If we ban gang patches, why not ban the media from using them for clickbait?

The bill to amend the gang legislation is currently being passed by parliament and is expected to come into effect from November.

Among the changes to the law: it will be a criminal offence to display gang insignia in public places; police will have new powers to evict gang members who gather in public; and gang membership will be an aggravating factor in a criminal conviction. There will also be “non-consorting orders”, to ban specific gang members from associating and communicating with each other for three years.

The changes come as the number of gang members continues to grow, with an estimated 9,000 potential and patched gang members now in New Zealand.

One research group – H2R Research and Consulting Ltd – believes the new laws will do nothing to curb the rising number of gang members, and believes the government should adopt more of a ‘carrot and stick’ approach, as the country saw under the leadership of former Prime Minister Sir Robert Muldoon in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

He worked closely with the gangs, using work programs and sports to keep gang members socially involved.

The research group supports that philosophy and believes the new laws will only drive the gangs underground. The critique of the new laws was written by Harry Tam, a former civil servant and honorary member of the Mongrel Mob, and public health researcher Angie Wilkinson.

They wrote: “If the government is serious about preventing gang intimidation of the public, it must find ways to prevent the news media from sensationalizing gang incidents.”

It would like to see the new laws prevent the media from publishing or broadcasting gang insignia and regalia. “The news media are a major contributor to the display of gang insignia, more so than the gang members themselves.”

But that proposal was rejected by the Media Freedom Committee, a group of senior editors representing New Zealand’s largest newsrooms.

“The Media Freedom Committee would be very concerned if the government were to impose new restrictions on the way we report on gang activity in this country. We believe that sunlight is always the best disinfectant,” said MFC chairman Phil O’Sullivan, who is also head of news and current affairs at TVNZ.

…oh, surprise, surprise, the New Zealand corporate media that makes so much money from the ‘if it bleeds, it leads’ style of clickbait crime porn don’t want to be banned from juicy reviews of gang crimes!

We will ban gang patches that are designed to incite confrontations between police and gang members, but we will not ban them in the corporate media that spreads the narrative of tougher crime.

Look, how do I say this in a nice way?

Kiwis are quite simple and very easy to lead. You play on their small-minded bigotry and fears and you can get any crazy draconian law passed.

We have angry Māori and Pacifica children causing trouble in cheap liquor shops staffed by exploited Indian and Chinese migrant workers, while the white middle class in the suburbs clutch their pearls and scream: ‘Something has to be done’.

Ram raids and gang fights generate a huge amount of headlines and clickbait sensation, but when we look at the statistics we see that the reality of crime for the vast majority of New Zealanders is very different.

In 2022, 886 ram raids took place.

In 2022, there were 57 murders.

These are terrible crimes, there is no doubt about that. But in 2022 there were 175,573 domestic violence investigations, with almost 50% of Māori women experiencing domestic violence in their lifetime.

Why don’t we censor gang patches in the media to prevent the media from hyperventilating about crime and actually implementing social policies?

That will not happen, because this government has no intention of finding solutions. They only want to incite police violence and create the feeling that there must be strict action.

This is who we are now, this is who we have become.