It's the heart of Ngapuhi. So what's gonna be done? You want
to see bike seiges? Oh at least.
You know the first out in the open sort of attack that I've ever witnessed.
It was really shocking, hey, to see a gang bash happen on our streets in Kaikohe. You
know the first out in the open sort of attack that I've ever witnessed.
So it was really shocking for our community, the great thing following it though is that there
are some initiatives that are underway to make sure that stuff like that doesn't happen again.
What sort of initiatives?
So we've had a few we had a hui of community leaders last week, we've got another hui tonight
with the public. I know that the gangs themselves
had a word with each other about making sure that our town is safe, which is really cool.
We also looking at initiatives through our business association like
you know bettering our CCTV camera network, our business association sponsors are security
cars to go up and down town at night time just to do spot checks. So there are things that we are
doing underway, that I think will have a really positive impact on our community here in Kaikohe,
because this is a really beautiful community, I really love living here,
I really love the people who make up this town are real people, you know, so here's hoping,
here's knowing actually that this will make a huge difference for our town.
There was a real sense of fear in this town following, you know,
what escalated there, but I think that it has started to settle, the town is feeling a
falling back into place just from the sense of it. I live right here in the town centre so
you know pretty good sense of how people are feeling, and I think there is that little
bit of tension but there is also, we're really resilient up here in the midnorth.
Kaikohe is turning, in my view, into something like a narco-village. The level of menace,
the level of mayhem and the total absence of responsibility from both the gang leaders
and the members. I would say though, however, to the broader Māori community, there is an element
amongst our community who regard the gangs as some sort of heroes. These are not heroes,
it's not tolerable in my view, and I absolutely resent seeing the degradation of the main drag.
While I tried hard as a politician who is the regional champion and spent quite a lot of dough
in and around the mid north on sports and infrastructure and initiatives associated
with training. But there's an element of nialism amongst the younger gang members.
It's impossible to relate to them on the basis of tikanga Māori and Māori culture, I think it's
incredibly sad because many of them they come from families broadly speaking who are trying to
pave their way, trying to paddle the waka in the world of light in an honest way.
My own view is these young ones, who are possessed by a spirit of living the life of bling
and showing absolutely no respect or no recognition of the consequences of their actions,
they only understand one thing, and that's what we call .. the force of the strong hand.
So what's going on? Do you want to see bike seiges?
Oh at least, there are consequences if you choose to spend your life harrassing,
menacing and degrading your community. Quite frankly we don't want you.
What we are hoping is a logn term commitment to doing something with the current issues that are
lying in town and have been sort of growing over the years. If I go back to an event that happened
more than a couple of years ago where the youth actually attacked a Mobil garage there.
We got funding to run a youth programme for two years after two years, nothing. So that's
a response to the situation so what happened to those 15 year olds once they were 17?
That ongoing support there. So looking for that so that's looking at the fact that at the moment
the police service is very very limited in this area, the numbers of police in Northland is
limited and they are struggling to cover the whole of Northland. Councillor recently gave some stats,
the average age of the community here is 28, compared to Kerikeri which is around 48.
If you take half of that average of 28 are under 15, so even if we're looking at prorammes,
the programmes that are for the slightly older age group, and we find that with the
presence in the community of these, I'll say gangs, but we take ownership, we've got kids
telling stories 8 and 10 year olds about you know uncles involved in that
and they get such and such. Or there's this glorifying of what you can get if you become
a member even a junior one. So there's that that's adding to the whole community.
Could the older gang members take out some of the younger guys
just until it died down? Is that basically what happened?
Moved them to a safe location, rather, I'm choosing my words carefully to be
positive. They were taking them, they moved to a safe location where they could address some of
the behaviours that they were seeing. First few days afterwards the streets were pretty empty,
okay. So people are not only in fear of the Covid issue, but they're also in fear, you'll find them
starting to change now, but the cars driving down the street they're driving
slower and it's almost they're driving cautiously looking.
So there's, to me, it's a fear of the unknown. A fear of well who do we trust?