What role can Maori guards play in tackling crime in New Zealand?

As tempers flared recently in an entertainment district in Auckland, New Zealand’s largest city, Joanne Paikea sensed an altercation – or even an arrest – was brewing.

“Brother, you know the police are behind us,” she said, describing her efforts to calm rising tension between two groups. “So you’re going to listen, or you’re going to get arrested. It is your choice. What do you want? Go home and get food, or go to jail?’

Ms Paikea is a Maori warden, one of about 1,000 indigenous volunteers in New Zealand who serve the vulnerable, calm the afflicted and occasionally intervene with the violent, independently of – but in partnership with – the police.

The role of the police has recently come under scrutiny in New Zealand, where lurid crime stories have dominated headlines. Shootings, gang tensions and numerous ram raids – where miscreants rush into shops in cars to loot them – have roiled the peaceful country and become a major issue in last month’s elections.

Christopher Luxon, the country’s new prime minister and leader of the center-right National Party, pitched voters on a new era of tougher punishment, including a pledge to send young offenders to boot camps and to change course on efforts to reduce the prison population.

“We will restore law and order,” Mr Luxon said in his victory speech last month.

Experts have questioned the need for such a shift, as well as the more muscular tactics of Mr Luxon’s party, saying the underlying problems would remain unresolved. Many Maori guards, the majority of whom are women over forty, know them firsthand: economic hardship, alienation, addiction.

In recent months, a cost of living crisis has hit New Zealanders hard. Food prices in October up 6.3 percent year on yearalmost twice as high as in the United States.

This has created a black market for some goods. Stolen cigarettes, which cost about 35 New Zealand dollars (more than $20) per pack, can be exchanged for other valuables. “Some people will trade eight packs for a piece of steak,” said Ms Paikea, who heads the Akarana Maori Wardens Association in Auckland.

New Zealand’s murder rate is far below many other rich countries. But that’s true one of the highest incarceration rates in the worldwith a long history of jailing people for relatively minor crimes.

Many countries are grappling with practical and philosophical questions about law enforcement, including the threat of police violence, the harms of incarceration, and the factors that drive offenders. People like the Maori Wardens, who have been active in New Zealand for about a century, can offer compelling alternatives to low-level crime control.

“They sit between formal community policing and social workers, and are virtually essential to the way certain areas in New Zealand operate,” says Fabio Scarpello. a political scientist at the University of Aucklandsaid.

A few nights a week, Ms Paikea and other security guards go on patrol – what they call “roaming” – along Karangahape Road, a major thoroughfare in Auckland, where, early on a recent Sunday morning, beer-fueled revelers spilled onto the sidewalks and homeless people slumped against storefronts .

The guards are helping where they can – but conditions on the ground are changing, Ms Paikea said, and police have asked them to wear stab-resistant vests for the first time in recent months.

“It’s violence, ram raids, stabbings, robberies,” she said, adding: “Our youth play a big role. We can only do so much.”

The Maori guards say they prefer respect and compassion to more forceful coercion, and the National Party has made no suggestion their role will change. But many voters supported the new government’s more punitive approach to crime.

“The offenders seem to have no fear of the police, no fear of getting caught, no fear of the law or any consequences,” said Sunny Kaushal, president of the Dairy and Business Owners Group, which represents small businesses. “Hardworking people, the store owners, have lost their trust in the police and the justice system.”

Strategies introduced by the previous government, including creating a new criminal offense for ram raids and subsidies lacks guns to blind potential offenders would have been insufficient, he said.

Mr Luxon’s government has pledged to address what party leaders described as a “crisis” in the criminal justice system by introducing tougher sentences for offenders, and by introducing tougher penalties for offenders. criminalizing street gang meetings and the wearing of badges by the public.

New Zealand has a particularly high percentage of gang members. Many members are Maori or Pacific Islanders suffering from urban poverty. While experts say not all gangs, nor all divisions of those gangs, are necessarily criminal, they are often seen as linked to profit-oriented crime, especially the sale of drugs such as methamphetamine.

Many voters see government efforts to collaborate or collaborate with gangs as a waste of their tax dollars. But the guards have access that formal law enforcement officers do not have, and Ms. Paikea said they had sometimes acted as formal security at the sometimes awkward funerals of gang members, where their mana – a Maori word meaning personal power or authority – guarantees respect.

“We want people to feel comfortable with us,” says Garnet Wetini Weston-Matehaere, director. “Our magical instrument is our mouth.”

The Wardens’ diverse backgrounds, they say, give them insight. Ms. Paikea, who now works in environmental health, spent years on the margins of society, living in her car and having run-ins with law enforcement. Mr Weston-Matehaere, a retiree, once worked as a police officer and a prison guard. Others survive on disability or unemployment benefits.

The emphasis is on respect, said Mr Weston-Matehaere, who often described himself as a grandfather.

“One of the things I always wanted to do during my working years was help people,” he says. “Every job I had, I did the exact opposite. Being a Maori warden opened my eyes and gave me what I wanted.”

Mark Mitchell, the new police minister, has a very different philosophy aimed at holding offenders accountable for their actions.

“As long as humanity has existed, you will have bad people who want to do bad things,” Mr. Mitchell said, a former mercenary and police officer.

Experts have questioned that approach, as well as data claiming to show higher violent crime overall.

“The figures are manipulated to fit the agenda,” says Ronald Kramer, a criminology lecturer at the University of Auckland. Without addressing the underlying economic problems, he added, policymakers would not be able to tackle the problem.

Part of the new administration’s strategy to tackle offenders includes expanding military-style boot camps for at-risk youth to those as young as 15.

Critics said the camps risked exposing young people to violence and bringing them into contact with other young thrill seekers. “All the research tells us that boot camps don’t work,” said Sara Salman, a criminologist at Victoria University of Wellington. “We do not want to criminalize young people.”

That ethos was at the heart of why people trusted the guards when they might not have trusted the police, Ms. Paikea said.

“They know we’re not there to arrest them,” she said. “We are just here to help them.”