Crime

More Herald-style journalism. You really couldn’t make this up.

A Wairarapa mother is angry her son was given only instant noodles to eat while in custody at Masterton Police Station for more than 40 hours.

Callum Mahupuku, 20, was taken into police custody at 8pm on Saturday when he allegedly breached his bail conditions by drinking beer.

He said the only food he was offered between his arrest on Saturday and being released on Monday afternoon was instant noodles, often without any flavouring, and one time soaked in cold water.

“It was gross, I didn’t even eat it. I didn’t eat at all on Saturday,” he said.

His only other sustenance until his release at 2.30pm yesterday was several cups of Milo.

“It’s stupid,” he said.

So this mother is upset her little boy was fed noodles in jail. Shouldn’t she be ashamed he is a dick and breached bail conditions?

And why did this one-sided journalist not bother to vox pop the people of Masterton, who will be delighted this little shit was take off the streets on Saturday night.

Red Radio allowed this scumbag and his mother the oxygen of publicity this morning. Shame on them too.

ᔥ the tipline

A very good source has revealed that Mike Williams had a meeting with Kim Dotcom while he was incarcerated in Mt Eden.

I understand that the meeting was to solicit a donation to The Howard League for Penal Reform in order to pay for the salary, secretary, car and expenses for Mike Williams to carry out his work for The Howard League for Penal Reform.

That makes the revelations being spruiked very hard by Labour very interesting because the Mike Williams who visited Kim Dotcom in jail is the same Mike Williams who was also the Labour party president, and the same Mike Williams who had 5 board appointments under Labour….and the same Mike Williams who flew to Melbourne to dig up a scandal against John Key and the very same Mike Williams who has been commenting in the media about all of this fuss and bother.

This is of course the same Mike Williams who asked Owen Glenn for a job, and the same Mike Williams who approved the Owen Glenn donation to Winston Peters.

What other things were discussed by Mike Williams and Kim Dotcom during this visit in prison….of course the visitors records will clearly clearly show the visit, prison tend to keep records like that….along with video footage.

ᔥ Stuff.co.nz

The only time that being a fatty pays off:

A violent weekend confrontation between two groups of men led to one man being stabbed and the discovery of more than $20,000 worth of cocaine.

But police say the stabbed man was not badly hurt because his fat stomach stopped the weapon penetrating any organs and doing serious damage.

A police spokeswoman said the incident began when three men drinking at a Mangere house at 11am on Sunday went to an Otahuhu house to confront its occupants who had accused them of stealing.

When one of the three was attacked by several of the occupants, his two friends left to collect weapons including a machete, golf club and spade to help their friend.

However, on their way back to the house they were stopped by police who discovered the weapons. Both were arrested and charged with possession of offensive weapons.

Police then went to the Otahuhu house, where they found the man had been stabbed in the side of this stomach.

Officers searched the house and found 47 grams of cocaine worth $21,150 as well as smaller quantities of methamphetamine and cannabis.

Sounds like a typical lazy Sunday evening in Mangere

ᔥ Stuff.co.nz

The dysfunctional parents of the 11 year old feral who went on a crime spee tell us the poor waif is “innocent”. CYF involvement, violence in the home, blaming everyone else…yeah I’d say he is about as innocent as they come:

The parents of the 11-year-old boy arrested for burgling houses in Napier say he is a good kid who just wants to live with them.

The couple, who live in a Housing New Zealand house in the suburb of Maraenui, say the boy and four siblings were taken by Child Youth and Family in May 2010.

They say this occurred due to domestic violence between the couple “but never to the kids”. It was the second time their children had been taken by CYF.

The father is doing seasonal work in orchards and the mother is unemployed. They do not have a phone, going to a local store when they want to make calls.

The children had been living with their grandmother since they were taken in 2010, but the 11-year-old had not been happy and had been running away since April last year, they said.

The other children moved to Gisborne with their grandmother in November, but the boy was allowed to stay with them, the father said.

They show the boy’s report card from his final term at a local primary school, which includes a photo of him smiling and his grades of “very good” for reading, writing and mathematics and an “excellence” for attendance.

“He was doing OK with us. The trouble started during the holidays when we let him stay with his uncle down the road. Those other older kids started taking him out knocking on doors then. They used him,” he said.

