Dirty Politics. When you are asked to believe a politician, a left wing muckraker, and a nasty right wing blogger who the hell do you go with?

It’s a trick question: you don’t believe any of them. You simply look at the allegations and find which ones stack up and which ones don’t.

Let’s say the most credible person here is John Key. I suspect most would and I’m prepared to run with that, but even in this camp one can’t deny that there have been issues raised that should be tackled head-on. On Radio New Zealand this morning I couldn’t believe how disingenuously John Key tried to address them.

Indeed, he failed to meaningfully answer a single question in the probing interview by Guyon Espiner. Listen to it for yourself – if you have no time at least go to 6.15 and the discussion about the Justice Minister. If nothing else it is gold standard journalism.

Key sounded, dare I say it, like Richard Nixon - full of bluster but with uncomfortable secrets. Somebody please tell me, what the hell does Judith Collins have to do to be put out of her misery? He reminded me of a child trying to hide by simply covering up his eyes with his hands.

Even when given the opportunity to condemn Cameron Slater for some of his ugliest comments about a dead man and Christchurch’s earthquake ‘scum’, the prime minister refused to do that.

Where have Key's blindingly good political instincts gone?

People want answers, mate. Even just a few. Yip, some of the accusations may be wild nonsense but some are demonstrably not.

Right now we need something more from our prime minister than the chanting of one-liners designed to distract. Such lines work during a one or two-day scandal where you don’t have to repeat them over and over again until they sound like what they are: obvious spin. This morning I heard echoes from the grave: “I was not lying. I said things that later on seemed untrue.“

What effect this will have on the election remains unclear, the Labour opposition is too weak to take full advantage, but what is clear is that the Teflon gloss of John Key is damaged in the eyes of all but National’s true believers.

Wanker of the week

Winner: Cameron Slater

There are few more pathetic wankers than Slater. His nastiness is as ugly as his approach is anti-intellectual. Using my best Irish accent I might say whale oil beef hooked he has the manner and manners of a buffoon. Calling a lad killed in a car crash on the coast ‘feral’ and smirking at his death was one low point, and his comments that the people in lower socioeconomic areas devastated by the Christchurch earthquakes were poor ‘scum’ gives equal measure to the disdain we should hold him in. Real disdain. Regardless of the rights-and-wrongs or the accusations levelled against the National government and its links to Whale Oil, the fact that Key and Collins in particular are comfortable having a relationship with this morally bankrupt miscreant does them absolutely no credit.

Honourable mentions: Anybody associated with Slater and particularly those bemoaning the fact that swathes of people don’t vote. It’s exactly this type of nonsense that makes politics a turn-off.

Saint of the last seven days

Winner: Terrance Wallace

Wallace has established the In Zone Education Foundation, which runs a hostel for poor Maori and Pacifica kids. It’s situated in Auckland Grammar school zone so the lads can get a top class education in a supportive environment. John Campbell’s peeps did a great story on it. This saintly bugger is changing the world in very real ways. What a contrast with our grubby politicians.

Honourable mentions: The All Blacks may have had to settle for a draw but their record since the World Cup speaks to the greatness of the team; and Brian Mason aka the Hoff aka Beans, rest in peace, mate.

At 64 Brian Mason had a crazy idea. He joined the Fire Service to become a volunteer firefighter. At 67 he died.

At Station 28 in Sumner, we often get older folks coming for help. They ask us to put up smoke alarms. They never ask to join. I was scornful. I said to Brian, ‘You do realise we don’t have a pension plan?’ He laughed. He did realise we didn’t have a pension plan. He just wanted to help.

He got a plain yellow helmet. He’d have to do course work and train at the brigade for at least six months before undertaking an eight-day course to get qualified and become one of us. I gave him no chance.

Brian turned up to everything – every training and every call, riding the truck if there was a full crew and extra room – to watch and to learn. He had dyslexia. I yelled at him once because he struggled to take a Fire Comms call when the siren went off. Afterwards I showed him how to do it. He thanked me.

He never said a bad word about anybody. Always kind. Softly spoken. Tall and smiling. Big but somehow lanky and a little slouched, maybe that was age or God just got his dimensions a little wrong. If one of us needed a hand, Brian would help out. He always turned up to his duty days and every brigade function. Everybody liked Brian. He became one of us.

I named him Hoff, because he looked like David Hasslehoff, but the moniker never really stuck. Mostly people called him Beans. Some time in the mid 90s he was diagnosed with cancer and he was told to eat fresh fruit and vegetables. Somehow that turned into baked beans and white bread. That was all he ate for 20 years. He beat the cancer.

