Crime

First published in Column 8 on the 4^th September, 1991

 When armed robbery took place last week at our local pharmacy my family was at home only a block away. One of the robbers made his escape down a street only one away from where my kids were at school. I became rather unnerved at my wife’s phone calls to me at work relaying the latest news reports. Was it possible someone with a shotgun was still wandering the streets?

We found out later that the robbers must have left the area pretty smartly – and I guess in their shoes I would have done the same. All power, then, to the police for picking them up in Timaru – of all places – only a couple of days later. The police did a great job.

We’re constantly told that an abstract body, ‘the community,’ is not doing enough to stamp out crime. That irritates me. How exactly is the average suburbanite supposed to stop armed robberies?

And if the ‘community’ is to blame for the lack of concern when it comes to crime, what makes the television programme Crimewatch so effective? Isn’t that the community at work?

Anyway, the community shouldn’t be the prime fighter against crime – most of us haven’t the resources or skills or know-how to make a lot of difference. Surely policemen are still the best ones to do the job.

When the current Government promised 900 more policepersons I felt like cheering, because at this time in our history we are absolutely desperate for them.

But even 900 more bobbies are going to have a massive job. There’s more at work than just an increase in the number of criminals. Part of the matter is that hectic social forces contribute considerably to our problems. We aren’t the community we once were.

Unemployment and drugs have increased out of all proportion in the last few years, and are seedbeds for crime.

Major changes in our attitudes to life are also a problem. For better or worse, the fact that men and women’s rules are now so differently defined from the traditional bring tensions and violence in marriage. We may eventually work through this transition time (and be the better for it) but for the present, overworked women’s refuges prove families are suffering dreadfully from its onslaught.

There’s more. Things that used to be considered criminal by the vast majority have been taken on board as the ‘norm.’ Governments have elected to make them legal. Abortion, de facto marriages, adultery; and the way in which a criminal can be considered as a victim in the very crime he has initiated.

With such turned-around views we can never have our former more stable society.

Lastly, we’ve thrown religion out the window. I know New Zealand was never quite the Christian country it claimed to be, but the civilising effects of Christian attitudes kept many evil forces in check, for decades.

Now we’re so secular we think religion – especially Christianity – doesn’t matter. We don’t want to believe that it does.

The vast changes in the communist world are a lesson to us. Average people, we’re told, committed very few crimes during the communist years. That’s hardly surprising when just being alive could be crime enough to have you thrown in jail – or a mental institution. And anyway, the bosses committed such despicable horrors themselves that crime was virtually respectable.

Now a strange thing is taking place. With communism gasping its last breaths, untold number of people are returning to something communism could never quite destroy – their religion. Poland, Romania, and now Russia itself have shown there is an undeniable hunger for spiritual things.

I wonder how long New Zealand will have to suffer the strife of daily major crime before it, too, realises that throwing out God, and opting instead for a selfish, secular, uncompassionate and ultimately hopeless society is a major cause of our woes.

NZ Police Car, 2025

 

This was written over thirty years ago and there are no signs of crime decreasing. Nor is there much sign of the secular society realising that a community that makes man and woman its centre has little hope of improving. Without God, we are hopelessly stuck in our problems.