Spasms of citizenship don’t redeem gangs

It’s good that they wanted to help after the Christchurch shootings, but the sight of gangs stepping forward to offer security around mosques sat uneasily with a great many New Zealanders, and for good reason.

We have no trouble believing they wanted to offer some sort of meaningful assistance.

Who didn’t?

After all, this was a time when the cry was issuing throughout the land that we needed to stand united in the face of a savage assault on our common humanity.

But about that . . .

What happens to this sense of humanity when the gangs go back to selling P to our kids?

Luring people into their debt and then requiring a hideous ‘‘payment plan’’ when they can’t pay up?

Using violence to make money? How easy, exactly, do they expect us to handle their transitions from assisting their ‘‘brothers and sisters’’ in our community during these painful times, back to intimidating the hell out of them?

Gangs have for decades professed a willingness to change and there can be some positives to point to.

But let’s not, ever, fail to recognise the implacable ugliness that constitutes business as usual.

We need to resist, good and hard, any sense that gangs are outfits that are decent enough underneath, supporting one another as best they can, just prone to wildness and misbehaviour. Like hell.

Their day-to-day dealings cause enormous social harm.

Their rules are not our rules. They don’t hold themselves to the standard that the law requires. It doesn’t make them rebels. It makes them criminals. The calculating sort.

At times, typically when it’s easy and might help them feel good about themselves, they have stepped up as if they care about our society.

But we are hip-deep in evidence to the contrary.

In Southland there’s been a coordinated effort by the Mongrel Mob to grow its presence in Mataura.

Gore district mayor Tracy Hicks has met gang leaders to discuss this and Clutha Mayor Bryan Cadogan has issued the clarion call that it’s time the lower South Island woke up to the lives that are being destroyed, under our noses, by the greed and intimidation of gang activities and the influx of methamphetamines.

We know exactly how many people died and were harmed by the Christchurch shooter.

It is far more difficult to count the lives taken, and broken and debased and otherwise harmed by gang culture.

Come the day that the gangs of New Zealand want to help their brothers and sisters, they know what they need to do.

Should that actually do it, we’ll notice.

Because our society will be hugely better.

What happens to this sense of humanity when the gangs go back to selling P to our kids?