If you didn’t know him, I won’t convince you here that he lived solely on baked beans and white bread. Three tins a day and just shy of one loaf of bread but it’s true. One day he admitted to eating the odd piece of fruitcake at Christmas. The fraud. I alerted the media to this remarkable existence. Such wonderful madness should be shared. He got sick again when they were going to do a story. But now I’m ahead of myself.

Brian failed the qualifying course to become a firefighter. He waited over a year to get his confidence up. He trained hard and gave it everything but in the end the physical component was too much. We made him an Operational Support member. He had a beaming smile. He was officially one of us.

Some days he’d turn up to duty with his grandkids. One was his spitting image. He looked at them with pride. And they looked right back.

Riddled with something he never told us about, we knew he was crook. We heard dark whispers from his family. He was in and out of hospital. He lost a lot of weight. You all right, Hoff? I’d ask. Yip, really good thanks, he would reply. Getting better, he said.

We should have known there was something really wrong when he started eating things other than beans and white bread. He was trying to put the weight back on but he never did. At 10.15am tomorrow our siren will scream but we will not rush. We will be silent and bowed. 

On Sunday Brian died. He was one of us.

In politics, as in religion, the true believers will never be convinced they are wrong. But I could not let David Farrar away with the incredible assertions in his last blog post defending the incorrect use of gang figures.

Farrar says, “Dr Gilbert now concedes gangs are responsible for the proportions cited”

I did not. Anybody can read my post for themselves and see that. The only thing I'm conceding is that I shouldn't have called the dishonest Farrar a reasonable bloke - quite clearly he is not. He's ignorant.

Farrar repeats his claim that  “The figures seem credible”

Again I say that Colin Craig thinks the idea that we didn’t land on the moon is credible, but that doesn’t mean it's right. What we want is truth.

Farrar says, “Dr Gilbert… is now trying to argue that there is a difference between gang associates and gang members”.

I’m not trying to argue that at all, I am stating it as a fact. Just as every gang researcher in the world does, and just as the New Zealand Police and the Department of Corrections do. Apparently Farrar knows better.

Farrar says, “Is Dr Gilbert saying the Corrections Department is lying when it says 28% of the prison population are gang members?”

No, I’m not saying Corrections are lying. They are not lying. The Minister has just used the Department’s figures incorrectly, and so has Farrar. As I have previously explained: the Corrections figures include gang associates (via affiliations) and that inflates the ‘gang’ figure by many times. You can see for yourself here. This makes sense, of course. You don’t want to put the brother of a Mongrel Mob member in with a group of Black Power. It doesn’t mean that the brother’s offending has anything whatsoever to do with the gang. It’s about prisoner safety. In this way he becomes a 'gang' number but he’s not part of the gang problem. 

Farrar says, “They [the police] say there are 4,000 gang members. I don’t know if this includes associates in that. I presume Police and Corrections are using the same definition”.

Wrong plain and simple. The police figure is gang members and the Corrections figure is gang members and everybody who knows one. To complicate it further, though, the police will use ‘gangs and associates’ in some crime data. That’s not ideal, in my view, but so long as it is clear and consistent, then that’s okay.

And this is where the problem is. If you use different definitions you get different results. The problem can either look very big or very small. In other words you can be deceptive, which is exactly what I pointed out. This is not a semantic argument; it fundamentally changes things.

If Farrar doesn’t think this is a problem, then I’m sure we wouldn’t hear a peep out of him if the Green Party said dairy farming was responsible for 33% of waterways pollution, but then used sheep, pig and all agricultural famers in the data to prove it. 

Such incorrect data will obviously lead to poor policy because we are not viewing the problem accurately or clearly. New Zealand history is littered with terrible and ineffective gang legislation for this reason.

I don’t have an agenda. It is quite clear that Farrar does and here we see clearly the problem of politics. Both sides won’t concede that they just desperately want to win, and the victim in all of this is the truth. 

In coming days I will publish an extract from PATCHED that discusses this in detail. Farrar won’t read it of course, but I hope anybody curious about understanding things a little more might.

Wanker of the week

Winner: The Internet/Mana Party

For thinking that advertising young people chanting ‘Fuck John Key’ was going to go down well and not make Dotcom look like rabid, megalomaniacal fool. The inevitable comparisons to Hitler, though, are ridiculously wide of the mark. Hitler was more charismatic.

Honourable mentions: Conservative Party candidates Colin Craig, Christine Rankin & Garth McVicar – if we could get their supporters to wear gang-like back patches, we'd know who to throw stones at; Indian photographer Raj Shetye who didn't think a fashion photo of a woman being assaulted was utterly disgusting; and Federated Famers spokespeople, I’m yet to hear one who doesn't sound like a wanker with regard to the pollution of our rivers.

