The police seem to regard wearing a gang patch as more of an urgent need to investigate than child sexual abuse. A Mongrel Mob member walking down a Taumarunui street wearing his patch was promptly arrested and charged under the law banning gang patches.
The gang member – whose last recorded serious offending was in the 1990s – pleaded in court for the return of his patch, arguing it represented his family and was akin to a family crest. After a long deliberation Judge Lance Rowe let him have his patch back. Rowe said evidence suggests the country’s early gangs had their genesis, in part, from abuse in state care, and that Māori abused in state care were disconnected from whakapapa and te ao Māori, and suffered loss of identity as Māori. “[The patch] signifies, for him, a sense of belonging and family that he does not find in the community.”
The Royal Commission of Inquiry into Abuse in Care dedicated a whole volume of its final report to the connection between violence inflicted on children in state welfare institutions – including sexual violence – and gangs and prison.
If Police Minister Mark Mitchell bothered to read it, he hasn’t learnt anything. He doesn’t think the separation of powers applies to him and complained to media. He was “disappointed” by district court judge Bruce Davidson ordering the return of a patch to a Mongrel Mob member in another, similar decision.
For all Mitchell’s claims to be getting tough on crime, police aren’t in a hurry to investigate crimes that cause real harm – crimes such as the sexual abuse of children.
I recently wrote elsewhere about a victim who made a complaint early last year about a perpetrator he alleged had sexually abused him when he was a ward of the state. The Ministry of Social Development received multiple allegations against the alleged offender and about other staff at the same organisation that was contracted to the state. But the police, under Mitchell’s watch, sat on their arses and did virtually nothing for nearly two years. An investigation is finally under way.
A former gang member I know made a complaint to police in the 2000s about a prolific sexual predator, John Drake, who had worked in state welfare institutions for two decades and was the subject of more than a dozen complaints to MSD. The police found a way to faff around and fail to investigate and Drake died before he could be charged. In the transcript of the police interview with the victim, the cops were glib to the point of callousness, bordering on voyeurism.
Evidential interviews have to be neutral, not “leading”, for them to stand up in court, but I saw no evidence in the transcript that they were taking any care of this individual’s wellbeing. The victim was a child when he was raped, but when police spoke to him he was a large Māori man who had a reputation as a gang enforcer. Did they regard him as a victim or just a former gang member?
This stands in stark contrast with a police interview with the notorious Dr Selwyn Leeks who tortured hundreds of children at Lake Alice. The cop basically accused the victims of lying and Leeks was only too happy to play along. Leeks felt emboldened by the cop’s tone and referred to his victims as “bottom of the barrel kids from Hokio, Kohitere and Holdsworth”. For nearly 50 years the police failed to properly investigate Leeks. He died without facing justice.
When Drake worked at Holdsworth School in Whanganui he was funnelling many of his victims into Lake Alice where they were not only tortured by Leeks, but raped and sexually abused by adult patients and staff. These events were the subject of a criminal complaint but the police failed to even interview the victims.
In 2010, the police concluded, after an eight-year investigation, there wasn’t enough evidence and it wasn’t in the public interest to prosecute. If hundreds of children being tortured and raped doesn’t reach the bar of “public interest”, what does?
The police had legal advice there was a prima facie case regarding a number of allegations, but dismissed one victim’s credibility because he’d spent long stretches in jail. This particular victim ran away from Lake Alice when he was a child and was taken back by police. On that occasion he was tortured with electric shocks and chucked in a unit with criminally insane adults where he was gang raped. He was 11.
I’ve got documents that corroborate that this happened, and not just to this one individual. But the police didn’t even bother talking to him. They were more than happy to arrest him for the crimes he committed as an adult but failed to investigate the far more serious crimes committed against him.
In a letter of apology to victims of Lake Alice this year, Prime Minister Christopher Luxon made this astonishing but accurate admission: “The state’s actions protected perpetrators and meant those people were never brought to justice.”
But under Mark Mitchell, the state is still protecting perpetrators through police inaction and tardiness in investigating the rape and sexual abuse of children.
Aaron Smale is a journalist specialising in te ao Māori issues.
