Minister of Police Chris Hipkins has acknowledged a correlation between low school attendance and youth offending.
The minister was fending off opposition members during question time in Parliament on November 15, while answering the charge that the police was not being hard enough on offenders committing retail crime.
The minister suggested that truant youth were not just “disengaged from education,” but were set back by other factors and had “a whole lot of other things going on in their lives as well.”
While agreeing that youth not attending school had fuelled the sharp increase in ram raids, the minister said there was a question of “which comes before the other.”
He cited data from the Social Wellbeing Agency which indicated that 90 per cent of young offenders “could be living in a household with someone who’s involved in the corrections system.”
The minister, while acknowledging that the 18-or-under age group of the offenders involved in the recent robbery of a jewellery store in Ellerslie was concerning, he believed that “harsher penalties and more custodial sentences” for young offenders was not the answer to containing spiralling retail crime.
Minister Hipkins claimed police had made “hundreds of arrests and laid thousands of charges” for offending at retail businesses in Auckland and the Waikato in recent months.
He said of the 521 stores identified as the victims of a ram raid, police have successfully contacted 209 businesses. Of these, 132 have had a formal assessment completed by police, 93 stores have been reviewed by a contractor, and 83 stores “have had installations booked, under way, or partially or fully completed by external suppliers.”
However, the minister was hard pressed to answer a question posed by National’s Mark Mitchell as to how many of those 83 businesses that were booked, under way, or completed have “actually been completed?”
The minister admitted he did not have an update on the seven businesses that have had installations completed on their premises.
“I do understand that a number of businesses have at least part of the work partially completed, but I don’t have numbers for that,” he added.
The minister told the House that he stood by his statement that evidence showed that, once a location had been victimised, it was more likely to be reoffended against.
Hipkins also confirmed that the Retail Crime Prevention Programme targeted funding specifically to businesses that have been the victims of ram raids.
The minister did not rule out “extending the eligibility for government subsidies” to victims of smash-and-grab offences as well.
Addressing the issue of delays in installing protection equipment for Hamilton businesses hit by ram raids, the minister absolved the police, saying that in most cases the delay arose over the procedures involved around contacting contractors, insurance companies or the local authority.
The key role for the police was to complete the security assessments for businesses hit by ram raids.
“It is proving to be challenging for police to contact some of the businesses that have been victims of those ram raids. That’s very understandable, but if the businesses who have been victims can keep in contact with police, then that would make the process faster,” the minister noted.