History Repeats: Moral Panic and The Failures of Provocative Policing
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16 September 2024
An edited version of this piece was published in The Sunday Star Times on 15 September 2024.
An edited version of this piece was published in The Sunday Star Times on 15 September 2024.
Photo by Aaron Smale
We’ve seen this play out before. History has proven that the coalition government’s last-minute amendment to its Gangs Bill will be a counter-productive exercise that inflicts harm, creates victims, and burns taxpayers’ money.
The recently announced change to the Gangs Legislation Bill gives police broad powers to search the homes of repeat offenders caught with gang insignia. The Bill (now split into the Gangs Bill and the Sentencing Amendment Bill) enables police to seek out insignia in offenders’ homes, with discretion regarding what actually counts as insignia and who it belongs to. Whether it was ever intended for public use appears to be of little concern.
An open letter written by the New Zealand Law Society states the amendment is inconsistent with the Bill of Rights Act, and other critics have denounced it as Orwellian. Despite this, expert scrutiny of the changes was impossible, given that the announcement was made after the select committee process and shortly before the Bill’s proposed third reading.
The potential for overreach and overzealous policing is a genuine threat with this amendment, and it’s ludicrous that it was proposed a mere month after the Prime Minister delivered a heartfelt speech to victims of state abuse. Around 80 to 90 per cent of gang members suffered systemic abuse in youth institutions, a number of whom were taken from their homes during the grips of a moral panic.
A moral panic is a widespread and intense public reaction to a perceived threat to societal values and interests. It occurred in Aotearoa in 1954, when revelations about deviant and promiscuous teens, coupled with the release of the infamous Mazengarb Report, created an atmosphere of fear and hysteria around juvenile delinquency. Political rhetoric and media sensationalism amplified public anxiety, leading to swift calls for stricter laws and harsher policing. This ultimately resulted in countless young people, many of them Māori, being placed in youth institutions.
The fear of gangs in Aotearoa dates back to this era. And as a result of the abuse endured in state care, it was also the birth of gangs as we know them today.
The height of the moral panic around gangs came some years later, in 1979. It’s a time that reflects our own in many ways. The economy was weak, unemployment was rising, and so was inflation. Uncertainty spurred anxiety, and outrage was directed at groups or individuals perceived to be making the situation worse or more difficult to bear.
Gangs, in this sense, became an easy target, and politicians and the press exploited the opportunity to paint gang members as societal villains.
It’s important to note that gangs had undergone a significant change by this point. While bikie gangs had previously dominated the scene, Indigenous ethnic gangs, including the Mongrel Mob and Black Power, were on the rise, many of whom had collectivised over their shared experiences of alienation, social inequality, and abuse in state care.
Violent inter-gang clashes were already hitting the headlines during the 1970s, but 1979 was the year this came to a head.
The most severe incident of inter-gang violence in Aotearoa occurred in August of that year. A violent fight erupted on the streets of Moerewa after a group of Stormtroopers had travelled north seeking revenge against Black Power for a previous attack. The Stormtroopers’ plans for retaliation failed, and their alcohol-fuelled, pent-up frustration unleashed into a large-scale street brawl with local police, who were vastly outnumbered. Several injuries occurred that night. A gang member was shot in the leg, a police van was set ablaze, one police officer received superficial burns, another sustained severe head injuries and lost several teeth, and a firefighter suffered cracked ribs and concussion.
News reporting of the incident was vast and visceral. While this was undoubtedly a violent event, journalists plastered descriptions and firsthand accounts across the daily newspapers, many of which were highly emotive and exaggerated. Separate news events became linked together as if to show a pattern, which paved the way for extreme and widespread hysteria and panic. Community groups gathered, and politicians, who could not afford to ignore the vocal outcry in their constituencies, spoke out vehemently against gangs and their “mindless violence”.
Politicians hastily rushed through a raft of reactionary measures to alleviate public fear and frustration. Powers of search were expanded and saturation policing soon followed, with limited thought given to their effectiveness and potential breach of human rights. According to academics Jane Kelsey and Warren Young, who wrote extensively about this period, it was “provocative policing”. That is, it was a government-endorsed exercise in harassment with the targeted group defined based on their identity and affiliation.
