KEY POINTS:
If there's one thing the area that doesn't like to be known as South Auckland needs like a hole in the head, it's more gangs. They already have the Black Power and The Mongrels and the Killer Beez. Now vigilante crime fighter Peter Low wants to bring in
some Chinese triads to try to bring the existing pests to their knees.
As smart ideas go, it's on a par with the 19th century brainwave to introduce ferrets and stoats to combat the population explosion of yet another disastrous import - rabbits. New Zealand's wildlife will never recover from that act of madness, and there's not a Kiwi of the human kind, whatever the colour of their skin, who is likely to endorse this 21st century proposal to repeat it.
Listening to an unrepentant Mr Low, on TV3 on Monday night, continuing to defend the idea by proclaiming his right "to bite on their neck until they die", it crossed my mind that maybe he was really the leader of the Re-Elect Helen Clark Triad, deliberately going totally over the top, in order to make his beloved leader look more statesmanlike by comparison. It certainly had that effect.
The Prime Minister and assorted ministers were quick to damn the Low plan with stern warnings about the grave perils of taking the law into one's own hands. And National politicians, who had been queuing to endorse the law-and-order marchers, were left with no option but to fall in behind Helen Clark. The executive members of the Asian Anti-Crime Group are now falling over each other to disassociate themselves from their feral leader.
How could they do anything else? If small business operators were in the mood to pay protection money, why not just pay the local gangs and be done with it? Why import another layer of complication?
Thanks to police propaganda - and Hollywood movies - triads are the new bogeymen. They're said to be working with local gangs to strip our coastline of paua to feed the gourmet restaurants of the Orient. They're also in cahoots with local gangs, importing drugs, including the precursor chemicals for P which ironically, we're told, is the fuel behind much of the street crime the marchers want stopped. Yet these are the guys Mr Low wants to hire to stop it.
Following Friday's truckers' day of protest, Saturday's massive anti-crime parade around the streets of Botany really did start to suggest a country rising up.
The images of 10,000 bedraggled anti-violence marchers - mostly recent Asian migrants - traipsing through bleak rainswept suburbia was rather affecting. As someone who developed a taste for street protest during the Vietnam War era, I can appreciate how strong the feelings must have been to get a crowd of that number out marching, particularly on a day as dreary as that.
Most of us would sympathise with their feeling of helplessness when police fail to show up, particularly after "minor" incidents. This is not just a South Auckland phenomenon. Who hasn't heard tales from people whose house or shop have been burgled about how long it takes for the slow hand of the law to show up?
But three brutal deaths in quick succession in a fortnight in June does not make a crime wave, however ghastly the crimes were. Nor does it make it an anti-Asian crime wave.
Nationwide, the number of homicides has dropped from 109 to 88 in the past two years. In the Counties-Manukau police district there were eight homicides last year compared with 27 in 2006.
Police figures show that while violent crime has risen in the area in recent years, much of the increase is put down to increased reporting of domestic assaults. Overall, on a population basis, recorded offences in the area have dropped during Labour's term in office.
None of this will be of any cheer to the victims or their families, or to those stirred up by the likes of Mr Low with his simplistic "bite to kill" theory of crime fighting. But it is evidence to suggest a calmer approach to the problem could be more productive.
An approach which, for example, didn't drag race into the formula. Mr Low claims his campaign is non-racist. But labelling his group "Asian" does exactly that.
And quickly taking the bait was television cop, former Detective-Inspector Graham Bell, who is reported by TVNZ as saying a lot of the crime against Asians is committed by people who might be expected to have had enough of racism - Polynesians. He claimed there was a criminal element - mainly of Polynesian descent - that deliberately targets Asians.
Wouldn't it be more relevant to talk about a P-addled gang prospect who targeted a late night shop-keeper? Why bring an artificial construct like race into a situation which is quite fraught enough as it is?
