A Hells Angels member in New Zealand in 1969. The gang's first chapter to be established outside the United States was in Auckland. Photo / NZ Herald
OPINION
As we say goodbye to 2023 and welcome in 2024, it’s a good time to catch up on the very best of the Herald columnists we enjoyed reading over the last 12 months. From politics to sport, from business to entertainment and lifestyle, these are the voices and views our audience loved the most. Today it’s five of the top columns from Jarrod Gilbert.
On the Fourth of July, the United States celebrated its Independence Day. It was one such celebration over a long weekend back in 1947 that would fundamentally change New Zealand’s gang scene.
Gangs have existed in New Zealand since at least colonial times. A review of old newspaper articles reveals a number of tales, including one from the early 1900s of young gang members who had an initiation ceremony involving putting urine – both horse and human – in new members’ hats. Each to their own.
But gangs as we know them today stem directly from events during the Fourth of July celebrations in the small US town of Hollister, California, where a motorcycle event had been planned. Along with the scores of serious competitors, groups of rebellious motorcyclists – made up largely of ex-servicemen out of World War II – attended too. They had aggressive names like the Booze Fighters, Satan’s Sinners and, my personal favourite, the Pissed Off Bastards of Bloomington.
These raucous elements leered up and created significant community concern but, more importantly, they created headlines all across America and, largely via Life magazine, around the world, too. It’s widely accepted now that the media reports were overblown, one of the photos used in Life was staged, but regardless the hype around rebellious bikers was pivotal.
Alarmed by the bad publicity, the American Motorcycle Association is said to have decried the young bikers as “outlaws”, saying that just 1 per cent of motorcycle riders were making the other 99 per cent look bad. The bikers loved the sound of that. They began calling themselves outlaw motorcycle clubs and stitching diamond-shaped 1% badges on the front of their vests. On the back were large patches with their names, their territory and a logo. They formalised an internal hierarchy: a president, a vice-president, a sergeant-at-arms, and a secretary and/or treasurer.
Inspired by the events at Hollister, The Wild One, a Marlon Brando and Lee Marvin movie, was released at the end of 1953. The rebellious biker was suddenly cool.
With a remarkable degree of uniformity – in physical appearance and organisational structure – these outlaw clubs spread throughout California, around America and then the world. Read more >
About 12 months ago, I found myself wandering around the supermarket on a Sunday morning in my slippers. I wasn’t sure what that said about me, but I was certain it was saying something.
Owning slippers was a relatively new thing, but padding up and down the aisles of my local SuperValue seems to me like a signal that I was nonchalantly strolling into old age.
Further evidence has now presented itself. I have applied for membership of the Sumner Bowling Club. Read more >
Earlier this year, a quiet powerhouse within New Zealand Police, Glenn Dunbier, hung up his epaulettes and retired. During his last formal speech, he talked about mums, meth and mahi, three words that illuminate some significant changes within the New Zealand police’s operational focus, and why Dunbier will be missed.
Police officers like Dunbier tend to be invisible to the public. At a grassroots level, frontline cops are the face of the police. At the other end, at the top of the hierarchy, most people know the commissioner. The commissioner sets the overall direction of the police, and it’s the frontline police who then implement it.
That is a very long way for policy water to travel, and it was Dunbier’s job – sitting just below the commissioner – to help the river flow smoothly. As anybody who works in a large organisation knows, even the best plans will fall flat if people throughout the organisation don’t buy into them. And the New Zealand police are undertaking ambitious plans.
New Zealand’s Police Commissioner, Andy Coster, is an extremely smart man, and as such he recognises the complexity of crime and therefore that complex responses are required. Consequently, he has overseen the development of strategies that see police tackle crime in more sophisticated ways, one of which is the multi-governmental agency project called the Resilience to Organised Crime in Communities programme (ROCC). ROCC recognises that police can’t just arrest their way out of organised crime. Unless communities reject such crimes, there will always be new crooks to replace those who are sent to prison. This isn’t about ignoring traditional policing but adding to it. It’s complementing our short-term approaches like busting down doors with longer-term strategies that will mean fewer doors needing to be kicked down in the future. Read more >
The gangland killing of Kevin Ratana is a case that highlights both the changes and the specific dynamics of New Zealand’s gang scene; growth, territorial movement, and violence as a means of dispute resolution. It’s also potentially a miscarriage of justice.
Kevin Ratana belonged to the Mongrel Mob. He was the founding member of the Kingdom chapter, one of many new chapters that formed around a single hub in Hamilton. Here we see developments occurring in the gang scene generally.
By the late 1990s and early 2000s, many New Zealand gangs were in poor shape. The gangs had created generational barriers, meaning the gangs had aged and not rejuvenated with young members. The establishment of the Rebels, Australia’s largest outlaw club, here in 2011 signalled the beginnings of a revival.
The swift growth of the Rebels showed there was still an appetite for gang membership, but that the old, established groups had to reform to attract new members. While some failed in this, and a number of established gangs fell away, the successful ones made room for new ideas and new members. One part of this was the creation of new chapters within existing gangs; in short, this meant there were more options for people to find chapters whose culture and style appealed to them. It worked.
With this growth in chapters and membership, many gangs began to spread out, moving into different areas. This fundamentally redefined the gang scene in important ways. Turf that had been considered the domain of one gang for decades was now being contested by others.
What came next was predictable. In 2014, I wrote about the growth and movement in the scene - changes which were then in their infancy - under the headline A Return to Gang Wars?
That question has now been answered.
On the morning of August 21, 2018, a number of Black Power members converged on Ratana’s house armed with a variety of weapons and yelled out that he had a week to leave the area or he’d be killed. Ratana emerged with a gun, whereby he was felled with a single shot to the neck.
While the killing gives us insight into the changing dynamics of gangs and how this leads to violence, it is one of the convictions for the crime that tests common understandings of gangs and leaves open the possibility of a miscarriage of justice. Read more >
When it comes to crime, I’m backing our police over our politicians.
The gang tangi in Ōpōtiki earlier this year certainly created real problems; but these were only heightened by politicians looking to make the most of it. All the while, the police took the action that was necessary and desirable.
Calls for the police to somehow break up the tangi and take back control of the town missed a couple of key points. Firstly, the town was never out of control by any reasonable measure. Indeed, without the political commentary and the ubiquitous reporting of media, the whole event would have gone largely unnoticed outside of the town itself. That’s not to diminish the disruptions that a large gang-attended event brings to a small town, or any place for that matter. But these things could be handled by the police.
How do I know? Because they demonstrably were. There were more column inches written about the threats that might occur than any of the threats coming to fruition.
Secondly, breaking up the tangi would have been enormously self-defeating. The police led with a questing principle that we should all live by: are the consequences of my actions in tackling an issue going to create more problems than the issue itself? In this instance, breaking up the tangi would have created more mayhem for Ōpōtiki. Imagine what that would take and what it would look like. Think about breaking up the anti-vax protests in Wellington and triple the trouble. And for what gain? Yip, there was some illegal behaviour by gang members, but among it all there was a grieving whānau, too. Read more >
Dr Jarrod Gilbert is the Director of Independent Research Solutions and a sociologist at the University of Canterbury.