Crime on Queen St, abuse in care, and Christopher Luxon: Yes, they are related – Simon Wilson

THREE KEY FACTS

• The Government has funded extra police for inner-city beat patrols in Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch.
• The Royal Commission of Inquiry into abuse in care has called for better services for vulnerable children and abuse survivors.
• The Government says the new boot camp pilot will feature wraparound care services.

Simon Wilson is an award-winning senior writer covering politics, the climate crisis, urban and social issues, with a focus on Auckland. He joined the Herald in 2018.

OPINION

At McDonald’s in Britomart they used to have at least one disruptive incident every day. People losing their temper, threatening the staff or other customers, stealing food from tables, making a bloody great nuisance of themselves.

Now, says owner-operator Mathew Tolhurst, it’s down to two or three a week. Progress – though problem not yet fixed.

Tolhurst was speaking to media during a walkabout in central Auckland by the Prime Minister, Christopher Luxon, who was out to promote his Government’s funding of extra cops on the beat.

A blustery sunny day, the PM on form, bouncing from one handshake to the next as people stopped and stared at the cluster of police officers and journalists, grinned in surprise when they spotted Luxon leading the way.

It was just two days after the report of the Royal Commission of Inquiry into abuse in care had been tabled in Parliament, all 14kg of it, and this event was related. Not that Luxon gave any sign of thinking so.

“Have you noticed less crime since we put more cops on the beat?” he asked the staff in Michael Hill Jeweller.

“Yes,” they said, politely, and then, “Would you like to buy something?”

“Did ya give the streetie any money?” called out someone else as the PM walked past a man with his cup waiting.

Tolhurst didn’t put the decline in bad behaviour in his shop entirely down to the extra cops. It was falling anyway, he said. The police say the same.

But he did think it helped to have the police more visible.

Everyone did. And why not? As Tolhurst said: “The biggest challenge is the perception that it’s not safe.” Having the cops right there changes the perception.

His problem was different from the one at Michael Hill. The threat to the jeweller comes from violent thieves, while the fast-food outlet deals with people with mental-health and substance-abuse problems.

That is, people who might be on the street because their lives are too hard for them to manage being anywhere else. “And”, said one of Tolhurst’s managers, “they don’t get enough support”.

What do we do about that? Having more beat cops doesn’t prevent a streetie ruining your burger meal because they’re having a bad day.

To deal with that, the critical issue is better social services.

Police Commissioner Andrew Coster was on the walkabout with Luxon. I asked him why they hadn’t put more cops on the beat a long time ago.

Extra funding, he said. Couldn’t do it until they got the money. It’s a simple truth: you can do more on the front line when you’re funded for it.

But it’s about more than that. As Coster has revealed, those extra police are available because he’s pulling them back from family harm callouts.

Those callouts are up 80% in the last 10 years and now account for two-thirds of all serious assaults. It’s one of the terrible secrets of our society.

But Coster says the cops don’t need to worry about that as much because more than half their investigations don’t lead to an offence being recorded.

I would have thought that’s a good thing. Police defusing a situation before someone gets hurt: isn’t that what we want?

And isn’t it the same as police patrolling the streets to discourage crime?

Prime Minister Christopher Luxon with Police Commissioner Andrew Coster, on walkabout on Friday. Photo / Michael Craig

Coster thinks someone else should deal with a lot of the family harm callouts. But there is no one else, say the people who deal with the outcome when police don’t get there in time.

“People don’t invite police around just because they feel like a visit. They invite them around because they’re scared,” says Women’s Refuge chief executive Dr Ang Jury.

Coster told me family harm and street crime are different, which is only superficially true. The obvious parallel is the relationship between many crimes of violence and mental health, alcohol, and other drugs.

We perceive street crime and crimes in the home differently. One is a threat to society, because it’s in public; the other, somehow, is not seen as such. But domestic violence leads to more deaths, more serious injury, more trauma, and more lives broken.

The police should not have to choose between street crime and family harm. Nor should our social services.

Both kinds of violent crime have roots in our failure to safeguard vulnerable children from abuse. This has been made horrifyingly explicit in the abuse in care report. Despite some fine speeches in Parliament, will the Government’s response show that it understands this?

On Sunday, the Christian Social Services Council (CSSC) revealed to TVNZ that the 230 care providers under its umbrella have not had their Oranga Tamariki contracts renewed.

About 1000 contracts expired in June and, said Nikki Hurst from CSSC, the Budget cut $30 million a year from funding for their sector.

Coster wasn’t wrong that more money equals more frontline cops. How is it possible that doesn’t apply to the care of vulnerable children?

Abuse-in-care survivors have told us, desperately, that there’s one obvious way to measure the Government’s commitment to righting the wrongs done to them: cancel the boot camps.

Don’t worry, the Government says, the Young Offender Military Academies of today won’t be like boot camps in the bad old days.

But as the inquiry made plain, the bad old days are still here. Vulnerable children are still being abused.

That surely means no one can have confidence in institutionalised “tough love” residential care of children. Not now, maybe not ever.

On top of that, while the “tough love” message is prominent, the Government also says something else.

“The academies will act as a circuit-breaker so these young people can receive intensive rehabilitation in a monitored facility,” declared the National Party in its election policy. “While in the academy, young serious offenders will receive schooling, counselling, drug and alcohol treatment, mentoring, and cultural support.”

Children’s Minister Karen Chhour echoed these sentiments last week.

Hang on. That’s wraparound care, isn’t it? Aka “kumbaya” liberalism?

The Government seems to be saying that if its boot camps work, it will not be because they’re boot camps. It will be because, behind the military facade, they’re exemplars of good social work. Not tough love, but warm love.

It would be terrific if they were brave enough to come right out and say it.

Minister for Children Karen Chhour with Act Party leader David Seymour examine a boot during a boot camp announcement last week. Photo / RNZ, Rachel Helyer-Donaldson

Sometimes, we get a moment. A disaster happens, lessons are learned and we agree to change things for the better.

It happened after the Christchurch mosque attacks. It didn’t happen after Cyclone Gabrielle. The abuse in care report gives us another moment, right now.

The inquiry has challenged Parliament to seize this moment to educate a fearful electorate about what works and what is necessary in the care and upbringing of traumatised and vulnerable children. And to establish the structures and funding it needs to succeed.

To move, finally, past the desire to punish that destroys so many lives. Including the lives of the victims of crimes committed by people abused as children.

Hazel Phillips, who worked for the royal commission, has written about the survivors who suffered repeated rapes and other violence abuse, some of whom haven’t survived because they ended their own lives.

Others become abusers themselves. Some join gangs: “It’s well proven”, Phillips reminds us, “that state care is responsible for the formation of gangs.”

Many survivors struggle on from day to day and sometimes they have a meltdown in Macca’s.

“Survivors were constantly and consistently not believed, labelled as liars and troublemakers,” writes Phillips. “If they ran away to escape the abuse, the consequences got worse than ever. Sometimes, all they wanted was just to get home to mum for a cuddle.”

I’m pretty sure I’d be in meltdown if that was my life. Especially if I still wasn’t getting the help I needed and was still seen only as a troublemaker.

It’s great there are more cops in the inner city. But breaking the cycles of institutional and domestic violence, that’s the thing we really have to do.

Phillips tells us something else about the survivors of abuse in care. “Some went on to become high achievers and help troubled youth in the ways they would have liked for themselves. Many, many, have acted as circuit-breakers to end generations of abuse.”

There’s that phrase again: circuit-breakers.

What heroes they are. We could empower those people to lead the process of setting all this right.

They know far more about it than the rest of us, and they’ve done far more already than the rest of us will ever do.