As tempers flared on a recent night in a nightlife district in Auckland, New Zealand's largest city, Joanne Paikea sensed an altercation — or even an arrest — was brewing.
“Bro, you know the police are after us,” he said, describing his efforts to calm the growing tension between two groups. “So you listen or you get arrested. It's your choice. What do you want? Go home and eat or end up in the cells?”
Paikea is a Māori custodian, one of about a thousand indigenous volunteers across New Zealand who care for the vulnerable, calm the angry and intervene with the violent, working independently of but alongside the police.
Policing has recently come under the microscope in New Zealand, where stories of gruesome crimes have dominated the headlines. Shootings, gang tensions and dozens of car ramming attacks — when criminals hit stores with cars to loot them — have shaken the peaceful nation and become a major issue in the October elections.
Christopher Luxon, the new Prime Minister and leader of the center-right National Party, proposed to voters a new era of harsher sentences, including promising to send young offenders to training camps and reversing efforts to reduce the prison population.
“We will restore law and order,” Luxon said in his victory speech.
Experts have questioned the need for such a change, as well as the more forceful tactics of Luxon's party, saying the underlying problems would remain unresolved. Many Māori Trustees, most of whom are women over 40, know it first-hand: economic hardship, alienation and addiction.
In recent months, a cost of living crisis has hit New Zealanders hard. Food prices in October increased 6.3 percent year-on-year.
This has created a black market for some products. The stolen cigarettes, which retail for about NZ$35 (more than $20) a pack, can be exchanged for other valuable items. “Some people will trade eight packets for a piece of meat,” said Paikea, who heads the Akarana Maori Custodians' Association in Auckland.
Many countries are grappling with questions about law enforcement, including the threat of police brutality, the harms of incarceration, and the factors that drive criminals. Māori custodians, who have been active in New Zealand for about a century, “are halfway between formal community policing and social workers, and are quite essential in the way certain areas of New Zealand operate,” Fabio said. Scarpello, a political scientist at the University of Auckland.
The custodians help where they can, but conditions on the ground have been changing. Maori custodians say they prefer respect and compassion over more forceful coercion. But many voters backed the incoming administration's more punitive approach to crime.
“Criminals don't seem to fear the police or being caught,” said Sunny Kaushal, president of the Dairy and Business Owners Group, which represents small, owner-operated businesses.
The previous Government's strategies, including creating a new criminal offense for ramming attacks and subsidizing fog cannons to blind offenders, had been deficient, he said.
Paikea said not wanting to criminalize young people was the main reason people trusted custodians, when perhaps not the police. “We're just here to help you,” she said.
By: NATASHA FROST
The New York Times
BBC-NEWS-SRC: http://www.nytsyn.com/subscribed/stories/7017067, IMPORTING DATE: 2023-12-06 20:00:07
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