Saint of the last seven days

Winner: The young people chanting ‘Fuck John Key’.

Having been on a few student protest marches engaging in a bit of salty language myself I’m unable to cast the first stone here, and maybe they just learned ugly behaviour from politicians debating in the House. Moreover, given 42 percent of 18-24 year olds didn’t vote at the last election, young people becoming politically engaged is great. And, again, the comparisons to Nazi rallies is patently silly and potentially offensive. I say good on them, their puerile manner will dim with age, but their political engagement may not.

Honourable mentions: Chris Finlayson, the Minister of Treaty Settlements, who always speaks sense and this week quietly sorted a settlement regarding the Whanganui River; the Canterbury Crusaders for coming oh so close; and Beck Eleven who woke up last Saturday to find that I’d moved in with her and didn’t call the cops. Saintly indeed.

Right wing blogger and reasonable bloke David Farrar has confidently challenged my assertion that the gang statistics used to launch the government’s new gang policies were wrong. I claimed the data were bollocks. I said I would eat a suitcase full of carrots if that was incorrect. I stand by it.

It’s not the first time David has run his ruler over my ideas around crime and justice, but it’s the first time we’ve disagreed to such a degree.

Great stuff. Let’s start in prison.

On Monday the Minister said that there are 4,000 gang members in total and that gangs make up 28 percent of the prison population. That means more than one in four people in prison are gang members.  Furthermore, it means that only 1,620 gang members are on the street (given a prison population of around 8,500). So more than half of all gang members are in prison.

Over to you, David, if you can find any credible source who says that is correct then I will cede the entire argument and say you and the Minister can increase my ability to see in the dark.

I spend a lot of time working in prisons and I spend a lot of time with gangs. The prisons are not so full of gang members and not a single gang I know has anywhere remotely close to half of its members inside.  That statistic is bollocks. Let me repeat, the number is wrong – and wildly so.

I could just end it there, but let’s go on.

What the 28 percent prison number represents is gang members as well as gang associates in prison. This makes a massive difference. A few years back The Police Association said gangs and associates numbered 60,000. Associates are difficult. Am I an associate? Is a guy with a brother in the gang an associate? Associates are an arbitrary measure that can capture people not connected to a gang in any meaningful way. Therefore, if you are talking about gangs as ‘membership’ numbers or gangs as ‘members and associates’, then you are talking about very different things. That’s a 4,000 to 60,000 difference. While I think the latter should be avoided, you need to at the very least use one definition or the other and remain consistent. Apples with apples, as they say.

Inflating figures when it comes to gangs is hardly new. In 2009 the Police Association said that the methamphetamine trade was worth $1.5 billion a year, of which they estimated at least 75% was controlled by gangs. Given most gang members (accepting that many are neck deep in the black economy) are hand to mouth people, I wondered where the money was going. It didn’t seem possible, so I did some digging.

I turned to apprehension data compiled by the police and obtained by my lawyer. These statistics were arranged in three, rather ambiguous, categories: Drug (Cannabis Only), Drugs (New Drugs), and Drugs (Not Cannabis). In each of the three years from 2006 to 2008, drug dealing by gang affiliates, as measured by apprehensions for ‘possession for supply’, averaged 9.4 percent of total apprehensions for ‘cannabis only’, 11.5 percent for ‘new drugs’, and 7.6 percent for drugs ‘not cannabis’.

These data will surprise most people because they obviously don’t support the rhetoric of gang dominance of the drug trade. It was for this reason the statistics used by the Minister on Monday looked heavy.

At the time the above data were obtained I spoke to the National Statistics Manager at Police National Headquarters who told me that their data did not include whether or not apprehended persons were gang members as such, but only if the “persons apprehended are known to be affiliated in some way with a gang”, and therefore captured a significantly wider population than just gang members as well as a large degree of offending unrelated to gangs in any meaningful way.

The Minister has almost certainly relied on the police for her data. So unless the police have changed their policy and now take note of gang numbers (not including associates) then the figures are heavily misleading. We are not comparing apples with apples. We are not even comparing apples with pears. We are comparing apples with basketballs. It is fundamentally dishonest.

So, David, you have close links with the Minister. You were sent her data. You have used it to say that I am wrong. Ask her. Did she use membership numbers (a small number) to show how few gang members there are and then gangs and associates (a large number) to show a) how many were in prison and b) that they dominate certain crimes and c) why use arrest data and not conviction data – surely what can be proved rather than alleged is the key?

You continually say that the numbers ‘seem credible’ but that’s not enough, is it? Colin Craig thinks that it’s credible that we didn’t land on the moon. What we want is the truth.

