Nerd Sunday: Going gangbusters

We've heard a bunch of reckons from politicians. What does the evidence say?

Everyone has issues that push their buttons.

I had a friendship once that went wrong: badly wrong. The reasons were complex, and, I think, much bigger than either she or I. When it was done and dusted, and the police had left, and only hurt remained like shards of a dropped glass, I ran the story through my mind in reverse to find the cause - like rewinding a videotape, characters moving jerkily backwards into history.

She was part of a gang family. I’m also part of a gang, called the middle class, and we do plenty of social harm too, only it’s through stuff like the housing market. Despite all that, she and I were friends for the usual reasons. You know, we kind of liked each other. We laughed at stupid shit, traded stories of kids and of life, helped each other out. I’d had too many experiences of crime to be naive about her - and she never hid who she was or what she’d done. In a sense, it was a leap of faith, a moment of vulnerability for both of us.

The end of our friendship, when it came, seemed to have started as a niggle - a thing so minor that, taken at face value, you’d wonder how it ever blew up. Everyone has issues that push their buttons. For her, I am guessing, there was the hurt of perceived rejection. Of feeling judged, maybe, or feeling less. And that hurt felt outsized because of all the stuff that came before both of us - generations before - but which people like me continue to represent.

Like I said, everyone has issues that push their buttons. Gangs push people’s buttons - and that’s why we’re hearing so much about them this election year. A large part of me gets it; recalls the fury I felt at the thing she did, at the harm to my family. Consider my buttons pushed. The rest of me wants to step the hell back from this brink we’re being ushered towards, in turns, by one party then the other.

I was scrolling when I found this new research report, released with little fanfare, in a corner of the internet. It’s from the Prime Minister’s Chief Science Advisor. It’s called Toward an understanding of Aotearoa New Zealand’s adult gang environment - and it tries, with an earnest kind of nerdiness I love, to give us a way back from the brink. I thought it was fascinating, and level-headed too, so I want to share.

Here’s how we’re going to do it. I’ll run through some of the main points of the report - not the things we all know, but the bits that are perhaps more surprising. Where I think it’s helpful, I’ll add in other sources. The storytelling over top will be mine, so any shortcomings should be slated back to me, not the researchers.

As we go, let’s bear in mind the researchers’ important caution. The report draws on the voices of gang members, but also those who work with, study, or imprison them - and some of those voices have a lot more power than others. Perhaps that’s not surprising. Power, who has it and who doesn’t, underlines every word of this story.

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When we talk about gangs, what are we actually talking about?

Righto, let’s start from the beginning. Gangs are hard to define, partly because they’re hard to study and talk to. It’s fair to say patches and PhDs don’t generally mix. We’ll come back to this challenge. Let’s make a few points first.

When researchers want to know about a topic - especially one that’s not well trodden - they’ll often start with overseas research, seeking clues to help us understand Aotearoa. When our researchers looked at the overseas research, they found something interesting. Sure, some of the same factors - like poverty and marginalisation - are associated with gang membership everywhere. But Aotearoa gangs are different from gangs in other countries.

Overseas, people tend to be involved in gangs when they’re young. They join for a while and then they age out, making gangs youthful and their membership unstable. Here, people are likely to stay in gangs as adults. They may have kids and grandkids raised in a gang context - although it’s important to note that being in a gang and being raised around a gang are not the same thing.

That means in Aotearoa gangs can be intergenerational, because they may have many members of a whānau. Sometimes a gang is whānau. Let’s hold on to this idea. It’s important to understanding much of what follows.

Why do we have gangs?

OK. The short answer is colonialism - a topic with lots of incredible writing. But just because it’s a short answer doesn’t make it simple. Let’s do some unpacking. The report points to three particular events in our national history that fuelled gang membership.

In the early days of gangs in Aotearoa - I had no idea - some of our gangs were entirely Pākehā. Then, particularly from the 1960s, the make-up of gangs shifted. One key reason is the ‘urban drift’, where many Māori moved from rural places into cities. It started a bit before World War Two, when Māori were encouraged to take up city jobs to meet a labour shortage - then expected to just go back home when the work was done. Of course, with land depleted by colonisation, there was less to go back to, and not enough jobs; but that didn’t make the city better. Māori newcomers in the city, even those attracted by opportunity, could be frustrated by shitty living conditions.

