Heather du Plessis-Allan: It's getting tiring pretending crime isn't happening when it clearly is

Tell you what I'm getting quite sick of: constantly being told by Government ministers and people who want to be nice to criminals that crime is tracking down.  

You hear it all the time. Every time someone pitches an idea for how to crack down on crime, like the ACT Party with the juvenile detention centre idea yesterday, up pops a critic with a piece of data to tell you that there's nothing to worry about.

You're imagining it, crime's not as bad as you think, ram raids are falling, youth crime and retail crime is down, the cops are winning.

BS. I call BS on any of this stuff.

Critics can cherry pick their data all they want, they can selectively use time frames that tell the story they want to, and they can exclude crime categories to twist the narrative. They can do any number of things that paint a certain picture. 

But what they can’t get around is what we’re seeing with our own eyes and hearing with our own ears.

Last week, I went to a furniture shop in Newmarket’s new Westfield mall. Really nice place, nice part of town, the kind of place where you don’t expect rampant crime.

The guy selling me a couch told me they have people walking out of the store with the Dyson vacuum cleaners in their hands, into the mall and they can’t do anything to stop them.

He said the same people will steal things in the morning, then come back in the afternoon and do it again- because there are no consequences.

In the last year, the dairy down the road from me, the clothing store on the same street and the Glengarry nearby were all ram-raided. I can't recall ever seeing a ram-raid before that, and I've lived in this neighbourhood for 8 years on and off.

Michael Hill jeweller has been hit so many times now by guys with hammers, that they've hired security guards for all 34 North Island stores because everything else they’ve done hasn’t worked. 

Now I understand that media can whip up a moral panic and I'm wary of being sucked into a false reality. Which is why I've quoted you, not media coverage of crime, but things I've seen and heard and actual concrete steps retailers are being forced to take.

It is getting tiring being told this isn’t happening when it clearly is.

The people telling us it isn’t happening need to get with the page. Because we want something to be done, so this can stop.

And if they don’t like the ideas being pitched, like the juvie detention centres, come up with a different idea.

But stop pretending it isn’t happening.

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