Gangs Talking
Peace, Renouncing Crime, Doing Good –
The Bro’s are Doin’ it for Themselves
By
Kim Workman
Sisters are
doin' it for themselves.
Standin' on their own two feet.
And ringin' on their own bells.
Sisters are doin' it for themselves.
Talking
Peace – the Mongrel Mob and Black Power
The
1985 Aretha Franklin/Annie Lennox feminist anthem came to mind, as I watched the
3rd Degree programme ‘Rival Gangs Talk Peace, Positive Change’ . But in this case it’s not the sisters, it's
the Bro’s. Samantha Hayes interviewed Mongrel
Mob and Black Power leaders, who talked about the possibility of peace, renouncing crime and became a force for good in the
community. TV3 has never shied away from
presenting an alternative perspective, and Amanda Millar’s documentary
‘Notorious’ on the efforts of the Mongrel Mob’s Notorious Chapter to transform
their lives, won her and Alison Horwood the 2006 Premium Media Peace Award. The
Notorious Chapter went on to play a
major role in de-escalating street violence, building pre-school centres, and
with Salvation Army support, running drug treatment programmes for gang members
addicted to methamphetamine.
Public Sector Resistance to Peace
Initiatives
Denis O’Reilly is right in saying that forging
peace has been on the gang agenda for more than 20 years. In the
early 1990’s Mongrel Mob members, led by amongst others, Harry Tam (now a
senior public servant) formed the Mob Advisory Panel (MAP), to assist the
prisons and police to reduce gang-related violence. At that time I was Head of Prisons, and faced
with the problem of increasing gang violence in the prisons. The Mob Advisory Panel were highly effective in identifying the
trouble makers, and worked closely with Black Power and Mob leaders, both
inside and outside the prison, to de-escalate violence. Their presence and influence, however, was not appreciated by some politicians and prison
officers, who worked to undermine the initiative. Prison
officers felt that their authority was being undermined by these external peace
brokers. They informed the media, who
filmed a group of Mongrel Mob members walking into Justice HQ for a meeting. It resulted in political pressure to curtail
the activity, and while we persisted, the
decision to do so was not exactly career
enhancing.
The Gang Initiative to Forge Peace
Over the last decade, the movement by gang
leaders toward a more positive life style, supporting whānau, and making a
positive community contribution, has gathered momentum. At the forefront of this movement has been a
small (but growing) number of key influencers – and not all of them patched
members. Sam Chapman, (2010 New Zealander of the Year) Roy Dunn, Mark Tipene, Edge Te Whaiti, Rex Timu, Harry Tam, Eugene
Ryder, Denis O’Reilly come to mind – but there are many others. The decision to take part in the 3rd
Degree programme, would not have been a ‘whim of the moment’ decision. Negotiations and discussions have clearly
reached a point where the two gangs felt confident about making a public
declaration. They were aware of the risks in doing so, and an opinion
piece from the Taranaki Daily News, ‘Gang Deal Sounds All Too Sweet’ , was typical of those who would like to see something positive
happen, but smelt a rat.
What has driven this search for legitimacy and
acceptance?. In my many conversations with gang members, there is one factor
that is common to all – their mokopuna, (grandchildren). Many of the founding members had their
children at a young age, - the median
age of grandparents in the former Pomare Mongrel Mob community was about
37 years. At the time their children
were born, most of the members were actively engaged in crime, and struggling
with a whole range of issues – drugs and alcohol, mental health, poverty, you
name it. But the arrival of the first grandchild is a defining moment. It was a time when many gangsters looked back on
their own lives, and the lives of their children, and decide that they didn’t
want their mokopuna to have the same experience.
The Otatara Awakening
It was with that in mind, that in January 2011,
Denis O’Reilly and others held a three day hui at the Otatara pa Reserve, near
Taradale to discuss “Fatherhood,
Gangs, Drugs and Choices’.
Known as the The Otatara Awakening’ it was
attended by about 40 Black Power and Mongrel Mob affiliates, and facilitated
by John Wareham, who heads the Eagle Foundation, based in New York, USA. John used a handbook with a variety of
readings, including quotes from Plato,
Shakespeare, Malcolm X, Frederick Nietzche, Malcolm Gladwell, Jean-Paul Sartre,
von Goethe, Claudia Orange, the gospel of Jesus
Christ, and Mahatma Ghandi.