At the same time, and even as late as the 1980s, something even shittier was happening. It’s a bleak thing to follow the Royal Commission into Abuse in State Care: I couldn’t quite do it. The short story, only it’s not a short story, is that Aotearoa incarcerated our children. We injured them with savagery, raped them, abused them, fucked them up. Disproportionately, those children were Māori, subject to extra scrutiny by a state that watched for their minor transgressions - stone throwing, truancy - and locked them up with zeal. In the boys’ homes, the children made alternative communities to the ones that cast them out. They were reunited with each other when they graduated to prison. If you can, and it is not easy, I urge you to listen to their voices directly, on The Hui.

Added to this cauldron of shittiness was the Dawn Raids. Like Māori urged from their papakāinga, Pacific peoples were also seen as an answer to Aotearoa’s labour shortage. Then, in the 1970s, the economy went sour - and so did our sense of national decency. Those families we encouraged when it suited us were now seen as surplus to requirements, or worse; and they were torn by police out of their beds, from children to the elderly, to be forcibly returned to their countries of origin. This account, one of many, talks about police pulling the blankets off women, watching them fearfully pull clothes onto their naked bodies, saying things like ‘F- get up! You black bitch, put something on … whore!’

Nothing happens out of nowhere. Aotearoa had sowed the seed. Gangs flowered.

What did these new-formed gangs actually do?

I said earlier, patches and PhDs don’t generally mix. An exception is Dr Jarrod Gilbert, an academic who specialises in gangs in Aotearoa. The report draws on his research, as well as work by a researcher named John Meek, to talk a little bit about the history of gangs. This is a really big topic, so I’ll pull out just a few events.

Gangs first became seen as a social problem in the 1950s, when mostly Pākehā working class kids started following trends from the UK and the US, forming into groups called bodgies, widgies and milk bar cowboys - and riding motorbikes, going to parties, getting drunk and having sex. The government was concerned enough to commission a couple of reports, finding that many of these young people were from ‘broken homes’.

Like we’ve seen, the make-up of gangs changed in the 1960s. Youth gangs petered out, and were replaced by more structured gangs with rules, leaders and patches. The Hells Angels formed. And the Mongrel Mob started to hit its stride, fuelled by the urban drift. Gangs gathered steam during the 1970s - helped by the fact that, when the economy soured, causing hardship and marginalisation, Māori and Pacific workers got hit the hardest. The upshot? By the end of the decade, gangs were perceived not just as young people behaving badly, but as ‘a significant threat to law and order’, as well as a symbol of racial disharmony. This was exacerbated by an appalling event in 1979, known as the Moerewa incident, in which two gangs erupted into outright street warfare, and emergency staff were seriously injured, with gang members attempting to throw a pleading and injured police officer onto a fire.

Interestingly, when the 1980s rolled around, the government - while concerned - wasn’t completely punitive in its approach to gangs. Off the back of another report, suggesting social factors pushed people into gangs, the government set up something called Group Employment Liaison Services (GELS). Instead of trying to stop people being in gangs, GELS tried to get gang members into employment - figuring if they worked together, they’d be better behaved and less likely to fight each other. GELS actually worked, but was disbanded after a couple of years - partly because of further gang incidents. Throughout the 1980s the economy soured further, gang membership grew, and gangs got more interested in making money. An event known as the Ambury Park rape horrified the public once again.

The 1990s saw a worsening public perception of gangs, and police upped the ante with more major operations aimed at curbing gangs’ illegal activity. Now, gangs were seen as dominating drugs and other profit-driven crime (although not everyone agrees this is true). Another incident - the murder of Christopher Crean, who was due to testify against gang members - again disturbed the public. At the same time, the nature of gangs was changing. Taking inspiration from LA-style gangs, youth gangs were making a comeback, but this time wearing bandanas and calling themselves names like Crips. In late 2005, the first killing associated with these gangs took place, and was followed by nine more killings in the next year alone. At the same time, Australia’s crackdown on motorbike gangs exported members of those gangs to our shores (with 501 deportees eventually exported too).

