Why fog cannons are an admission of failure
It’s a law and order week for the Government. Fresh on the heels of the Sandringham dairy stabbing last week there has been a flurry of activity – with more to come. Yet most of it has to do with cracking down on crimes already in progress, rather than trying to stop them in the first place.
Police yesterday announced they would be reinstating pursuits of fleeing drivers – in limited circumstances. And while that is an operational-level decision, it is understood that this week the Government will also be announcing tougher penalties for people who do try to escape from police in their cars.
The most significant part of Labour’s announcement yesterday – that the Government would give each dairy owner $4000 to buy fog cannons for their stores – was not that it was tough on crime, but that it was effectively admitting that the Government and its law-enforcement arms can do little, for the moment at least, to prevent these sorts of crimes in the first place.
The $4000 subsidies to help stores buy fog cannons – devices that create a dense fog when an emergency button or alarm is triggered – will only help shop owners hopefully avoid the worst should they be a victim of crime.
While undoubtedly this will be some consolation to dairy owners and the small businesses who fear being ramraided, it does admit that the best the Government can do on this issue is limited.
It does not do anything to help reduce the crime itself, but does help manage the potential effects of crime. It’s ambulance at the bottom of the cliff stuff.
The fact that this is being announced as a big policy is not good news for Labour. But equally, it will also irk the Government. Basically everything Labour wants to do is top of the cliff stuff – but fixing the social causes of crime takes ages, is complicated, and clearly a lot of it is not working or is not seen to be working by the public.
Dairy owners across the country protesting isn’t a great look, and crime is now clearly a vulnerability for Labour.
The Sandringham dairy worker’s death was of course not the Government’s fault. However, that one event – and the fact the PM did a full media round on it, and attended the funeral, and so on – encapsulates just how febrile and fraught the
issue has become. Sometimes there is one crime or event that acts as a lightning rod or metaphor for discontent around a given issue. It may not be that National has answers any more compelling than Labour’s – and boot camps for youth offenders certainly wasn’t – but overall its message is a more politically simple one to deliver – that Labour is soft on crime and has presided over a society in which criminals face few consequences for their actions.
Labour is clearly going to be ramping up its response to that side of things and showing that it is tough on crime, and tough on the causes of crime – to borrow one of the phrases that endeared British Prime Minister Tony Blair to News Corp papers in the UK in the mid-1990s.
The question now is whether the public will believe Labour, and what mixture of anger, concern or resignation becomes entrenched by early 2023.
Dairy owners across the country protesting isn’t a great look, and crime is now clearly a vulnerability for Labour.