Such policing tactics were criticised in the 1987 Report of the Ministerial Committee of Inquiry into Violence. Also known as the Roper Report, it noted that tactics such as “team policing” often exacerbated tensions between the police and gangs, and contributed to a negative “us versus them” mentality, aggravating violence and division in the community rather than reducing it.
Given such adverse outcomes, a key recommendation in the Roper Report was that the Police review their “whole attitude toward the question of gangs”.
The Roper report was also critical of the ongoing media frenzy around gangs and violence, proving that it never really died down nearly a decade after the Moerewa incident. Rampant reporting was seen as both “selective and distorted” and deemed to be creating “unnecessary feelings of fear and trepidation”, particularly when coupled with the “emotive and often ill-informed rhetoric from those in authority”.
Failing to address the root causes of gang membership, such as poverty, lack of opportunities, and social alienation, merely shifts the problem rather than solves it. This is also emphasised in the Roper Report, calling on the need to address the underlying issues rather than conflating or capitalising on its surface-level problems: “It is our belief that despite the attention periodically given them, gangs are one of the least of this country's worries and, indeed to some extent, they are a result of those more serious concern”
Understanding this history makes it hard to overlook the risks of our current-day moral panic. Anxiety over youth crime and rising gang membership reached new heights in the lead-up to the 2023 election. Ram raids and gang incidents were heavily publicised and politicised, with news reports and political grandstanding fuelling a self-perpetuating, confrontational narrative about community safety. Opposition leaders dismissed social policies aimed to address the root causes of harm as "soft on crime" and instead campaigned for a return to previously ineffective punitive measures, such as boot camps and the Three Strikes legislation.
This setting created the perfect storm for the Kahukura methamphetamine rehabilitation programme, spearheaded by the Notorious chapter of the Mongrel Mob in 2020.
National Party spokespeople expressed outrage at Kahukura and called it "a sick joke" that the programme received $2.75 million in funding over three years from the contestable Proceeds of Crime Fund. It was fiercely derided as pandering to gangs, despite, ironically, being based on a program implemented a decade earlier as part of the National-led Government's Meth Action Plan.
Kahukura exemplified the extent to which a perceived social problem is blown out of proportion in a moral panic. Politicians and reporters pounced on any information that might signal the failure or exploitation of Kahukura. Reporters staked out the marae where the initiative was being run and took long-range photographs. National and Act party politicians made a whopping 176 written parliamentary questions about Kahukura over two years, and a complaint was made by then Leader of the Opposition Judith Collins to the Auditor-General requesting a review of the decision to fund the programme. The Auditor-General backed the process undertaken to fund Kahukura, and the massive fishing expedition undertaken in the written PQs failed to reveal any scandals or failures the Opposition could use to deride the programme.
Despite the relentless attacks, Kahukura delivered all nine of its funded initiatives on time, within budget, and with positive early indicators of methamphetamine reduction and significant improvements to health and employment. The programme provided value for money to address the demand for methamphetamine amongst a population group typically seen as “too hard” for conventional programmes to cater to, yet costing a similar amount to comparable rehabs and achieving a commendable 94% graduation rate.
The staff and those who attended the rehab were demonised from the start, however, and no amount of success could change the end result. Inevitably, shortly after the coalition government came into power, funding for Kahukura was cut before the completion of the independent evaluation.
This collective demonisation of gang members is nothing new, as history has shown us. It is not all that surprising today to hear politicians portray gang members as inherently criminal, calling them “brazen offenders” who take over towns, “peddle their misery”, and “prey on” vulnerable community members. And yet, over the years, the result of this has been a profound dehumanisation.
Public acceptance of gang members as social pariahs has allowed politicians to continue scapegoating them, perpetuating a regime of suppression and marginalisation through policies that harass, persecute, and erode civil liberties.
We should have learnt our lesson about moral panics in 1954. Or at least in 1979. On both occasions, we have seen the failures of hardline policing to tackle gangs and witnessed the discriminant and disproportionate impacts that political rhetoric and media sensationalism has on particular communities. Yet, here we are again.
If Christopher Luxon and his coalition government are sincere about apologising to victims of state abuse, then they should U-turn on their gang laws and recognise their efforts for what they are: a self-perpetuating financial drain that will only create more victims in the long run. A more effective approach would be for the Prime Minister and Police Minister Mark Mitchell to heed the Roper Report’s recommendation and reassess their entire stance on gangs. Because, really, it’s time.
