Gang patches: Views of a cop, gang member, lawyer and mayor

Sunday, 3 March 2024

• A police officer, gang member, and a current politician offer their views on looming ‘patch laws’.

• Officers worry that the plans are “completely unworkable”.

• But the gang member warned: ‘I’ll die for my patch’.

A cop, a defence lawyer, a Mayor and a gang member walked into a bar…

Well, they didn’t really.

But they could, and do, in many parts of the country, especially out here in the regions, where degrees of separation are significantly lower than in the big smokes.

Here in Hawke’s Bay news of the government’s proposed gang patch ban has been met variously with sentiments of: joy, relief, cynicism, derision, and nonchalance.

Last weekend the coalition government announced it would soon introduce new legislation into parliament which would see tougher handling of gangs by police and the courts.

Justice Minister Paul Goldsmith and Police Minister Mark Mitchell said the move was prompted by a 51% increase in the number of gang members over the past five years (now numbering more than 3000), and a “significant escalation in gang-related violence, public intimidation and shootings”.

The new legislation would see all gang insignia banned in public places, would give police the power to issue ‘dispersal notices’ to gang members gathering in groups and to stop them communicating with each other. It would also allow judges to give more weight to gang membership as an aggravating factor at sentencing.

Police Commissioner Andrew Coster said the proposed law was 'ambitious' and would would provide officers with further tools to “continue to put pressure on the gangs”, noting it would be up to officers to exercise their judgment about when to enforce it.

Police Association president Chris Cahill said 'gang members aren't just going to hand over their patches“ and that policing the proposed law would be difficult in some areas. Some academics have been more critical. Associate law professor Carrie Leonetti called the proposed law a “political gimmick”.

Labour’s police spokesperson Ginny Anderson says officers have more important things to do than being “wardrobe police”.

Gangs aren’t popular, especially when they gather in large crowds and flout the law on motorways or in towns or cities, and any move to diminish them is generally welcomed.

The niggly bit, and it’s a niggle successive governments have struggled with since the days of Norman Kirk in the 1970s, is working out how to attenuate the impact and presence of gangs in a lawful and practical way.

To take a closer look at this we enter that allegorical bar in Hawke’s Bay, and speak to four people at the coalface.

First up is a Hawke’s Bay police officer with more that 15 years front-line experience, who is happy to speak provided he remains anonymous.

He said the principle behind the legislation - cracking down on gangs - was excellent, but in practice it was “absolutely and completely unworkable”.

“I just cannot see how we could do what they are proposing,” said the officer.

It’s the view shared by nearly all his colleagues, he said.

He said the more remote police stations might have two cops on a late shift.

“You’d often both be single-crewed and driving around for the shift. Even when there are two of you, you’ll go to some jobs and find a group of Mobsters, or pull over a car and find it full of four to five patched Mobsters acting like clowns… in situations like that this new law just isn’t going to be enforceable,” he said.

“I don’t think the general public appreciates just how much gang members disdain any form of authority, and especially police officers. I mean they really hate us.

“They’re ok when they’re by themselves or in a pair. They can be civil and compliant. But any more than two and they just wind each other up like a couple of teenagers egging each other on. They’re unpredictable, irrational and dangerous,” he said.

The gang members he deals with tend to be aged from their late teens into their 40s.

“Its really only the old, old school gang members who would be super compliant. They know how to play the game. The new generation are the problem. Full of bravado, showing off to each other. I think the last six years have seen them become way more emboldened. They get away with more than they used to,” he said.

The idea of a lone police officer confronting a gang member and demanding they remove their patch might work in some situations, but most likely the new legislation would see cops identify the patch-wearing gang members and then follow the matter up the following day, the officer said.

“That’s the only way I can see it working in reality and that’ll add so much more work to what we do already,” he said.

“Nothing will change with the tangi. I just can’t see how that’d change, unless we’re going to get hundreds and hundreds of cops from other districts and set up road cones and checkpoints etc… and expect to get into scraps with them. We’re not going to show up at a tangi for a mobster and start locking people up for wearing a patch. We’ll just take photos like we do now and arrest them at a later date”.

“If you lock up one or two and take their patches, that sort of thing won’t go so bad. But it has the potential to turn into an absolute shit-fight every time you deal with a gang member because they will know we’re after them. They’ll either cover up their patches or they’ll just make sure they get around in larger groups so they always outnumber us,” he said.

