Kate Hawkesby: Teens still getting away with thuggery, while PM rejects premise of question

I see the latest outburst of thuggery from our youth happened at a Palmerston North shopping mall.

30 teens ‘rampaged through it’, stealing, smashing things, throwing glass at staff, kicking them. Here’s the rub: they came back the next day bold as brass to skite about their performance and mock staff they'd abused.

Understandably, businesses are fearful. 

As well as this group’s destructive spree through the place where they also threw chairs, they assaulted a young worker while other offenders cheered on.

Police took 20 minutes to arrive apparently, despite the station being two minutes from the mall, and by then a bunch of the teens had escaped, they only managed to round up two girls.

But this gang of thugs are relentless, they carry BB guns and knives according to mall businesses, and they don’t fear police.

I tell you who is living in fear though, retailers. A contact recently told me a well-known jewellery chain in this country is struggling to get staff to work there anymore given the recent spate of attacks on jewellery shops.

We have a youth crime wave that is now seriously out of control and shows no signs of abating. And it’s no longer just an Auckland problem.

My Christchurch-based sister was asking me the other day how I can stand living in Auckland with so much violence around the city. Not just our CBD but through the suburbs too. 

She’d heard about the six ram raids in one night and the brutal street brawl between rival teen gangs, she said Auckland didn’t sound appealing at all. And that’s a worry too isn’t it?

What all this does to our reputation if we’re not seen as a safe country anymore.

And I just wonder if we’re all a bit punch drunk by so much of this that we’ve become a bit too immune to it all.

For the people at the forefront of this though – can you imagine? Their livelihoods are being crushed here, as well as their spirits.

And having a government say they’re going to get on top of it – then nothing happens must be as soul destroying as it is frustrating.

The PM was interviewed recently about ram raiders and the lack of consequences for them and she 'rejected that'.

Are we surprised she rejects anything anymore?

It’s so predictable it’s laughable, but she said that the police and Government are taking youth crime seriously.

She said they want to stop young people entering a life of crime, and that ‘a group of ministers’ were all looking at what’s contributing to young people choosing crime.

But what about consequences?

The PM couldn’t say what the consequences were, she just rejected that there were none. Police on the ground say kids are bored, that lockdowns didn’t help, and that young people feel they’ve got nothing to lose. 

Many of them are repeat offenders; they get some kind of notoriety out of it.

I would’ve thought the most obvious place to go looking for the clues would be asking young people themselves. A group of teenagers recently said they do it because they get away with it. They do it because they can. They know the cops won’t chase them. So I would have thought that’s your answer. 

While departments and ministers and politicians are all hunting for the why’s and how’s of these kids offending, the kids are just getting out there doing it knowing they can.

We should be demanding more of government ministers than just letting them say they’re looking into it. Or in the PM’s case, that she rejects the premise of the question.

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