“He was coerced into all this trouble by the older kids. He’d never done nothing like this before. He’s an innocent child.”

They said CYF took the boy back at his first day at a local intermediate school in the second week of the first school term.

ᔥ Sydney Morning Herald

Yesterday I had a guest post from David Garrett that provoked agreat deal of comment. Later on I read an article in the Sydney Morning Herald that suggests that we have much to learn from the New York experience:

New York has achieved twice the national rate of the decline in crime in the past 30 years while reducing the incarceration rate.

The tide turned when a Democratic mayor, David Dinkins, an African-American liberal in denial about black crime, was replaced by the city’s leading prosecutor, Rudy Giuliani. New Yorkers, who vote overwhelmingly Democrat, were so weary of crime they turned to a Republican.

Under Giuliani, the police began swamping areas where street crime was brazen. They conducted stop-and-frisk operations. They collected fingerprints. This raised the ire of civil libertarians and civil rights warriors but it had a dramatic impact.

Police identified what they called hot spots and although most of those frisked were black and Hispanic, the black and Hispanic communities benefited most from the new policies because they were disproportionately the victims of street crime. Giuliani was re-elected. After two terms he was replaced by another Republican, Michael Bloomberg, who later fell out with the party, but Republicans have been running New York for the better part of 18 years.

Professor Zimring concludes that the police, by inhibiting street crime, inhibited crime generally. They took away a milieu. This had the greatest impact on the greatest source of crimes – criminals coming out of prison – who found their old comfort zones were gone. This led to a reduction of crime, not because prisoners came out ”reformed” but because a reduction in criminal activity on the streets had changed the social environment. It created a virtuous cycle.

Recidivism declined. The incarceration rate declined. The police also took a more pragmatic approach to victimless crime, especially marijuana possession. This led to a further reduction in the prison population.

The first little runt to have his car ordered to be crushed thought he would be clever. But he wasn’t clever enough.

“The first car in New Zealand destined to be crushed under tough new boy racer legislation has been seized again by authorities, after police say it was the subject of a last minute switch.

Police confirmed yesterday they had recovered the 1982 Toyota DX belonging to Karn Clarrie Forrest, of Milton, which was the subject of a court order last year.”

What an idiot. Because now he’s made things worse for himself:

Another Guest Post from David Garrett:

Correlation causation and  crime – the effect of active policing and sentence enhancement

When I was in parliament I sometimes  had  coffee with Rick Barker, a fellow member of the Law and Order Select Committee and a damn good bloke. Rick told a  great story illustrating how correlation and causation can be confused – even by those who should know better.

During WW II, no bananas were imported into Britain, they presumably being deemed not to be an essential food, or just not readily available. After the war, banana imports resumed – and it was noted that within nine months or a year,  the birth rate had sharply increased. For a time, banana sales went through the roof, as its “aphrodisiac” qualities became widely known. It was apparently some years – and after a couple of studies found no basis for bananas enhancing fertility – before it was realized that banana imports and rising birth rates were just a coincidence. The birth rate had risen  not because of bananas, but because at the same time  more and more young men were “de-mobbed” and came home to their wives and girlfriends.

When crime plummeted in New York State following the introduction of “broken windows” policing, those on right said smugly that the reduction in crime followed logically from more intensive policing. Those on the left said falling crime rates were just like those banana imports – changes in policing policy had nothing to do with it.

While  it  is now pretty much over in the US, for ten or fifteen years the debate raged, with lefties “feverishly searching for the ‘real’ reason crime rates plummeted”, to quote the late Dennis Dutton. Any  reason would do -  because surely it couldn’t be simple old style policing. Could it?

All sorts of “reasons” were suggested to explain away the precipitate drop in crime, from “demographic bubbles” passing through the population, to the crack epidemic which had been plaguing New York and other states waning . And of course  the now famous “more readily available abortions” theory suggested by economist Steven Levitt. This theory of cause and effect is in Levitt’s ‘Freakonomics’ and  his paper “Understanding why crime fell in the 1990’s: four factors that explain the decline and six that do not.”  in ‘Journal of Economic Perspectives’ Vo. 18, 1: pp. 163-190

Leftist commentators always focus on the “more readily available abortions”  factor Levitt identifies without ever mentioning two things: that the abortion  ‘factor’  is number four on his list of four; and the two factors  to  which Levitt  ascribes most of the reduction are more police per capita, and much greater use of punitive sentencing policies.  While almost every one knows New York is the home of “zero tolerance policing” a.k.a. “broken windows”, it is less well known that New York state also  has “sentence enhancement” laws, of which three strikes is one variant.

