Sunday, May 24, 2009

Too inconvenient to break the law?

In just over a month the gang patch ban is due to come into effect in Wanganui. Apparently;

Chester Borrows says the gangs have resigned themselves to abiding by the law, because it is going to be too inconvenient to skirt around it.


At first glance this is an absurd assertion. Like gangs abide by other laws because it is just too inconvenient not to. Sure.

But at second glance, there may be a grain of truth lurking. In the interests of breaking weightier laws some gang members might just comply. A senior cop told me in the 1990s that gangs were becoming less visible because the kind of serious money they were involved in meant they wanted to attract less attention.

It remains to be seen how the lower echelons react.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Imagine two kinds of snakes, identical in every way. One is harmless and good for controlling rodents. The other deadly and violent. Not being to tell them apart is a problem.But if one of them had a bright yellow tail you are thrilled to have the additional information.

Apparently the Einsteins who pushed this law believe the public is better off not knowing who to keep an eye on. The patches identified the gang members allows us to know who to watch. This may the best thing that every happened for the criminal gangs, it helps hide their identity. What moron came up with this idea? If anything, I would have thought that the politicians would have made patches mandatory.

Anonymous said...

The mongrels wear red and the black power wear blue.

On any day in my part of small town New Zealand the gangs are easy to identify thanks to their colour coding.

And what a dead beat bunch of losers they are!

Dirk