Following each reading, there was a discussion about the content and its
meaning for the gang members, their families and their life styles. One of the observers was the local Police Iwi Liaison Officer, who
was clearly respected by the Hawkes Bay gang community.
I
was invited as a neutral observer, and recorded
snippets of conversation, which gave some
indication of their views. The hui was highly successful, with a number
of those attending, being inspired to persist with making changes in their own
lives, and those of their whanau and community.
That
momentum has continued; this latest video message holds much promise. As Police Commissioner Mike Bush observed, not
all gangsters trust the Police, and not all Police trust the gangs.
“Black
Power put the kibosh on gang rape 15 years ago – but the Police are still at
it”.
Gang
Member at the Otatara Awakening 2011
Nor
do the gangs expect that they will be embraced unconditionally, and absorbed
within mainstream society.
“I’ve just thought of a new Tui ad -
‘I’m gonna hand in my patch and join Rotary – Yeah right!’
Gang
Member at the Otatara Awakening 2011
Nevertheless,
there is a mutual willingness to engage
in talks, to explore and support possibilities for change, in order to reduce
crime and social harm. The Gang
Leadership acknowledge the value of mutual dialogue.
“If we
don’t have a seat at the table, we’re gonna end up on the menu”.
Gang
Member at the Otatara Awakening 2011
The
Police Gang Management Strategy
But
Not for Long.
The Problem
with ‘Tough Talk’
“It
seems to us that the harder we work to gain acceptance, the harder the
government works at keeping us at arm’s length”.
Gang Member at The Otatara
Awakening 2011
The climate
for change quickly dissipated, when shortly after declaring conditional support
for the proposed change, the Minister of Police and Corrections, the Hon Anne
Tolley, in a short video, decided to engage in some public ‘tough talk’ with the gangs. Announcing that ‘actions speak louder than
words’ she made it clear that any support from the Police and the government
was conditional on the Gang’s good behaviour.
She
then went on to describe a Mongrel Mob family who through their criminal
activity, cost the taxpayer $5m a year – and that they were ‘not dissimilar’ to
the gang members who were interviewed by TV3.
This
sort of gut kicking behaviour mitigates against the Police and the Gangs ever having a relationship. I know the people who were interviewed, and I
can assure the Minister that they have absolutely nothing in common with
the Mongrel Mob family to which she referred.
Her comment brought to mind a survey Rethinking carried out in the
former Farmers Crescent Mongrel Mob community, which showed that within the 30
whanau, three gang members had tertiary qualifications, five were fully
employed as helpers within the Taita/Pomare community, and 23 worked as unpaid volunteers in education,
health and community development.
A
group of us have been working for over ten years, learning how to bring up our
kids, building pre-school centres, doing community work. And yet we’re still getting kicked around in
the process. What do we have to do to
belong?”
Gang Member at the Otatara
Awakening 2011
This
sort of public bashing is a major discouragement to those wanting change.
“I
want to climb out of the ditch but I keep asking myself, is it safe out there?”
Gang Member at the Otatara
Awakening 2011
The
message from government then, is that you climb out of the ditch at your
peril.
“Let’s
face it, we live in a jungle and we have to learn to survive in it. Right now, we’re safest up a tree”.
Gang Member at the Otatara
Awakening 2011
Why the
Tough Talk?
How
much faster this strategy could have advanced, if the Minister had
acknowledged those that have worked
unrelentingly for change. Being a
politician she will know how much effort it takes to get a bi-partisan
agreement about anything. But why deliberately slow the process down? Those that I have spoken with, offer the
following optional explanations:
Option
One: Building a False Perception about
Gangs
The
video was opportunity to generate fear, and to continue building a false image
of gangs.
Dr Jarrod Gilbert, an expert on
gangs, identified this as one of the critical
factors, in an interview with Andrea
Vance (Dom Post, Feb 8).
‘‘Politicians for a very long time, largely through cynical
politicking, have created a perception of gangs in the public mind that is
completely out of kilter with reality. To address them more accurately will
seem like anathema to the public. There is going to have to be some sort of
education.”
The
myth making was evident in a shorter interview with Minister Tolley when she
claimed that a third of all prisoners were gang members. There are currently 8,500 people in prison,
which according to her figures, means that there are currently 2,833 gang
members in prison. The Police estimate there are about 3,500 gang members in total
which means that about 6/7th’s of all gang members are currently in
prison. Sorry, that doesn’t
compute. Nor does her claim that gang
members are twice as likely to reoffend and return to prison.
