Sharples Pita: General Debate 
Sharples Pita: General Debate 
[Volume:641;Page:10923] 
Dr PITA SHARPLES (Co-Leader—Maori Party) 
: 
 Tena koe Mr Speaker. Apart from this two-party debate the hot topic on everybody’s lips is who can be the toughest on gangs. The Maori Party never being one to shirk from a challenge has some tough talk of our own to bring to this debate. We urge all parties in this House to take the time to familiarise themselves with the ground-breaking international research that is revealing that more police more prison and more punishment have not stopped gang violence. The research I am referring to is entitled  
Gang Wars: The Failure of Enforcement Tactics and the Need for Effective Public Safety Strategies 
 which has just been released from the Justice Policy Institute in Washington. The international research is telling us that the billions of dollars spent on traditional gang suppression activities have failed to promote public safety and in fact are often counter-productive. 
Gang Wars 
 describes two key strategies that will help us avoid going down a flawed anti-gang path to failure. There is the Los Angeles and Chicago approach of tough-talking elimination through enforcement. We could call this the “Labour - New Zealand First - National crack down on gangs and get heaps of votes for next year” method. Or there is the New York and Toronto approach that is committed towards ensuring public safety through gang and community engagement. This is the approach that the Maori Party favours in our emphasis on public safety and prevention by promoting jobs and education and encouraging youth to turn away from gang activity. 
The numbers make it blatantly clear that there is no argument about which way works. The results speak for themselves. Two years ago Los Angeles police reported 11402 gang-related crimes and New York police reported 520. The research cites extensive evidence that the use of social resources such as job training mentoring after-school activities and recreational programmes has made significant dents in gang violence while heavy reliance on police enforcement has far less impact. Not long ago we attended a hui of gang leaders in Auckland. Each of the 25 current gang leaders who attended the hui had a job one of them had an economic proposal that he wanted support for and all of them spoke of the value of education for their children and grandchildren. 
We must confront the facts rather than endlessly sharpen the political knives in order to engage in futile battles against gang members. We need to ensure that we all know what the problem is in the first place. This is far too serious a matter to indulge in a game of who can talk tougher on stamping out gangs and gangsters. The Washington report concluded that heavy-handed suppression tactics can actually increase gang cohesion while failing to reduce violence. No one who truly cares about the future of this nation can afford to ignore leading-edge research that warns against legislation to stiffen penalties for gang-related crime. Sure gangs are in our face so the war on gangs has become an easy target for politicians. But we must be committed to solutions not just to quick-fix populist reactions. We must take bold action and support the kinds of prevention programmes that are already showing reductions in violence and crime. Aggressive gang enforcement is not the answer. Investing in jobs schools a decent wage and programmes that give young people good reason to leave gangs is shown by the US research to have promising impacts on reducing crime and violence. 
We must work together to reduce poverty to address the ongoing alienation that so many of our young people are expressing and then to target the right problem with the right solution. At another hui that the Maori Party attended at Manurewa with different gang leaders—senior leaders—they told us about strategies they are working on to contain inter-gang violence and to discourage the new youth neighbourhood gangs from the street fighting that has developed in Auckland and other cities. Working with them we talked about how they had drawn up a list of 85 youth gang leaders from these gangs of the style of the Los Angeles gangs the Bloods and the Crips and how they were working with those groups to defuse street violence. In the last few months that violence has decreased. 
We need to ensure that the investment we make in creating healthy communities will have the best results in the widest interests of public safety and community well-being. It is not about talking tough; it is about facing facts it is about engaging gangs in the communities in which they live and it is about acting smart. Tena koe.