While lefties often derisively refer to the US experience, I suggest we can learn a lot from that country – both what works and what doesn’t.  Those who have traveled widely in the US quickly realize that to a considerable extent it is a land of fifty different  nations. The Boston Brahmins have about as much in common with the good old boys of Louisiana and Tennessee as New Zealand’s effete artistic elite have with banana growers in Far North Queensland.

So what does the US experience tell us about how best to reduce crime?  The most obvious lesson is that a combination  of more police on the streets and  sentence enhancement of one sort or another makes the biggest impact.  This is the major lesson from the New York experience;  it is that state which has seen -by a considerable margin –  the greatest reduction in crime of all types since the 1990’s.

Secondly,  sentence enhancement works. Levitt himself, the darling of the left – at least on this  issue –  says so himself. Twenty six states have introduced  “three strikes” laws which vary widely in their ambit and effect. Some states  – such as California – use their  laws far more than others do. With a couple of exceptions, there appears to be a close correlation between the usage of three strikes laws and the level of crime reduction: those states that apply their laws more have seen much greater reductions in crime of all types than those states which do not.

For the left, this is of course an “inconvenient truth” to borrow from Al Gore, but it is a truth nevertheless. It has often been said – including  by commenters here on Whaleoil – that the drop in crime across the US, and in other countries in the western world is “unexplained”.  What they really mean is if you discount the obvious, then no-one can agree on any other explanation.

Those with both common sense and a degree or two find the lessons from the US clear: put more police on the streets and lock serious felons up for longer, and crime will drop. In the last two years we  have introduced a three strikes law, and put more police on the streets of South Auckland which has the highest levels of crime in the country. And as a result,  those crime rates are falling, along with prisoner numbers. God help us if the socialists get their hands on the levers of power in 2014.

David Garrett has sent in a guest post to rebut Brian Rudman. Apparently the NZ Herald prefers running opinion pieces from Labour hacks like Bryan Gould – Britain’s answer to Bill Rowling. They refused to look at a rebuttal of Rudman’s crim hugging whine.

In a recent Herald article Brian Rudman writes – utterly predictably – that imprisonment does nothing to reduce crime, and we should not follow what he calls  the “…bray of the ‘lock ’em up’ lobby.” About the only surprise in his piece is the admission that New Zealand doesn’t after all have “the second highest imprisonment rate in the world” as is  claimed ad nauseum, by those on the left  but  is in fact fifth in the OECD.

Leaving aside that the imprisonment rate in a population is meaningless unless one also considers the offending  rate in that same population, Rudman’s conclusion is simply not supported by the evidence from overseas jurisdictions, particularly the United States. Nor is it consistent with an emerging trend here.

It is well known that  crime rates have plummeted in New York State since the introduction of  so called “broken windows” policing in the early 1990’s. Homicides in New York City fell from a high of 1,946 in 1993, to 673 by the turn of century – a  decline of  more than 60%. What is less well known is that as well as “broken windows” policing, New York also introduced “sentence enhancement” laws,  of which New Zealand’s “three strikes” law is a variant.

In California – the home of “three strikes” – the decline in  crime has been second only to New York’s, with violent crime reducing by 43% during the decade after the introduction of “three strikes” in 1994. Although the rate of decline has since leveled off, crime rates in California  remain about half what they were at their peak in 1991.

On the left, there has always been the greatest reluctance to ascribe any reduction in crime rates to more punitive policies. As the late Dennis Dutton once observed, the precipitate decline in homicide and crime generally  in New York prompted a feverish search by left wing academics across the country to find the “real” explanation – any explanation would do – because it couldn’t possibly be the result of more intense policing and longer prison sentences. Could it?

