Andrew Dickens: National's gang policy is a dud

Early Edition with Ryan Bridge · Jun 12, 2022 · 1m

I was really disappointed that Christopher Luxon hung his hat on the patch banning gangs policy, mostly because the policy is not new. It's proposed every time a political party want to be perceived as tough on crime - and it has been discredited every time it's been proposed.

And it has been tried before in Whanganui. Michael Laws argues it was a success, and yes it kept gang patches out of the city centre for a while. But it didn’t decrease gang crime.

Embarrassingly for National, Chester Borrows, who was part of National at the time and argued for its use, stated in the Sunday papers that…