Threat from organised crime needs new approach - Associate Police Minister Casey Costello

Organised crime networks are escalating their activities in New Zealand, Associate Minister of Police Casey Costello says, announcing a new cross-agency plan to combat them.

"New Zealand and our Pacific neighbours are being increasingly targeted by organised criminal groups, who are using new technologies and new ways of operating," she said. "We need a different, stronger and more cohesive response."

However, Labour police spokesperson Ginny Anderson said the move was very late in the play for this government and looked a lot like a programme introduced by Labour in 2007, while Greens justice spokesperson Lawrence Xu-Nan said details were very sparse, and any new work needed to take a responsible position when it came to the affects of organised crime and drugs in the Pacific.

Many New Zealand agencies have some level of responsibility for dealing with organised crime, but more work was needed to enable them to work together more effectively, Costello said on Saturday.

The change would mean better use of resources, powers and information that agencies collectively possess, and better accountability of efforts to combat organised crime.

Organised crime taking place in New Zealand included drug trafficking, scams, migrant exploitation and money laundering, harming individuals and families, legitimate businesses and the broader New Zealand economy, she said.

"The illicit drug trade alone is estimated to cost the country around $1.5 billion in social harm.

"The key thing I think we need to recognise is that organised crime is a business that will do anything it can to make a profit. They are agnostic about commodity - whether it's people, whether it's tobacco, whether it's drugs, whether it's money laundering, whether it's scamming - whatever they can do to make money, they will do.

"We need to be pivoting and responding in a far more flexible and responsive way than we currently are."

A ministerial advisory group on organised crime has published a series of reports on the vulnerabilities in the country's response to transnational crime, including revealing that government agencies typically avoid the risk of sharing data and work was needed to address the problem.

"Organised crime is organised, we are not", and it should be recognised as the greatest threat to national security, the report, released earlier said.

It recommended urgent action, including one minister tasked with responsibility for the government's organised crime response, an overhaul of strategy and a charter that would hold agencies accountable. It also warned the government that a "smaller, scaled back option" taken from its full recommendations, would "not achieve the results we need".

The newly announced plan includes:

• Exploring the idea of one agency responsible for transnational and serious organised crime
• Developing new methods for sharing information and data between agencies
• Putting into action a package of actions on methamphetamine harm
• Strengthening communities and addressing harm through 'Resilience to Organised Crime' initiatives.

"It's about better accountability," Costello said. "It's about focusing our resources where they most need to be.

"Sometimes we get swallowed up with keeping busy and forget to identify what the outcomes are. We really want to get some strong outcomes, because organised crime effectively needs organised government to respond to it."

Very late in the day

The government had taken too long to reach this point, Anderson said.

"I just would like to emphasise that the length of time it's taken for the government to take any meaningful action on methamphetamine - when it's increased by 97 percent - is really alarming.

"This government's been predominantly pre-occupied with getting the 500 police officers, which it's failed to deliver, and so that is a concern as well, that there isn't a frontline capability for this to take action.

"It's good that the government is finally taking some action, but they are late to the game. We've had to stand by and watch communities being wrecked because of methamphetamine."

This new plan seemed very similar to the last multi-agency organised crime set-up, Anderson said - Labour's Organised and Financial Crime Agency of New Zealand (OFCANZ), which was in play from 2007, then renamed and merged into the NZ Police in April 2017, under National.

Protocol existed for data-sharing between government agencies - Approved Information Sharing Agreements and information sharing agreements.

"It will be important that that's all done appropriately and it will be interesting to see if they use the previous model of OFCANZ," Anderson said. "There's always many agencies that need to be brought together to combat organised crime and it's important those are well-coordinated.

"If the government feels that OFCANZ or the previous model that was announced by a previous Labour government is a better model, then we're in support of that."

Costello's office responded that OFCANZ had been within police, but this new structure "sits across the agencies in this space and that provides accountability to a minister".

Xu-Nan said information about how this plan would operate was sparse, and it was unclear how or if it would include serious domestic organised crime.

"This is something that we'll just have to wait and see, and look at more information as they come out."

How information would shared between agencies or with different states was also a concern, he said.

Concerns raised by the ministerial advisory group about a need for better co-operation with other Pacific countries needed to be addressed, he said, and that should be done responsibly, "rather than us, sort of, overriding".

Benefits of distance and scale

Aotearoa had some advantages when it came to tackling organised crime, Costello said.

"We are the envy when I go around the world and talk to other agencies. We don't have state boundaries - we have one jurisdiction.

"We have one border. We have very straightforward legislation.

"We have a good judiciary, so we have that cohesion that should make us the very hardest border to penetrate and the easiest to enforce law in this space."

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