BEFORE MOSQUE ATTACKS, NZ FAILED TO RECORD HATE CRIMES
Steps taken by cops to combat hate crime, racism insufficient
IN the wake of New Zealand’s worst mass shooting, questions are being asked about what signs agencies missed and where resources should have been allocated to protect vulnerable communities.
Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern had ordered a Royal Commission of Inquiry into the attack.
Federation of Islamic Associations of New Zealand president Anwar Ghani said anecdotal evidence suggested there had been a rise in anti-Muslim behaviour in recent years.
“When there is a hotspot in global events and when Muslims are involved… we do see the pulse of hate crime coming from certain members of the community,” he said.
When current Justice and Intelligence Services Minister Andrew Little took office in late 2017, the Human Rights Commission said in its incoming briefing the country needed a central system for recording details about
crimes motivated by hatred and racism and steps currently taken by police were insufficient.
Little did not respond to request for comment but told local media on Saturday that current hate speech laws were inadequate and he would work with officials to review the legislation, including considering whether a separate hate crime offence should be created.
Police said they took hate crimes seriously and were looking to improve the way they worked.
The National Party, in power from 2008 to 2017, said while in government, it introduced legislation to protect people from harmful communication online.
“There are hate speech laws in the Hu- man Rights Act, but whether data should be collected is an operational matter for Police,” a spokeman said.
New Zealand had no previous extremist mass attacks, unlike neighbouring Australia, but civil society members said an underbelly of racism had always existed and might have been escalating.
Anjum Rahman from the Islamic Women’s Council of New Zealand said the group had repeatedly alerted the government over the past five years about the rise of the extreme right and the growing threat Muslim women felt in New Zealand.
“Without the data, without the measurement, it’s really hard to push for change. I feel like it wasn’t taken seriously because it wasn’t hard data because we didn’t have it,” she said, adding that she felt “a resistance to creating that data”.
One in 10 New Zealand adults has experienced hate speech online according to a study last year by Internet safety organisation Netsafe, with people of Asian descent or who identified as “other” ethnicity most affected.
Since 2002, a law has specified judges should take hostility towards a group of people with a “common characteristic”, such as race or religion, into account when sentencing.
A review of sentencing records found 22 such cases since 2002, most with a racial motive.
Those included the murder of a Korean student, the hurling of a pipe bomb at a Sikh temple, and threats to politicians by a nonMuslim posing as an Islamic extremist, which the judge described as a “deliberate attempt to tap into public fear about radicalised Muslims”.
The likely number was far higher, said human rights experts, because accessible records encompassed only cases that were appealed or the most severe charges that reached New Zealand’s highest courts, not the tens of thousands of cases dealt with in lower district courts each year.
One of those was a 2016 case, first reported by the New Zealand Herald, in which a Christchurch man delivered a bloodied pig’s head to Al Noor Mosque, which was attacked this month.
He was charged with “offensive behaviour” and fined NZ$800 (RM2,200), court records show.
In 2017, lawmakers asked police whether hate crime was increasing, but were told it could not be measured because it was not recorded as a specific category, according to parliamentary records.
The Human Rights Commission said it received 417 complaints relating to race in 2018, up from 350 in 2014.
Those included 63 complaints of “racial disharmony“, which includes hate speech, a 26 per cent jump from four years earlier.