From the 1980s onwards, the government passed a series of laws strengthening powers to combat gangs - including bugging, removing gang fortresses, and confiscating the proceeds of crime. In 2009, the Whanganui District Council passed a bylaw banning patches from the central city and certain other public places. The bylaw was controversial, and was criticised for overriding people’s rights. It lasted only two years. The Hells Angels sought a judicial review, and in 2011, the High Court chucked the bylaw out.

OK, that was then. Who or what are today’s gangs?

First things first: gangs don’t necessarily like to be called gangs. If you’ve watched the clip from The Hui above, you’ll have seen Eugene Ryder, an outspoken Black Power member, social worker, and critic of family violence. In the report, Ryder says of his own identity, “when people ask me am I in a gang, I am definitely not in a gang … ’cause I know what that word does for people’s psyche you know, but Black Power is part of who I am.” Power being what it is, the prerogative to define gangs sits with the government. Let’s see how they do it.

If you’ve been following the news, you’ve seen claims that gang numbers are growing, and pushbacks on those claims. Who’s right and who’s wrong? Some of it comes down to definitions.

In 2016, the police established something called the Gang Harm Insights Centre. One of the Centre’s jobs is gathering information on gangs - including something called the National Gang List. This is a bit bureaucratic, but it’s important.

The report is a little tricky to decipher - I’ve borrowed from other sources - but it seems the National Gang List categorises gang members into three groups:

• Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs, or OMCG, an absurd acronym no one wanted or needed. These are your Hells Angels or Comancheros type of gangs, and are a relatively small group (although they have a big impact).

• Other Patch‐Wearing Gangs, or OPWG - somehow, an even worse acronym. This is far and away the biggest group, dominated by the Mongrel Mob and Black Power.

• Street gangs. These are your LA-style Killer Beez types, and are also a smaller group.

Probably, gang numbers are increasing after a period of decline - but there are a couple of reasons to be careful about what the National Gang List tells us. First, the List is kept for police operational purposes, and is not a ‘census’ of gang members. When data collection methods change, so do List numbers. And it’s easier to get on the List than come off, because there is no definitive moment people can be said to leave a gang. It’s not like cancelling your Netflix subscription. That means the List will probably always continue to grow.

Second, the way gangs are defined rules some people in, and other people out. For a group to qualify as a gang and get on the List, it must have five or more members, have a common name, cause harm to the community through criminal activity, and have common identifiers (like patches). This definition means some very harmful groups, who happen to be Pākehā - like the white supremacist groups that started forming in the 1990s - aren’t on the List. I’m not suggesting this is deliberate bias, or that the police don’t take these groups seriously too; only that there’s a story behind almost every statistic.

Is this all just a moral panic? How worried about gangs should we be?

It’s justified - and understandable - to be worried about gangs and gang harm. The report sets out experiences of people connected with gangs, including women and children, who’ve found gangs nurturing, supportive and protective. It relays incidents of gangs leading within their communities: feeding schoolkids, standing guard outside mosques after the Christchurch attack, and encouraging whānau to be vaccinated against COVID.

But at the end of the day, the harms can't and shouldn’t be ignored. The report sets them out.

Yes, gangs hurt people. Crime, both organised and opportunistic. Violence at higher rates even than other offenders. Pushing meth onto the desperate; luring poor kids with promises of shiny things. And yes: the people hurt by gangs include their own. Kids notified to Oranga Tamariki at heartbreaking rates. Intimate partner violence, threats and coercion. Trauma and neglect handed down, over and over.

If you care to read them, the report will offer you both the statistics and the tales of human misery behind them.

So yeah, we’re allowed to worry. But we need to worry about the right things. The report sets out how, while there have been spikes in police proceedings against young people in particular places, looking across the board, youth proceedings have gone down (using data from the year to July 2022, to be fair). There’s nuance we need to consider. And serious as ram raids are, we need to look at them in this context - resisting the conflation that’s happening, where some are attributing ram raids to gangs. As the report puts it:

Recent claims of ram raiders being driven by adult gang operations are not supported by an evidence base. There is also no evidence to suggest that the increase in youth crime is in any way impacted by youth gang membership, although some offenders do have gang associations.

Public sentiment - especially after a distressing event - tends to drive policies more strongly than evidence does. These kind of policies seldom offer long-term improvements for victims of crime or their families, let alone address crime’s underlying causes. Again, in the report’s words:

Recent survey data highlight that the public feel that crime is increasing, with gang activity playing a key role in the increase in crime. Despite crime statistics trending downward, the perceived increase by the public coupled with inflammatory reporting likely contributes to an appetite for punitive measures aimed at tackling gangs, rather than a focus on reducing specific crime harms.

