In a passionate plea by many small businesspersons of the Indian community, the police are being urged to take back control of many town centres in South Auckland, which according to them are currently under the clutches of gangs of young criminals.
"I think the biggest problem today is that youth gangs have taken over the town centres. The Police needs to do something to take back the control of these town centres," says, one of the business owners from South Auckland said in a community meeting on rising crime in Auckland.
A group of small business owners were interacting with the Associate Minister for Justice Mark Mitchell at a community meeting convened by National Party MP Kanwaljit Singh Bakshi on Saturday, April 1, in Papatoetoe, over the issue of the recent spate of aggravated robberies.
This was a follow-up meeting from an earlier meeting held on the previous Saturday, March 25, where a group of aggrieved shop owners under the aegis of a recently formed community action group – Crime Prevention Group - have sought immediate government attention.
The meeting was well attended, however many from the previous meeting including Sunny Kaushal, the lead organiser of Crime Prevention Group were not present in the meeting.
It is important to recall that a Crime Prevention Group was formed a fortnight ago after a brutal attack on husband-wife duo owners in a Mt Roskill dairy in Central Auckland which left the owner badly injured.
The dairy owner, Jeetesh Patel is still not back to work even after three back-to-back surgeries in the North Shore Hospital and is without any financial support for the business.
An incensed community had then formed a Crime Prevention Group with an intention to attract government's immediate attention to the problem of rising spate of aggravated robberies, which largely affects small business members in the wider community.
This meeting was a departure from many previous meetings on the issue in a sense that the Minister chose to bring an array of senior officials from police and different ministries in the government to demonstrate their commitment towards the rising spate of crime, particularly aggravated robberies in the community.
It is to the credit of Mr Kanwaljit Singh Bakshi, for doing a better homework this time in bringing a well-prepared Minister and his troops from the officialdom, and in being better prepared himself than he was at the previous meeting a week before to respond to the concerns of many in the community.
The key speakers apart from the minister were Andy Costa, Assistant Commissioner of Police and Deputy CEO in the Ministry of Justice, Allan Warren, Assistant Commissioner of Police and CEO of the newly formed Ministry for Vulnerable Children, Oranga Tamariki, and Rajesh Sharma, Deputy Secretary of Policy, Ministry of Justice.
However, the community, many of which were victims of aggravated robberies themselves seemed not much impressed with the ‘rosy picture’ painted by the officials and the minister himself about the “declining numbers and statistics of crime in New Zealand.”
Despite best efforts from many speakers in the meeting, the community remained unfazed by what the government was doing behind the scene and what had been done in the past.
Their questions and concerns were about now and today – the recent spate of aggravated robberies in and around South and Central Auckland – which remained largely unanswered.
In fact, it would not be an exaggeration to comment that the meeting continued at two different levels.
At one level, the representatives from the government shared insights on how government's efforts were leading to declining in crime, then at the other level victims of everyday crime continued to share their plight and evidences of operational lapses on the part of police and justice system in apprehending and holding alleged perpetrators of crime behind the bars.
To be fair to the officials and other speakers, they fully acknowledged the plight and sense of pain among the victims of crime themselves, however, perpetuated on government's line of argument that crime numbers are declining.
One glaring omission from the responses of government representatives was the issue of recent spate in ram-raids and aggravated robberies.
There has been a surge in the number of aggravated robberies since the beginning of this year and in particular in the last couple of months.
Indian Weekender has done a detailed story about the spate of crime and sense of 'perpetual fear' among the small business owners, particularly in South Auckland.
In the meeting, almost everyone agreed that the sheer audacity of ram-raids has increased manifold in recent times, which has been unforeseen by many in the community for decades.
The Minister and the other government representatives failed to enlist what immediate urgent actions they have initiated at an operational level to control and deter the growing nuisance of youth crime.
Against this backdrop, the Minister's comment that many of seasoned offenders that we see today were the product of a generation of a dysfunctional social system, coming eight years after National Party's reign in the government deserves some further explanation.