OPINION: And so the gang patch law has taken effect. It took all of three minutes to nail a gangster wearing his patch at 12.03 am Thursday morning.
Duh! It’s not like you weren't warned.
In the cities, I think this gang patch law will work. Cops will band together, police together and it’s clear city cops will initially come down hard on those gangsters who thumb their nose at this.
The message from this Government is you won't get away with it, so there can be no compromise early on.
But this approach is overdue, right?
It's window dressing, yes, and it hardly addresses the causes of why people join gangs - as if Chris Luxon knows how to tackle that - but overdue, this most certainly is.
The gangs had become a bit of law unto themselves, a bit cocky under the past pandering Government and rudderless Police leadership. It was a committee of do-gooders excusing anti-social behaviour.
But stuff it, If they can ban them in Aussie they can ban them here.
It's not as hard as we had been led to believe.
And civil rights? Yeah, the rights of ordinary law-abiding folk not feeling intimidated would be a nice start.
Prioritise them ahead of the tough guys.
And people do get intimidated. I personally don't. But I get it that some do.
This has been a long time coming - all sorts of excuses were given as to why we couldn't, but they were just that, excuses to do nothing. In the end, the law has been changed.
Expect the gangs to work around it. They are masters at getting around laws - or driving straight through them - and this will be no different. Already, it’s emerging they are wearing patches of just blue or red.
But if it can be done across the Tasman, it can be done here.
The cops might just need to be like Aussie cops, show some bloody muscle, stop painting signs at the hikoi and stop being friends with everyone.
The approach to gangs from this Government compared to the last one couldn't be more stark.
The last one, they got $2.7m to fight meth. Andy Coster, and Dame Jacinda, the lot of them gave the gangsters a free pass. Why? Who knows, but it didn't look just soft, it was weak and seriously pathetic law enforcement.
Then National, Act and Winnie's mob came in with a view to making it hard for gangs to freely move around and freely go about their business. They made it hard.
They took assets, gate-crashed a few gang pads, hassled them daily, filmed them at gang tangi, and for pudding, they buried their gang patches and had regular checkpoints outside gang pads.
In Christchurch, not one Comanchero escaped arrest.
Policing gang members is unapologetically hard now and there are no backdowns.
They are targeted, no one is making it easy.
But this gang patch law will be tricky in the small towns where many gangs have moved to.
In the Far North, sometimes it's just one or two cops for 150 kilometres of road.
Policing in small towns takes on a life of its own and there are some things that police look the other way on. For instance, there are 22 cops in Wairoa and former gang members and current gangsters may top 200.
So police number just ten percent of the current gangsters in the remote town. For every cop there are nine gangsters. Good luck boys. The ones in blue I'm talking to here.
Will a rural cop really pull over a load of well-known gang members late at night?
Sometimes, the patch may be waived through, with a warning, just so everyone gets home that night.
I mean on $80,000 a year in the middle of the wops, would you stop a car full of men in red, barking out the window?
No thanks. It's not worth the fight. Nor are the cops paid enough to do it, sorry. Catch new episodes of Duncan Garner: Editor In Chief LIVE at 7pm every weekday.
