To punish or to prevent ?
The question is always before us. What sort of society do we want to build? Live in? Create for our kids? One founded on love, where people are fed, cared for, empowered, and enabled to thrive? Or one built on revenge, struggle, competition? It’s a question at the heart of our political discourse.
Recently, there has been a lot of attention on Auckland’s city centre, with concerns raised about an increase in crime. Almost predictably we’ve seen calls for increased policing in the city centre, alongside a demand for harsher punishment for people who participate in crime.
Unfortunately, this sort of thinking lacks both nuance and understanding of the critical issues that lead to these sorts of crimes. Soundbite solutions like harsher punishment and more police may be easy to chuck out there, but they don’t work in terms of prevention. This approach simply funnels more people into our justice system. To prevent crime, we must examine its primary drivers, and respond to them accordingly.
The underlying factors behind the challenges we’re currently facing are poverty, inequality, addiction and mental health concerns. Punishment and policing can’t address these challenges. If we want to make Auckland’s city centre safer and more vibrant, we need to respond, not react. That means getting serious about solutions.
One of the gaps in the city is investment in co-ordinated access to key services for people. This would be a central hub, specific to young people and adults, where people could go to get connected to the services and advocacy they needed.
There is a lot of amazing mahi happening in our community, in Auckland Central, and across the city, but sometimes we lack the ability for services to connect.
Currently, the onus for creating such access rests on already overworked NGOS, meaning that in the chaos of what we’re doing every day, organising ourselves to coordinate access for our people doesn’t always happen as well as it could. Investment in this infrastructure would be a huge win for our city.
Another solution with proven success is to invest in youth workers, social workers, and outreach services with mental health experience to engage with people and provide the right support and connection to core services. To do prevention well we need to respond to the challenge people are facing. By investing in these community resources, we also build the capacity of our communities to heal and hold our own.
Youth workers specifically are community resources who are often undervalued, and yet provide a vital service in designing and developing community spaces that build belonging and connection, which in turn strengthens our communities.
Alongside this is the opportunity to invest in these community resources to respond to mental health and addiction-related callouts in order to ensure that these complex situations are handled by those with the expertise to do so. A similar initiative was trialled in Wellington, in which police attended mental health-related callouts with amental health professional alongside them. Otago University evaluated the programme and found it had huge benefits, including decreasing the risk of violence within these situations.
The reality is that when people feel marginalised and stigmatised by mainstream society, unable to participate or find belonging within our community, they are more likely to find ways to survive that may just be out of step with mainstream society.
If we want to get serious about reducing crime, we need to take seriously our responsibility as a society to care for those we have structurally marginalised. This means making space in our society for those we’ve ostracised. It means ensuring our people can access all their basic human rights and are able to fully participate in society.
It means building strong, vibrant, connected communities, and committing to resourcing our own people to care and support our own.
Again, this comes back to investing in our communities and our people. We either pay for more police (who aren’t trained or equipped to deal with a lot of this stuff) or we invest in our communities, who are betterplaced to care for and support our own people.
These challenges can be met head-on and dealt with, but we need more than soundbite solutions to do so. The choice is before us. Are we after punishment? Or prevention?