“As things are now the [proposed] legislation will be 100% setting us up to fail. In theory it’s a really good piece of legislation, but we just literally don’t have the staff,” he said.

In one area he was stationed the local gang members would listen to police scanners, learn all the call signs then make a point of showing up at any traffic stop that police would set up.

“They’d just sit there in their car and intimidate you. It happened all the time. Even at jobs we’d get called to. Especially if it involved another mobster. They’d send a car to try and scoop up that mobster before we did,” the officer said.

“I’ve had a pursuit that went out into the backblocks and ended with the car crashing and the occupants - which turned out to be a group of patched Mobsters - getting out and confronting me. I was just by myself and had to take cover. By the time I got someone out to help me they’d gapped it,” he said.

“This idea that there’s back-up available real quick is just not true. You’ll often be 25-30 minutes away from the nearest station when things turn to shit on a nightshift,” he said.

The officer also felt the newer police officers were far less prepared to be confrontational with gang members.

“Without wanting to sound too negative, the new generation of cops are too scared to interact with gang members as it is now. The new cops don’t go out pro-actively policing the gangs because they’re just too scary. I shit you not. They don’t stop them, and if they do stop them they don’t do anything with them. They’re just too scared to deal with them”.

“It’s not their fault. It’s just the way policing has gone. We’ve been so watered down in the past six years they don’t don’t know how to police the way we used to. We’ve become this ‘police by consent, don’t be confrontational, give everyone a cuddle’ type of organisation. The hard truth is that the people we deal with, gangs especially, don’t respond to that and don’t respect it. They’re laughing at it”.

“Then you’ve got the old school cops. We still go and confront them [the gang members]. But a lot of the old school guys are leaving. And I’d say any old school cops who use this legislation will probably be isolated and singled out for using it as a way to pick a fight with the gangs”.

A Hawke’s Bay incident that illustrated the sort of volatile situation an officer could find themselves in occurred in 2022 when a lone police officer in Waipukurau was surrounded by 15-20 hostile and aggressive Mongrel Mob members yelling ‘Seig Heil’ and needed to call for assistance to get out of the area.

‘I’ll die for my patch’

A local gang member who would also not be identified said there was no way anyone would be taking his patch, or “korowai” (’cloak’), off him.

“It ain’t gonna f…ing happen. I’ll tell you that much,” said the man, who’d been in his gang for more than 15 years.

“I’ll die for mine [patch], let’s put it that way”

“And there’s no way they’re going to stop us communicating. Who do these guys think they are?” he adds.

“We actually have a good relationship with the police. People mightn’t think it, but we do. They’re definitely under-resourced. We know that and they know that and if there’s fifty of us f…ing lined up at a tangi, they can’t match that,” he said.

“What’re they going to do? Stand in front of one of our bikes and say ‘please hand me your patch’? Not gonna happen,” he said.

If the legislation came in it would be heeded as much as the marae that forbid the wearing of patches, he said.

“I say to those people [at the marae] ‘who the f… are you to say I can’t wear my patch?’ We all wear them. Who’s gonna walk out and tell 100 people they can’t wear their patches. It’s exactly the same with the police,” he said.

He said he was a law-abiding citizen, as were many of his fellow gang members.

“There are some of us who do things that aren’t legal. But you can’t tar all of us. Look at those tangi, the ones from Hastings to Te Hauke or Waipawa. We’re always guided by police when we do them and they always monitor us and catch up with anyone misbehaving,” he said.

He said he understood that people felt intimidated by patches, but said these tended to be people who had little or no contact with gang members and were under the impression they were all violent and/or criminal.

“Give me an instance with all the tangi of recent where a member of the public has been harmed? It didn’t happen,” he said.

As for the impact a huge Mongrel Mob tangi had on Ōpōtiki last year, which led to a local school closing for several days, the man said it was the school’s decision to close.

“They closed it out of sheer fear. It wasn’t the Mob that closed it. We were mostly well received,” he said.

The man said there were more law-abiding gang members now “than ever before” and police would be best served by laws that allowed them to treat gangs like they did any other group.

“It doesn’t matter which group you’re in. There’s always those who f… it all up for the others,” he said.

‘Bill will fall foul of Bill of Rights’

Scott Jefferson, who’s been a defence lawyer in Hawke’s Bay since 1997, said the proposed law was “simply the whipping up of fears and insecurities in the wider public for political gain”.

