Photo: RNZ / Angus Dreaver
Expanded programmes for young people at risk of being caught in the cycle of crime is just window dressing from a soft-on-crime government, the opposition says.
Police and Social Development Ministers Chris Hipkins and Carmel Sepuloni this morning made a second announcement as part of a suite the government hopes will curb a spate of ram raids.
They said children under 14 years who are caught doing the raids would be given intensive support to steer them away from a life of crime, and towards study and work.
It followed an announcement yesterday afternoon of legislative amendments giving police broader powers to seize assets.
National Party leader Christopher Luxon in Christchurch this afternoon told media more was needed around serious consequences for serious repeat offenders.
"We see a lot of family conferences - we think there should be a lot less of that. There's a lot of opportunity around home detention, there's a lot of opportunities around community service, and frankly for the most serious repeat offenders - of which at least 25 percent of ram raids are done by repeat offenders - we've got youth residential facilities as well and so we should be using and making sure we've got appropriate consequences in place," Luxon said.
"To be honest it feels like a lot of window dressing and I'm not quite exactly sure what they have proposed in great detail.
"It's not a strong enough response, what it is a political response to a government that's under pressure for being soft on crime and ultimately what it's missing is actually what is the consequences for serious offenders and ultimately also the support needed for victims."
There also needed to be more support offered to ram raid and burglary victims, Luxon said.
"I spent time with a shop owner who's been ram raided and broken into three times in four months and they've worked incredibly hard, they've saved a lot of money to be able to get into that business and lo and behold they are attacked by ram raiders and burglars."
ACT leader David Seymour suggested young offenders should be monitored with ankle bracelets.
"There needs to be an escalation pathway for young offenders that sends them a message early. At the moment they get softly softly till suddenly they turn 18, they're in the criminal justice system, and things get very serious with little warning ... we should have instant practical penalties as an infringement notice regime for shoplifting; if they ram raid we should put ankle bracelets on them."
That would keep tabs on their location, show whether they were attending school, and ensure they could not break curfew, he said, and added that ACT believed the core of the issue was a a lack of consequences for youth offenders.
"There's always a pathway back to redemption, it's not permanent. Unless we start giving short, sharp signals to young people going off the rails we end up leaving it too late, they turn 18, they end up going to real jail."
The government's response had come six months too late, he said.
Photo: RNZ / Angus Dreaver
But Luxon acknowledged measures brought in should to avoid overly penalising young offenders.
"What we don't want is minor offences, first-time offenders to become hardened criminals through their interaction with the justice system, but what we're saying is there are an escalating set of consequences that we're not fully using or deploying at the moment ... for serious repeat offenders."
He argued a main cause of increasing youth crime was truancy.
"And here we have [Chris Hipkins,] a minister of police who is also the minister of education and in this country we have a shameful record at the moment where only 46 percent of our kids go to school regularly."
Law and order experts have said that ram raids have been increasing as a relatively new phenomenon in New Zealand, but crime overall is not spiralling out of control.
They have also warned against overreliance on gang membership statistics, which can be unreliable and - because it is easier to identify people that are in gangs than those that have left - would tend to naturally increase over time.