Perhaps her Police and Corrections advisers need to start talking to one
another.
Option Two: Making it More
Difficult to Build Trust
Others see the video as deliberately
hindering the prospect of building trust.
In the interview referred to
above, Dr Gilbert identified a difficulty in gaining trust.
The gangs have
an outlook on life that is completely alien to the middle classes, the
bureaucrats in Wellington and to politicians. Therefore, to try and understand
them from the outside, and reach them, will be incredibly difficult . . . the
gangs are conditioned to not only
mistrust society but to seek to attack it.’
There is within the Public Service, a
significant number who resist the prospect of engaging with gangs. Between 2006 and 2008, Prison Fellowship invited up to 30 Notorious Mongrel Mob members to
attend and contribute at their Annual Conference. As the then National Director, I was
invited for coffee by a senior member of Corrections, who interrogated me as to my ‘strange’ behaviour,
and my relationship with the gangs. The
same official, now in an extremely influential position within Corrections, emailed
senior staff late last year, advising that the Department would not support personal
contact with gang members, even though it was part of the Minister’s Police
Gang Management Strategy.
Option Three: Offering
Conditional Engagement - the ‘Behave =Believe= Belong’ philosophy
A third view, again aimed at hindering progress,
was to set conditions around engagement with gangs that were both unrealistic
and impossible to meet.
According
to Minister Tolley, the Police were willing to meet the gangs half way, provided they stopped bashing their
women, committing burglaries, dealing drugs, being involved in prostitution,
kidnapping, and seeing that their children and grandchildren attended
school. She wanted to see more action and
less words, before the Police would take this proposal seriously.
As
any criminologist or social psychologist worth their salt will tell you,
setting those sorts of conditions before engagement is almost guaranteed to
prevent the relationship from proceeding further. Evangelical churches understand the principle
well. Churches who believe that new
converts must behave in order to believe, and only then to belong, have very little
success recruiting or retaining new converts.
Those that are successful take the reverse approach; people are welcomed
into the new culture regardless of their sin and shortcomings. As they grow in confidence and accept the new
culture, their behaviour changes to reflect that of the majority community.
In
Rethinking’s 2009 submission to the Gangs and Organised Crime Bill , we
describe the ‘Kia Whakakotahi’
project, which engaged gang parents in the life of
Taita College, and reduced Maori student suspensions from 38 in 2007 to 8 in
2008. The school trustees chose not to wait until they stopped offending; or to put conditions around their
full participation in the school as parents.
Increased parental increased involvement in the school saw
reductions in truancy, drug dealing, violence, gang rivalry and graffiti by Maori
students.
Option
Four: This is How Politicians Behave At
Election Time
Another
view is that this is nothing much more than political ‘get tough’ rhetoric as
the election approaches. There is of
course, precedent. The 2005 election was
preceded by Phil Goff proposing to ‘treat the gangs as terrorists’.
Rethinking took up the offer, with a
newsletter article “Treat the Gangs Like Terrorists – Why Not?” In the same year , John Key was promising
Boot Camps, Three Strikes. Both leaders were strong on the “Tough on
Crime” rhetoric. One theory is that this latest outburst is a government
tactic to capture the punitive
vote.
While
all the above may be at least partly true, Rethinking has another view – the
underlying driver in this behaviour is consistent with a strongly held value
system which supports the ‘criminology of the other’
The
Underlying Driver – The ‘Criminology of the Other’
The
‘Criminology of the Other’ is the result of two characteristics;
The Creation
of a Criminal Underclass
By the 1970’s, both in the UK and New Zealand,
the state’s efforts to reintegrate both criminals and other excluded groups
began to dissipate. Over the next 20
years, the state began to separate out those who did not adhere to traditional
family values, who did not respect the law, and had an aversion to work. The idea of an underclass strengthened,
described by Tony Blair as ‘people cut
off, set apart, from the mainstream of society whose lives are often
characterised by long term unemployment, poverty or lack of educational
opportunity, and at times family instability, drugs abuse and crime’. (1) This description fitted the emerging Māori
gangs well. The UK and New Zealand took
the position that while the State had a role to play in tackling the problems
of the underclass, responsibility ultimately lay with the poor themselves; an
approach reflected in the Minister’s current offer to work with the gangs if
they stop offending.