The proposed crackdown appeared to have two drivers, he said: “One or two high profile gang tangi and the misleading use of data from Police Gang Harm Insights Centre’s National Gang List suggesting a blow out in gang membership, yet Police themselves caution that the List holds limited information regarding patched or prospect members of NZ adult gangs and was established for intelligence purposes not for counting membership numbers”.

“The Bill will inevitably fall foul of the NZ Bill of Rights Act 1990, particularly s17 - ‘Everyone has the right too freedom of association’. No wriggle room there,” he said.

“There are more than enough offences on the statute books to deal with situations that involve actual threats, intimidation, disorderly behaviour, participation in an organised criminal group. Ironically, the Government says it is acting as the gangs are not above the law, yet Minister Goldsmith says that a finding that the Bill is in breach of the Bill of Rights will not stop the Government from making it law. Who is above the law?” he said.

Jefferson said that, aside from the practicalities and enforcement issues, there was “simply no empirical evidence that shows banning insignia reduces gang membership/ offending or increases public safety”.

He noted that patches and insignia were already banned from court buildings, but that didn’t stop gang members from offending within the court buildings “where assaults, threats and intimidation are commonplace”.

“Taking patches off adult gang members won’t stop me seeing in Youth Court a 13 or 14 year old third-generation family member steeped in gang culture, who has tattooed a bulldog or a fist into their skin. In the absence of policies to address the socio-economic and systemic drivers of gang recruitment, the court will continue to see the dispiriting sight of young people following sibling, parent and grandparent allegiances,” he said.

“Nor will the prospect of the taking of a patch from an adult recidivist gang member offender be the catalyst for a life outside of the gang when repeat, deterrent sentences continue to fail,” he added.

‘They’re not all bad buggers’

The northern Hawke’s Bay town of Wairoa is home to both the Mongrel Mob and Black Power and has seen more than its fair share of flare ups over the decades.

Mayor Craig Little isn’t a fan of gang patches in public places, but feels there are more productive uses of police time and resources than targeting gang members for wearing their patches.

“The problem is that we associate the patches with crime. But not everyone wearing those patches is a bad bugger. They might be in a gang associated with crime, but I work with the local gangs and there’s a lot of them doing good stuff and trying to make it better for their families,” he said.

“Look, in an ideal world we wouldn’t have gangs, but we do, so we need to work with them. In Wairoa a lot of people know or are related to someone in the gangs. We’re brought up with each other. But it’s true that some people do feel intimidated by the gangs, especially tourists or people passing through. I get that,” Little said.

“To be honest the greater problem is a lack of consequences for crime. That needs fixing up first. The police do their bit but these buggers - and its not only gang members - get back out on the street. The judicial system needs to align with what’s happening here as well,” he said.

“We’re not keeping up with crime at the moment. That’s just the way the police system is across New Zealand”.

“I wouldn’t just go confiscating gang patches willy-nilly. I think you need to have a reason, and I think we need to work out why people are joining gangs. I know some beautiful families who have kids that have joined a gang and it’s just broken their hearts. They’ve joined due to the pressure from their peers,” he said.

Little said he’d made a point, since becoming Mayor in 2013, of working with the gangs.

“I remember a previous mayor telling me he wouldn’t work with the gangs, but I do. We and the police and iwi leaders meet regularly and talk about how we can make things better. You need to do that as a community. You’re wasting your time if you think the police are going to do it by themselves,” he said.

“I’ve got to be honest there are some young gang members who are just exemplary gentlemen. They’ll come up and have a chat with me and I think, you know, maybe this is a sign that things are getting better. It’s much different to when I was a young fella in the 1970s. They were pricks back then. But that’s not to say there’s not a lot of bad stuff going on as well,” he said.

“They’re much better now than they were. Generally speaking the crime is within or between the gangs. Sometimes others get pulled into the scrap, but generally they’re pretty good at keeping it between them”.

Coster on Friday told Stuff that he acknowledged that the proposed legislation “will pose challenges for our staff, particularly in some regions”.

“We have significantly enhanced training for our frontline staff through our Tactical Response Model, which has increased confidence and safety in these types of interactions,” he said.

“There may be situations where Police are not in a position to take enforcement action straight away, but can follow-up at a later date. This may include search warrants on those who choose to flout the new law,” Coster said

“I know that that there are a range of staff reactions – some very positive, and some are concerned about what it will look like for them. While the legislation is going through Parliament, we will work to ensure our staff are in the best possible position to respond when the legislation is passed, and takes effect,” he said.