Tough on crime

I posted this two years ago, in the Facebook days, but it seems relevant again now. Kids are still more important than cars. Leaders of every stripe need to know it.

These are the facts of the case.

Five years ago, a boy got up to no good one afternoon, with a couple of his mates. He was fifteen.

The three of them should have been at school, but they weren't. They were mucking around in the carpark by the train station. They were trying, inexpertly and drunkenly, and not for the first time, to break into cars.

The police called my home after the incident. They explained what had happened.

I lived in Naenae at the time, but that day the car was parked at a more affluent suburb, where cars are typically worth more, and the children of outsiders less.

One of the cars the boys damaged was mine. It was a pile of junk: a 1998 Caldina, dented on the outside, and shabby within. You could see where they'd tried to pry the driver-side lock with a screwdriver, tried to smash a window on the other side. This day, they'd got caught.

The police told how they'd tracked the kids down. They'd set the dog on them.

When I met the boy, he had recovered from his surgery after the dog bite. It was a youth justice meeting. We sat in a semi-circle in office chairs on grey carpet, with tables pushed to the sides of the room to make space. There was instant coffee and fluorescent lights.

We took turns in the semi-circle, in our palpable awkwardness, talking about what had happened, our different perspectives. The boy looked at his feet a lot, smiled sometimes, mostly seemed unsure.

It came my turn to talk, and I suddenly felt a kind of disgrace. The things I'd wanted to say, intended with kindness, seemed greeting-card effete.

My voice broke into something inarticulate and tearful - faintly histrionic, and it shamed me - because I didn't know what to a say to a child who has been set on by a dog.

I don't know what you say when the body of a car is deemed to have more value than the body of the child who scratched it.

You can't talk about the details of a youth justice proceeding, out of respect for the young person's confidentiality, their dignity. But then, I imagine you don't need me to: it's the same story. The particular flourishes of inequity may differ, but the chapters - a series of institutions designed by and for whiter faces, culminating in the justice system - stay the same.

The youth justice coordinators were kind. When we'd all had a chance to speak they split us up, and they explained to the boy what he had to do now - that part of making things right is saying sorry.

He didn't know how to apologise, I guess, or not in words, because unexpectedly, he simply stepped in to me and hugged me. He was a little shorter than me, and had a boy's shoulders, still lean, like the shoulders of my own sons. He stayed in the hug longer than I expected, in my arms, not in any way that troubled me, but simply in the way a kid does.

The boy was Māori; but then, you knew that.

He is a young man now, and I still think about him. Maybe he knows that even on his worst day, in the middle of his stupidest mistake, a kid is worth more than a car. Or maybe he doesn't know, because that is not a story our institutions tell to brown children.

Part of making things right is saying sorry.

These are the facts of the case. It's up to you whether you hear the story they're telling.