I don’t expect you to eat a suitcase full of carrots when you discover I am right, although I promise I will certainly send you one. I would, however, like you to be honest. I believe that you are, and therefore I await your response.

I know I am safe on the prison numbers. They have without doubt been misrepresented. It is now just a matter of how much of the other information has been too.

Today the Minister of Police and Corrections, Anne Tolley, launched a 'whole government plan on tackling gangs'.

Great, we need one and much of what is being proposed is good. She should be congratulated. What we don't need is to over-inflate the problem. Unfortunately, in an election year (of course), this is what has occurred.

The Minister says there are 4,000 known gang members in New Zealand. She says that so far this year they are responsible* for 34 percent of class A & B drug offences; 36 percent of kidnapping and adduction offences; 25 percent of aggravated robbery/robbery offences; 26 percent of grievous assault offences; and consequently 28 percent of the prison population is gang members. Sounds bad, right? If we believe what we are told, gang members make up just 0.1 percent of the population yet they are responsible for between a quarter and more than a third of these serious crimes. Bloody hell.

Unfortunately, I suspect it's bollocks. More than that I'll bet on it.

I will eat a suitcase full of carrots in front of the fine Sociology Department at the University of Canterbury if these data are correct. I'll ask the Minister to do the same if I'm right.

Let's look at what we can prove, because inconveniently she has used specific offences that don't match with published data. Nevertheless, we are told that 28 percent of the prison population are gang members. If we take the current prison population as 8,500 that means 2,380 of known gang members are currently behind bars. Whoa, that means 1,620 free gang members are creating all of the carnage that the Minister has cited today.

Not only are the numbers wrong, they are widely inaccurate. Crazy inaccurate. If they're not I'll eat carrots.

Gangs are a problem, but to misrepresent the problem is just as bad. Law and government policy should be based on fact, not fiction. Throwing alarming statistics around in the buildup to an election is perhaps not surprising but it is certainly unacceptable. When the public see these frightening statistics of course they are going to accept whatever solution is offered. The unfortunate truth is that the statistics are blowing a problem into something it's not. Not even close. That being the case, the real problem is being hidden.

There is much to like about this policy initiative, and some things that are pretty average, but either way we should at least be presented with a factual picture. Somebody please ask the Minister to prove her numbers. Anybody. Let's just see the workings.

If the situation proves to be clear and accurate and I am wrong, then I will eat those carrots. 

I am not wrong.

*The Minister says these are the numbers of charges that are laid. Even if correct, why not use conviction numbers? Surely proof rather than suspicion of guilt is a better measure, unless the police are throwing charges at gang members without evidence? But I'll still take the carrot challenge even on that silly measure.

Over the weekend a fight at the Moerewa Rugby Club resulted in three people being stabbed. In 1979, the same small town hosted a riot in which police, firefighters and gang members were injured. This is how it went down.

Gang conflicts and wars had increased throughout the 1970s as gangs fought to mark out their territory. A leading Auckland judge, Justice Mills, remarked in 1978 that ‘the gravity of many of the offences by members of gangs and what had become known as “gang warfare” was a great concern to everyone’. This ‘great concern’ reached its zenith in August 1979 in the small North Island town of Moerewa, where an event of such severity occurred that it can be seen to mark the second pivot point in New Zealand gang history.

The incident had its genesis in Auckland in October 1978 when an estimated 350 members from the country’s Black Power chapters converged on Otara to hold a convention. The local Stormtroopers considered Otara to be part of their turf, and local and outside chapters of the gang gathered peacefully outside the weekend-long meeting to show their displeasure at the Black Power’s intrusion into their territory. The gangs engaged in several conflicts in early 1979, but it was an assault by a Northland Black Power member on an Auckland Stormtrooper, in either late July or very early August of that year, that sparked the drive for a showdown. Regarding battles such as these between gangs, one Black Power leader, Mane Adams, said:

"Basically it was tit for tat. If you went and did a tit, you were waiting for the tat, and if the tat didn’t come back, well you know you won that battle sort of thing. It worked like that, sort of thing, eh, tit tat, tit tat. But tit tat leads to very serious consequences, if you don’t get on top of it."

On 3 August 1979, Stormtroopers from Auckland travelled north and joined members from Moerewa to find the local Black Power members in order to seek revenge. Initially unsuccessful in their search, many of the Auckland members returned home, leaving 40 or 50 primarily local Stormtroopers to drive to the Okaihau Hotel in further quest of Black Power. Failing again to find the enemy, they set about drinking. Next, in what the bar’s publican described as an abrupt 60-second outburst of destruction, the members uprooted pool tables and threw bottles through windows and a stool at the jukebox. Leaving the hotel and travelling through Ohaewai on their return to Moerewa, the gang was confronted by two members of the police, who were forced to retreat. A warning shot fired by one of the officers was not enough to save the police car from extensive damage. 

