The 1990s gang laws were the most significant legislative thrust targeting gangs in New Zealand's history. Photo / NZME
OPINION:
Like any good story, this one starts dramatically. It starts with gangs. It's 1996 and guns are being fired. In Christchurch, a new chapter of the Road Knights is shooting at the Epitaph Riders, and the Epitaph Riders are shooting back. After one shooting, a gang member turns up at the hospital but he says nothing. The gangs are at war.
Shots ring out again, in the middle of the day and innocent bystanders are hit. Police smother the warring parties and things calm down, but then, further south, another war breaks out.
In Invercargill, the formation of the Black Power sparks an offensive by the Road Knights. A bomb planted at the Black Power clubhouse starts the violence but doesn't end it. Shootings become common. Violence begets headlines and headlines beget politicians. And this is where it gets interesting.
An election is looming. The first MMP election.
The Labour Party were in opposition, and they kicked it off. Attacking the Government for being too soft and saying more needed to be done about the gangs. The National Government initially said that police had adequate powers to take care of things and that it was under control.
But Labour MPs banged the drum too hard and so often that the Government was forced to act, and they did so by hastily proposing a swathe of laws to tackle the gang issue. The fact they didn't really know what the issues were was no impediment, but we certainly know they were flying blind.
The introduction to the bill that housed the laws explained that there was no research to assess the nature of the problem.
But you wouldn't have known that by what both sides of the political aisle were saying. Politicians had overnight become experts in everything about gangs.
Both Labour and National voted for the laws in a rare show of bipartisanship.
The gang laws were the most significant legislative thrust targeting gangs in New Zealand's history. They came about with massive political fanfare, and they had very few critics; largely a handful of lawyers and academics who said the laws were poorly researched and conceived, with one summing things up by saying they were "a sop to public opinion. I think it's a political device to make people feel that something is being done about something that the public has been encouraged to feel frightened about".
With support of the New Zealand Law Foundation, I have examined the outcomes of those laws using more than 20 years of data, and the findings are remarkable. Not least because those small number of critics at the time were proven to be remarkably correct.
A number of the laws proved to be unworkable, others have simply not been used, and those that have been used have only hit gang-affiliated people as a small minority and therefore used much more extensively against people not in gangs. Those are not gang laws, then, they are general law and order provisions and that is not how they were sold. The latter point is interesting, because one of the laws had been asked for by police on two previous occasions and not given, but when couched as a "gang law" it was passed. It's hard not to be cynical.
In my opinion, it's important we learn from this.
What was occurring in the gang scene in 1996 is remarkably similar to what is occurring now – new gangs are entering established territories leading to significant violence. In the lead-up to an election, politicians responded. I'd bet anything you like we'll get the same before next year's election. And the result will likely be the same, too – that being politics over sound policymaking.
I'd extend my bet further and say that our politicians will look to Australia for guidance, which has notoriously cracked down on its "bikies" in recent years.
But as part of this research, I looked across the ditch at those efforts and they should offer us a warning for caution as much as anything else. Any politician who says the various Australian measures offer easy answers hasn't had a good look. If history is anything to go by, we can expect that to happen.
It's perhaps too easy to have a crack at politicians. The fact is most of them are good people trying their best to do good things. But sometimes they genuinely don't. Sometimes they just chase votes. This is one of those stories, and a sequel is on the way.
Dr Jarrod Gilbert is a sociologist at the University of Canterbury and the Director of Independent Research Solutions. Tune in for a live Q&A with Dr Gilbert and senior Herald journalist Jared Savage from midday.
A copy of the research report Making Gang Laws in a Panic can be found on the New Zealand Law Foundation's website or on this link: https://www.lawfoundation.org.nz/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/Making-Gang-Laws-in-a-Panic.pdf