Sunny Kaushal: Sandringham dairy death shows crime isn’t down

OPINION

On the evening of November 23, I received a call no one involved with any industry group would like to receive. It was news that a young man, recently married, had been killed while minding the dairy of a relative. What and why were the first two words that came to mind.

What, is that sense of disbelief. Yes, it’s one thing to warn that a death was almost certain to happen with growing lawlessness, but it’s another to get the devastating news it had happened.

As Newstalk’s Kerre Woodham said to me a few days ago, it seems like a car crash playing out in slow motion. Car crash describes a current approach to law and order that’s divorced from reality. Where giving 16-year-olds the vote has the Prime Minister giddy with excitement while the death of a dairy worker in her own electorate, generates tea and sympathy.

The why is exactly that, why? In the past eight years, two dairy workers have been slain in the service of their community. The tragic death of Janak Patel is just that. A tragedy for his family as he will never go home. Family members lost a treasured soul. Lest we forget Arun Kumar who was killed in 2014 by two teens, then too young for the Youth Court.

Is a human life worth bottles of bourbon, packs of cigarettes or a cash register? That is now two deaths within just eight years but the number of close scrapes is getting far more common. I’ve sat with elderly dairy owners in hospital who have been beaten up for peanuts. Bashings, intimidation and robbery are common.

Sadly, politicians look at official stats and say crime is down.

Do you feel crime is down, honestly?

This contradiction is explained by a general loss of faith in the system. As a business we face insurance excess in the thousands of dollars. You make a commercial decision to protect your policy for something bigger. If you nab a shoplifter, it’s not as if you can restrain them as that’s illegal. You can’t close the shop until the overstretched men and woman in blue get to you. Worse, you make a calculation that they won’t return, armed and with mates, to do a number on you.

Flowers outside the Rose Cottage Superette in Sandringham. Photo / Dean Purcell

Our society is on a downward spiral. It may be an old stat and it’s Australian, but in 1987, research found out of 1000 crimes only 40 per cent were reported to police with 320 recorded as an offence. That saw 256 go to court resulting in 43 convictions but only one, out of 1000 offences, were sent to jail.

In 2001, the NZ Survey of Crime Victims concluded just 32 per cent of offences are reported to police but it’s now 2022 where government policy has been to empty the prisons. The prison muster is 22 per cent lower in September 2022 than it was for the same month in 2017.

Do you feel safer? As a crime victim myself it’s the opposite.

Earlier this year, we found reported retail crime was up in 10 of the country’s 12 police districts while arrests in all police districts were down. More crime, less offences for fewer consequences. This is New Zealand in 2022.

We don’t want to be Eeyore as we do have solutions that we put to the Minister of Police on October 19. We still await five weeks later for a reply. We’ve asked the Prime Minister to meet, Dr Ayesha Verrall to talk about our ideas for reducing cigarette sales without destroying us and Michael Wood on transport. None replied. Worse is Minister Kiri Allan who we had high hopes for. She said yes to a meeting but that was in June. Radio silence since.

The first thing we want is for the Government to admit there is a crime emergency, as the only ones who don’t think there is one are in the Beehive or on university campuses.

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In Parliament, Minister Chris Hipkins has made snide comments about our request for reform of self-defence laws. What we want is Australia’s law, as ours has more holes than Swiss cheese. New Zealand does not allow you to defend your own property that could see a victim of crime here, end up being charged. Australia defines acceptable force and extends self-defence to your property and your house. It’s better law. It’s needed here.

Perhaps the biggest thing we need is for the public to join with us to say enough is enough. That we, as a country, have serious issues where families do not care what their children do at 2am. The state’s role is to do the hard gritty stuff. To intervene into dysfunction, whether that’s the army of beggars we see on our streets to the homeless, who are themselves exploited by criminals. This is not care in the community. It’s neglect in the community.

There has to be a wakeup call because something is rotten that a hard-working young man who started work in a dairy never went home to his spouse. We have a crime emergency but we also have a social emergency one as well.

• Sunny Kaushal is the chairperson of the Dairy & Business Owners Group.