On this subject as on  others, left wing commentators such as Rudman have no hesitation in massaging data, or selectively quoting from scholarly works. The best example is the theory promulgated by economist Steven Levitt –  in ‘Freakonomics’ and elsewhere  – that more readily available abortions from the mid 1970’s onwards led to a drop in crime twenty years later  According to Levitt’s theory, children of the poor –  who are supposedly  more crime prone -were aborted instead of growing up to be the next generation of criminals.

Aside from the huge holes in that thesis itself, what those who quote Levitt  never  say is he identifies six factors which in his view explain the drop in US crime over the last 25 years. The sixth and  least effective, says Levitt, is more readily available abortions. The top two, in order of effectiveness,  are more comprehensive ‘community’ type policing, and more punitive sentencing laws.

When New Zealand’s “three strikes”  was passing through parliament, the Howard League for penal reform toured a Californian prison chaplain through New Zealand to talk up the iniquities of the Californian law – notwithstanding that New Zealand’s version is utterly different, and under it the famous “locked up for life for stealing a   chocolate bar ” simply cannot happen.

Columnists such as Mr Rudman breathlessly reported the view of Mr Kim Workman, once head of prisons  before he lost his job following a disastrous rehabilitation program he designed  called He Ara Hou was abandoned in the mid 1990’s following its spectacular failure. Mr Workman confidently predicted that if “three strikes” was enacted, the prison population would triple in two years, assaults on prison officers and policemen would increase sharply, and if there was any effect on offending at all, it would likely increase.

Almost two years later the  reality  has been very different. Prior to Christmas, Justice Minister Collins announced that the prison muster per head of population  had fallen for the  first time since the 1930’s. Recently it was announced that a new prison at Wiri would be built after all, after serious consideration was given to abandoning it because of falling prisoner numbers.

For those willing to examine the evidence honestly, and without ideological bias, the reasons for this change are clear. In 2010, the police quietly adopted a New Zealand style version of “broken windows” in Manukau, the country’s most crime ridden district. Offenders coming before the courts for serious violent “strike” offences – more than 900 thus far – are now warned that if they continue to so offend they will spend much longer in jail than earlier in their criminal career.

What is happening in New Zealand mirrors what happened in New York twenty years ago, whether Rudman  acknowledges it or not. A combination of more effective policing and more punitive sentencing has led to a decline in crime. If we do not lose our nerve, that decline will continue. The worst thing we could possibly do would be to repeal “three strikes” – as Labour has pledged to do.

They sure know how to punish people in Botswana. Check out this story - five strokes on the back for stealing a tin of corned beef!

And the Judge said he was handing down a light sentence because the offender had just buried his child!

A man accused of stealing a tin of corned beef from a store was sentenced to five strokes on the back by Urban Customary Court in Gaborone yesterday Sechoni Sibanda admitted stealing a can of corned beef at Payless Supermarket at the Main Mall in Gaborone on February 8, 2012.

The watchman, Kemmonye Baliki, confronted the accused, who denied taking the beef and resisted being searched.Baliki said he called the police after unsuccessfully struggling with the defendant. The tin of corned beef was brought before the Kgotla as an exhibit.

Kgosi Monametsi gave the defendant a light sentence because he was a first offender and in view of his plea in mitigation that he had just buried a child who had died and that he had a nursing wife and mother to look after.

The Sensible Sentencing Trust is wanting a review of bail laws and are proposing some law changes:

Christie Marceau may have died a tragic and preventable death but her memory will live on, in fact her death has become the catalyst for change.

The Sensible Sentencing Trust working alongside the Marceau family and supporters will launch a campaign aptly titled ‘Christies’ Law’ which will be aiming to have bail laws reviewed and an annual appraisal of Judges themselves.

Trust Spokesman Garth McVicar said the Marceau family had approached him soon after Christie was murdered wanting to ensure Christies’ life was not in vain and the system failures that led to the tragedy were challenged and changed.

“The murder of Christie by an offender on bail was not a one-of, we have dealt with many families who have experienced similar tragedies but Christie’s death appears to be the tipping point – the catalyst for change.”

Mr. McVicar said momentum for Christies’ Law was building with confirmation that a bus load of supporters from Tauranga will be attending.

The launch of Christies Law will take place at:

Location: Auckland High Court in Waterloo Quadrant
Date: 27th February [This coming Monday]
Time: 12 noon [the public are invited to gather from 11-30am]