My city's not so capital any more

The last thing you need is cruisy police when there's random violence on the streets of your city. Cruisy is not comforting; it doesn't make the violence go away and it doesn't make anyone feel safe. Only John Key can get away with it.

This is what I want from the police and the mayor when people are being viciously attacked in the small hours of a weekend morning, and with a fellow journalist killed going home from his night shift: tough talk.

There are people who think a good night out means ruining someone else's life for fun or for the meagre contents of a wallet. Sometimes they work in groups - as happened in Courtenay Place last weekend - and sometimes they're soloists, and all of them deserve to be pursued and punished. The cruel must be made to pay. I want to hear this from the authorities, not statements questioning whether the streets have really become unsafe when manifestly they have.

Maybe I'm being a bit hard on the acting Police District Commander Steve Vaughan, who did, after all, call the weekend's attacks in Wellington "terrible and nasty".

But I wonder who believes his claim that disorder and serious assaults in the inner city have fallen off in the past year. I don't wholly trust crime statistics at the best of times; they are seldom what they seem to be on close analysis, and are too often used for political purposes by every side of the law-and-order argument to make them wholly credible.

"If people are suggesting that our city is not safe, that's not right," Mr Vaughan said this week. "It's not the Wellington city I know and grew up in." Well, I'm damn sure it's not the city I grew up in any more.

I'm not being nostalgic about a phony past that never was, when everyone was a bit-part in some corny soap opera and all the streets were safe, but I don't recall the grinding, everyday level of menace and arbitrary violence we now put up with because we have no choice.

This was once a busy port with a lively, seedy dockside culture that spilled over into the streets, but I walked all over it at night as a teenager with a confidence that now strikes me as total stupidity.

The mayor, meanwhile, said the violence at the weekend was "not typical". She's obviously talking to the tourist market.

Statistics - if we want to look at them - only tell part of the story. You'd get a different picture if you asked people whether they'd modified their behaviour because of a perceived menace.

We're often told by criminologists that we're afraid of crime that isn't as bad as we think, but I question that too.

When we take steps to avoid being attacked because our awareness of danger is heightened, that obviously won't be reflected in crime statistics, but that doesn't mean that our feelings are based on a collective delusion.

We know what's going on because we live in the city and so do our kids.

On another semi-melancholy note, I'm almost relieved to see we have yet another rates hike coming, though smaller than the council really needs to complete all the projects on its wish-list. I'm relieved because I won't be paying for the silly things councils can fixate on when they're feeling flush. A schoolgirl wrote an open letter to the council in August asking it to hold a competition for a sign like Ohakune's giant carrot or Taihape's gumboot to greet travellers. Normally, they'd jump at something like that, but austerity brings some sanity.

This being the political centre of the country, no attractive symbol springs to mind in any case. Furthermore, if people have come all this way, hopefully they've worked out already that they're not in Auckland and, if not, we can always do the decent thing and pretend to be.