The Stormtroopers then went on to the Moerewa Hotel where more police were called. The gang’s alcohol-fuelled frustration turned toward the only enemy they could find: the police. Prominent New Zealand academics Jane Kelsey and Warren Young suggest that animosity toward the police was bred as a response to aggressive police tactics by Team Policing Units in South Auckland in late 1978 and early 1979, and they also reported a ‘strong suggestion’ that the gang members themselves had called the authorities, presumably in an effort to provoke a confrontation. Similarly, amateur historian Charles O’Hara says that one of the gang encouraged a younger member to break a shop window – ‘so that the cops’ll come and then we’ll do them!’ Be that as it may, the publican is almost certain to have made a frantic call to authorities, and the two officers under siege at Ohaewai would also have raised the alarm with their colleagues.

Police were called in from throughout the region, but some were diverted to an unconnected armed robbery in Whangarei. Those who could respond immediately were heavily outnumbered, and attempts to persuade the gang to disperse were fruitless. Indeed, police efforts to confront the gang were described by one gang member as ‘suicidal’, and they were attacked with an assortment of makeshift missiles and weapons. Offering insight into the loyalty and adherence to the gang leaders’ commands, one of the Stormtroopers said later, ‘when we are told to hit, we hit’.

In the melee, the police officers became separated and were beaten. One described being held against a fence and kicked and punched by as many six gang members. Others fared even worse. A police van was set alight and several Stormtroopers attempted to throw Senior Sergeant Charles O’Hara, who was already injured, into the fire, yelling, ‘Burn the bastard!’ As the senior sergeant cried out, ‘Mercy, mercy’, he was rescued by battered colleagues and firefighters. During another offensive surge, the gang members began chanting, ‘Kill, kill!’ Sergeant Walter Douglas retrieved a .38 revolver from his glove box and fired several warning shots before shooting a gang member in the thigh. In different pockets of the hotel car park the battle continued. One gang member raided a fire truck and handed out the axes to use as weapons. Constable Ralph Davis was beaten to the ground and kicked unconscious. Constable Arthur Turton went to his rescue and found him choking on his own blood, but in his first attempt at rescue was driven off by Stormtroopers with whom he pleaded: ‘I yelled at them that they had killed a cop and to let me help him.’ Despite being hit with a steel rod, he and another police officer managed to drag the severely injured constable to safety. Davis did not regain consciousness for 48 hours and suffered depressed and linear fractures of the skull, a fractured cheekbone and the loss of eight teeth. Without medical treatment, his injuries were life-threatening.

Sergeant Walter Douglas attempted to reason with the gang’s leader to call a halt to the attack, but it is believed, by one witness at least, that a series of shotgun blasts from a local resident, alarmed by the lawlessness, signalled an end to the violence.  Supported by an influx of reinforcements, police were able to arrest 28 members of the gang. The riot was over but the gang problem had begun in earnest.

This is an excerpt from my book Patched: the history of gangs in New Zealand. You will find references for the above quotes and facts in that. Go and buy the bloody thing, it's brilliant.

Wanker of the week

Winner: Colin Craig

For believing in chemtrails, for questioning the reality of moon landings, for basking provocatively in grass, for being a litigious shit by threatening or taking legal action against Russell Norman, the Civilian, and colincraig.co.nz, for saying he could choose to be gay if he wanted to, for staring from billboards using Norman Bates’ eyes, for fearing Kiwi-invented rockets will be used to export non-traditional family values to space, and for blaming climate change on sun spots and the “circulation of the planets” .* You, sir, are a most deserving winner of this award.

Honourable mentions: The 94 percent of Israeli Jews, let’s call them evil wankers, who feel that the assault on Gaza is not ‘excessive’; people who live in Epsom for continually being wankers; and all of the lazy wankers not defacing election billboards.

Saint of the last seven days

Winner: Dr Sheik Umar Khan

Khan treated over 100 patients in the current Ebola outbreak in Sierra Leone, and has been called a "national hero" for his efforts to contain its spread. This week he died after contracting the virus. Before becoming infected he said, "I am afraid for my life, I must say, because I cherish my life." Rest in Peace, Dr Khan.

Honourable mentions: No mentions this week, nobody ought shade Dr Khan.


*One of these isn’t true. Colin Craig is welcome to sue me if he’s bright enough to figure out which one he doesn’t believe in.