Police Minister Ginny Anderson will start gaslighting us this weekend that crime rates aren’t up, they just have better reporting now. But the stark reality for those of us living in cities is that violent crime is up massively. We’ve seen almost 400 ram raids in six months!

Ram raids have climbed to an average of more than two a day, prompting an Auckland judge to say the public and the police “are fed up with it”.

Police figures released yesterday show there were at least 388 “ram-raid style events” in a six-month period to the end of May, including 99 which remained unsolved.

During the six-month period, police said there were 218 prosecutions for ram raids, while 86 young people were referred to Police Youth Services.

Last year, police recorded 516 ram raids around the country.

Just a few hours after police released the latest data, a District Court judge in West Auckland told a convicted teenage ram raider; “The public are fed up with it, the police are fed up with it … and people want tougher penalties for this type of crime.”

NZ Herald

Wonders will never cease… a judge who gets it. He is dead right we do want harsher penalties for crime. Fortunately for us, we have an election coming up so we can tell the politicians we want harsher sentences. You have a stark choice, the crim friendly parties of Labour, the Greens and the Maori Party or the tough-on-crime parties of Act, NZ First or National.

What we also need are penalties for crime that do not allow the judiciary very much discretion at all in sentencing. Discretion is what allowed judges to water down ‘three strikes’ legislation. Removing concurrent sentencing might be a good idea too.

Government Police Minister, Ginny Anderson told the Herald the level of retail crime is “completely unacceptable” and said the Government was taking steps to get on top of the issue.

“No one should go to work and feel unsafe,” she said in a statement.

“[The steps we’re taking are] including intensive programmes to break the cycle of offending and provide support to retail owners – but we know there is more work we need to do.”

NZ Herald

Yawn! You have no idea what to do, do you Ginny dear?

Meanwhile, crime continues to rise, and the Government has to fight an election with headlines highlighting that their wrong-headed policy of emptying the prisons hasn’t worked as they merely flooded the streets with hardened criminals. Even Blind Freddy could see that this was going to end in tears, but it seemed to escape Kelvin Davis.

Send a message on crime this election.

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As much at home writing editorials as being the subject of them, Cam has won awards, including the Canon Media Award for his work on the Len Brown/Bevan Chuang story. When he’s not creating the news,...