Police Minister Ginny Andersen is back to gaslighting us again.
Police Minister Ginny Andersen does “not accept” the Government’s record on crime is a “social and moral failure”.
It comes after a pair of hammer-wielding offenders stormed a dairy in Mt Roskill on Wednesday afternoon, injuring two people.
[…] The Opposition has repeatedly blamed it on the Government being “soft on crime”.
“I think one of the drivers is the Government has sent very mixed messages around all this. The one target that they’ve had is to reduce the prison population irrespective of what’s happening in the community and they’ve created a culture of excuses for crime and that, I think, has led to this sense of impunity,” National’s Justice spokesperson Paul Goldsmith told AM on Friday.
“The real sense that everybody has – all the shopkeepers have and all the people on the street say – is that there are no real consequences for these crimes. That’s why we’ve got to restore consequences for crime.”
ACT leader David Seymour, meanwhile, said New Zealand “must get back to a culture of crime being unacceptable, where victims are put first and where anyone thinking of committing a crime is deterred by the knowledge that if they do, they’ll face consequences”.
Asked by AM host Ryan Bridge if the Government’s rhetoric had led to the public thinking Labour was “soft on crime”, Andersen disagreed.
“I absolutely refute that,” she said. “We’ve resourced our frontline [police], we’ve put money into it – far more than National. Police numbers declined under National [and] resourcing to our frontline declined under National.
“By having cops out there in cars, catching people and holding them to account is the best way to get on top of crime.”
Except they’re not being held to account; just catch and release.
The crime increases have prompted a wave of criticism about the Government’s record on addressing the issue.
But rising crime post-pandemic wasn’t unique to New Zealand.
Retail theft in Australia, for example, was the highest it’s ever been. Like in New Zealand, the rise has largely been attributed to skyrocketing living costs.
“Right now… there are kids with no food, they’re in cold homes. Their parents are contemplating going out and stealing or robbing just to feed their kids,” prominent Kiwi community leader Dave Letele told The Project last year.
What a feeble excuse. Many people are finding it hard but they don’t go out stealing.
[…] According to the Police Minister, the rising crime wasn’t a “social and moral failure” by the Government.
“I do not accept that because we continue to make sure we put those resources on the frontline to make sure we have the police there, and that’s the best way,” Andersen said. “I don’t see it as a social and moral failure because we continue to work with a tough problem, there’s no doubt about it – it’s a really hard issue to get on top of.”
[…] “It makes me really angry to see people have this level of violence in their community,” she added. “It’s for that reason that we resource police to be able to catch these offenders and hold them to account.”
If they were being held to account, they wouldn’t be going out and committing more robberies, would they?
Saying we need to be hard on crime to beat crime is simplistic. On the other hand so is saying all we need is more cops, especially when they don’t seem to making much of a difference. You can’t blame poverty either, since the thugs doing the robbing aren’t exactly doing it in order to live. But all this hand wringing means nothing if you’re a dairy owner who has been ram-raided for the fifth time or if you’ve just been robbed by some thug with a hammer.