“It
serves current political interest to regard us as an undeserving underclass –
and treat us accordingly”
Gang Member at the Otatara Awakening
The problem with identifying crime with a
deviant minority is that it then becomes easier to adopt an extremely punitive
attitude not only toward those members that commit crime, but those who
don’t. As Nils Christie explains, we
tend to demonise those whom we know little about.(2) In 2001 David Garland
predicted the development of a ‘criminology of the other‘ whereby whole
groups of people are identified as ‘wicked’ and separate from the mainstream,
thus justifying increased exclusion and punishment.(3) Exclusion reinforces
exclusion when we no longer make any effort to understand difference but rather
to eliminate the risk it represents. The
current criminal justice obsession with the risk management of offenders, and
the government’s increased capacity to control and exclude the poorest and most vulnerable members of
society, feeds into what economists call a ‘vicious cycle’. This is to the detriment of policies which
seek to reintegrate offenders into mainstream society. This process then results in a society which
can justify legislation like the Prohibition of Gang Insignia on Government Premises Act 2013, legislation which breaches the Bill of Rights.
It’s
a basic human right not to be judged by the nature of our association”
Gang
Member at the Otatara Awakening 2011.
Exclusion of the Wicked
This process also legitimates advice by the
former Minister of Police, to Maori Police Officers that they should not speak to gang members. Suggestions of this kind serve to aggravate the situation. As Bauman points out, spatial separation of
the offender from the rest of society leads to a rupture of communication
between the two parties, encouraging more punitive feelings. (4) I spoke at the same Conference and unknowingly, gave opposite advice.
In its most extreme form, the assertion of
absolute moral standards, and affirmation of tradition, leads to the assumption
that gang members are ‘simply wicked’, and in this respect intrinsically
different from the rest of us. They are
dangerous others who threaten our safety and have no call on our feelings. The common response, according to Garland, is
one of social defence; i.e. we should defend ourselves against these dangerous
enemies rather than concern ourselves with their welfare and prospects for
rehabilitation. There can therefore be
no bridge of understanding, no real communication between ‘us and them’.
The idea of the born criminal was
revived in a 2009 speech by the former Minister of Corrections’ speech in 2009,
to a launch of the Prisoner Skills and Employment Strategy, Auckland Region
Women's Corrections Facility, Manukau City, 7 October 2009
Some of these prisoners are simply born bad, and nothing
anyone can do will
prevent them forging a career in crime and spending much of
their lives
behind bars.
The Gangs – Challenging the Status Quo
The difficulty with the current gang
initiative is that it challenges a deeply held set of cultural values. Rather than rely on government intervention, the
gangs want to take responsibility for
forging peace, for reducing crime, and supporting their whānau and
community. But they want to do it
themselves, with support from the wider community.
We don’t want a hand-out, we don’t want a hand-up, we
just want a hand”
Gang member at the Otatara Awakening 2011
This presents a difficulty for the public sector. First, it challenges the gang stereotype that
has been carefully manufactured by the Police and politicians over the last
forty years. Second, it is a threat to
those public servants and criminal justice professionals who would prefer not
to communicate meaningfully with gang members.
Third, it weakens the authority and status of those professionals who
would prefer to be controlling and managing outcomes for results, rather than
having to concede that the Bros are capable of ‘‘doin’ it for themselves’, and
are very likely to be more effective.
Who Should Broker the Peace?
The Taranaki Daily News opinion piece, reported that the Police had offered to
broker a peace pact between the gangs. I’m
not convinced that claim is accurate, but I am
reminded of the outcome at the Otatara Awakening. Black Power and Mongrel Mob members signed an
agreement, known as the Otatara Accord .
This agreement read:
The Otatara Accord, an agreement reached yesterday at
the end of a weekend retreat based on the historic Otatara Pa reserve, near
Taradale. The accord reads:
"Having met in wananga, at Otatara, the leaders of the Mongrel Mob
and Black Power who are resident in Hawke's Bay, collectively declare the
following intentions:
·
To improve our parenting skills.
·
To support whanau ora.
·
To strive for understanding of
each other's issues as a step towards peace on the streets and in the
jails."
Let’s just support the Bro’s, and leave the bro’kering where it belongs.
References
Tony Blair - Speech made at the Aylesbury Estate, 2 June 1999
Christie, Nils, (1977) ‘Conflicts as Property’, the British Journal
of Criminology, 17 (1), p. 8
Garland, David, The Culture of Control: Crime and Social Order in
Contemporary Society :Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. pp 184-5
Bauman, Z., (2000) ‘Social Issues of Law and Order’, British Journal
of Criminology 40(2), p. 208
.png)