These issues demand more of us: yes, a law enforcement response, but something smarter too. We can’t just let the media, social media, or those campaigning for election simply push our buttons.

What could help?

It matters how we talk about this stuff.

When we talk about the pathway into gangs, we use words like ‘risk factors’. Mostly, the risk factors for gang membership are well-rehearsed: colonisation, unemployment and poverty, trauma and abuse, living in a gang neighbourhood. Those traditional risk factors have been joined by newer ones: victimisation by peers, schools without clear rules or expectations, labelling of kids by staff and teachers, neurodiversity, and other mental health or cognitive issues.

But people aren’t simply collections of risk factors. People are people, making their way through structures, a culture, a society that smooths the path for some, lays brutal traps for others; and in either case, attributes the outcome, success or failure, to the one who walks the path.

It’s easy to think it’s too hard: there’s nothing we can do. We couldn’t be more wrong. The evidence is pretty clear, and the report sets it out.

We can stop stigmatising people, especially kids. We can help kids feel connected to school and community, culture and sport. We can cut the populist bullshit - stop advocating for ‘scared straight’ programmes like bootcamps - because they not only fail to work, but they make things worse. We can, and we should, take a law enforcement approach; but we should join it with a public health approach to violence, alcohol and drugs. We can, although it’s hard, aim for better services for people on remand; better reintegration for those leaving prison. We can stop calling gang families ‘hard to reach’, and start holding to account the services that fail to reach them. We can ensure gang neighbourhoods have decent housing, jobs and opportunities, instead of gambling and alcohol and fast food outlets.

Because that’s the thing. For the most part we know what to do; or where don’t, we know how to find out. What we lack it is the courage - moral and political - to try.

Where does this leave us?

This is the part where I should neatly close, offer conclusions, make the last word my own. To be a writer, I guess, you must have to like the sound of your own voice; but the voices I want to hear right now, the ones I think we all need to hear, do not come from people who look like me.

On The Hui, the men speak. Much of what they say had not been spoken by them before.

There is Eugene. He came from a large family, his father a Minister of the church; but his home was not always a happy one. It was the girls his father abused, more than the boys. Eugene was eleven when he got locked up, the last of his siblings to be taken. He says of kids in the boys’ homes, ‘Some turned to the church, some turned to the gangs, some committed suicide, some bottled it up.’ He chose gangs.

There is Riwhi. He says he was cheeky, sporty, and adventurous - part of a big family with ‘awhina’ and ‘aroha everywhere’ - before he got locked up at age twelve. He hadn’t been going to school, because his mum was dying and he was caring for her. After her death, Riwhi was put in a boys’ home, because his dad had too many children to care for. He fell into violence; watched friends fall into gangs. Asked if the boys’ homes had taken his potential, he said, ‘Of course it has. Look at my brothers who have gone through it with me, that are in gangs. Not just chump gang members, these were captains … You put them in the real world, they’d be captains of industry … The opportunities were there, but they were never going to fucking get them’.

You can’t know, listening to Hohepa and Quentin, whether the violence they meted out, they hurt they did, happened within gangs or not. But it was Quentin’s words that stopped me in my tracks. Asked what it felt like to tell his story, he said, ‘There was a couple of times where I was gonna pull out, actually. Tried to be strong for young New Zealanders, particularly young Māori, is why I’m doing it’.

And so I don’t know how to conclude. I just know this. The story of gangs does not belong just to gangs. This is Aotearoa’s story. Much of it is brutal, is shameful. But we need to turn and face it, try to be strong.

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This is for my friend, my once-friend. She will not read it, or even know it was written. She and I will never speak again. There’s hurt you can’t transcend - and it’s not just about the depth of the wound, but the time, the generations, over which it was inflicted.

If we could speak, I’d say this. I still feel angry with you, sometimes, and maybe you feel the same. But I see you. I see the grit in you, one foot after the other, on the hardest of days. I see the ferocity with which you fight for your kids, fight to give them better. I see the fuck ups you make, but the many more things you do right. I inch towards forgiveness: maybe you do the same.

I’d say, I miss you.