How young is the youngest kid that's been involved in a ram raid?
The range from ten, I think that ten is probably the youngest that I've heard of.
Over the last few months,
it seems like a new crime wave has emerged in New Zealand.
Ram raids, where people drive cars into shops to bust them open
and steal the goods inside.
Last year they were around five a week across the country.
And the crazy thing is it's mostly teenagers
So that's the first one.
And they were pretty much in and out within 40 seconds.
So when the first robbery happened,
we found an account on TikTok where they had posted everything
online, just bragging about what they have stolen from us.
Himanshu Batra owns a small vape store in Sandringham with his parents.
They only opened in October last year, but in six months
they have been ram rated twice and robbed at knifepoint twice.
This is when my parents were here.
So these were schoolgirls
and then they tried to point the knife to my mother's neck.
And also one of the girls tried to kick my mother as well.
I don't have words to express how I feel about it,
but it's so unsafe that I got my parents involved into this business.
They got retired.
I wanted them to look after something so that they can easily
enjoy their retirement life and have a secured income.
But it feels like I have kind of made their life a target here.
That liquor store over there, they have been robbed multiple times
and they have been sleeping in their shop at night to prevent those ram raids.
We have had these businesses 13 years,
and since the last November,
we've been broken in twice.
So we think that we should have to do something to protect us.
Andy just decided he need to silver in the shop,
otherwise we worry about the group of people will come back again.
He's sleeping in the shop. Every day.
Most of the incident that happened that between
the early morning, between 3:00 to 4:00.
So now I'm so worried because I'm at home, but I also cannot
sleep well because I'm quite worried about his safety.
Police say nearly 90% of ram raid
offenders are under the age of 20, with the majority under 17.
It's pretty crazy to
think a ten year old will be out there doing something like that.
So we need to figure out
how they got to that point, especially being at ten years old.
I've got a ten year old daughter, but I know exactly where she is
and what she's doing.
Yeah, as a dad, how does that feel knowing that these kids are the exact
same age as your daughter out here?
Yeah, it's pretty scary.
How did the ten year olds know how to drive?
How did you learn how to drive?
I just don't think I started driving.
I didn't learn to drive until I was an adult.
Yeah, well, that's what I mean.
This there's so many layers to it,
so it's like you didn't just jump in the car and start driving.
So there's a lot of stuff that have been happening before that one incident.
If we chuck my daughter in a car,
she wouldn't know what to do.
Um, so if she wanted to learn how to drive, it would be me
teaching her, showing her, watching stuff.
And that's possibly what a lot of these kids are doing.
We're just seeing a lot of it.
Their friends, their peers. What we need to understand as a lot of our kids
didn't just wake up and said I wanted to go in and rob a store.
So there's so many complex layers that we kind of have to understand
before we start trying to figure out what's wrong.
Most youth offenders have had serious stuff going on in their lives.
88% of teenagers who go through youth justice process have earlier in
their lives had somebody make a report of concern to Oranga Tamariki about them.
Basically, somebody was worried that these kids were likely to be abused,
harmed or neglected.
You can't
not go home and think, is that helicopter and a car chase,
am I going to get an email in the morning
that says so-and-so's been arrested or picked up?
Jolene Cartwright manages a social work organization called
Turn Your Life Around, who run an early intervention
program with youth. The 10 and 11 and 12 year olds,
like 7 year olds, they're not seeing victims being people.
You know, a building with electronics in it, is not a
in their view they don't see it so much that there's a person behind that.
Their brain development isn't telling them
you are hurting people you are making victims.
What we're finding and we found for quite some years
is there's a multitude of complex issues that are going on for that young person
and it's in the home and it's generational.
It could be targeted offending because it's quick money
because they are living in poverty and they are the third generation
living in poverty.
And then they are also then looking at the world
or the community they live in and they're not connected.
When you are over 18 and commit a crime in New Zealand, you go through the adult justice system.
Younger than that,
it's either Oranga Tamariki or the youth justice system
where the outcomes can be a police warning, a youth aid
referral, a family group conference, or going through youth court.
So is it a situation where like for example, an 18 year old or 19 year old
might know that they might go to jail if they did this kind of crime.
But if they get a 17 year old to do it, they would be less consequences.
No, not at all. Just different consequences.
They are held accountable and the police investigate all of these offenses.
And we have had some good success with identifying the offenders for them.
They are held accountable in different ways.
So we try and involve family communities, schools,
things like that to try and get them off the track
that they currently on and back on probably a more productive one.
There are youth centers that they can get sent to.
But I think locking a child up
is not helping the underlying issues that they need help with.
I feel like I've only heard about ram raids
in the last couple of months, but police figures show that last year
they were 283 ram raids when we weren't even hearing about ram raids at all.
Is it a situation where they are genuinely going up?
Or is this just something that's always been happening
and now all of a sudden we panicking about it?
Ram raids aren't new to police.
It's something that's always happened. Bigger stores were targeted for
things like electronics, jewelry, clothing.
However, it seems to have increased just recently
and we're seeing more young people involved. I think a lot of media
attention at the moment is also brought it to the forefront, but it's not new.
You see their behaviours to us represent hurt and trauma
but to the person out there it just looks like
someone having a ram raid.
I would rather work with the young person and the mum and dad right?
Rather than just work with the young person
and put them back into their foundation.
But if we work with the family as a whole, at least then they're moving together.
There are still a pocket of our young people
that will continue to go from the petty crime to the dairy
robberies to then continue to get a little bit more risky.
It's short sighted to also then blame the parents.
We can't blame the parents if nobody helped them.
And for some it's even the grandparents weren't helped along the way.
So it's about education, it's about justice, it's about care and protection.
It's about wellbeing, health.
It's about a bigger picture
of how we can help a whānau rather than a person.
The government announced it will help fund bollards and other
physical defenses to protect shop owners from ram raids.
They also announced $560 million
of funding to police for gang and youth related crime.
Will more money
for police actually help solve the social issues that are behind this?
I hope so.
But it's not just a police problem.
I think it's across the board.
Everybody has to contribute.
Are you worried that kids are going to die in these crashes?
Like any parent would be worried.
Not just hurting themselves but hurting
members of the public,
who could possibly be my family. Your family.
What's the solution?
Solution?
What do you think the solution is?
I don't know.
I think the solution is us
continuing to do what we're doing because I think we're forgetting
that there's so many amazing services out there.
That are doing great work.
That's the message for me personally as a police officer that we're here to help.
And that's the true essence of a police officer is to actually
care not just about the victims, but
especially a lot of these kids who've been victimized themselves
that we don't really understand until we're in that space.
So a lot of times it's like, FTP but not my youth aid officer. Or not this person, not this cop.
And those are the small changes that we want.
What are some of the things that have really stuck with you
that you've seen at some of these ram raids?
I think sometimes the repeat
offence on one store.
So there's a couple of stores in our area
whose dairies have been ram raided two or three times.
So that just keeps revictimizing that person.
They offence may take out $700 or $1000 worth of product,
but for them to restore this store and put in that prevention,
they're looking in excess of $20,000 often.
We don't know,
It's an unknown world for us at the moment.
Now, what's going to happen this night?
Is another attack going to happen?
Is that our store again going to be a target?
We are kind of struggling to decide
what should be our next steps. Like until how long we can keep going.
And if we have to close that and go away,
obviously it would be really disappointing and disheartening for us.
And pretty much that's the point where we have come.
Even living in this part of the town or having a business in this part of town is so scary.
It is mentally really, really stressing
for us, for parents and for everyone involved
in the business.