Campaign: Law & Order
March for safer communities. Be at Britomart on Sunday 4 December from 2pm (outside H&M).
Read our 2022 Manifesto Presented to the Minister of Police.
There has been a surge in violent crime and we are its victims. Successive governments and officials ignored our concerns and stoked the crime wave through decades of excise hikes that have made dairies a soft target.
Parliament created this problem yet offers no help or support to us and those that shop with us. We and our communities have been left to fend for ourselves.
We know cigarettes drive a large part of the crime and our sector is the unofficial tax collector for around $1 billion a year! To lower demand we need the freedom to talk to smokers about vaping and smokeless tobacco instead. If not, we face a crime Tsunami in 2023-2025 as outlets are reduced and low nicotine tobacco becomes the only thing legally sold at a handful of outlets.
We need: more uniforms and active deterrence
We want UK-style Police Community Support Officers (PCSO) with councils retasking funding for traffic wardens and transport officers to PCSO’s. Deter criminals, not shoppers.
We want the 1,800 new police that were promised in 2017 and community stations re-opened.
A Retail Crime Fund with a $30 million budget run on the ‘high trust model’ whereby 10,000 businesses get the work done, then submit photos and invoices for reimbursement.
We need: technology to deter and defeat criminals
We need financial support to install fog cannons and bollards outside stores to stop the ram raids.
It would cost $21 million to equip every dairy with fog cannons and $9 million for bollards.
Fog cannons stop burglaries, robberies, and vandalism by filling a space with a thick cloud within seconds that leaves no residue and does not harm food or electronics.
Bollards are physical barriers in front of stores that prevent cars from ramming into a store.
We want smart street lighting and community scale CCTV cameras with night vision capability. This will help the police to identify criminals.
We need: laws that work for the law-abiding
We need to stop the begging that is being used by criminals to peddle drugs and protection. Get them off the streets and into centres to resolve the issues they have.
Enable stores to have leases over footpaths at a peppercorn and with easements to facilitate bollards and to stop vagrancy.
Fix New Zealand’s week laws on self-defence by adopting Australia’s that would extend self-defence to property.
Stop a creeping “ban everything” culture that does not work unless for the gangs who get a read-made market.