Protestors gathered outside deputy prime minister Grant Robertson’s electoral office at 220 Willis St in downtown Wellington on Monday (Nov 28) calling for urgent action to address the retail crime emergency facing the country.
Dairy owners nationwide downed their shutters on Sunday to protest the killing of dairy worker Janak Patel following a burglary at his store in Auckland on November 23.
Protestors raised slogans such as “Enough is Enough” and “Where is Robertson,” and waved the Indian tricolour at passing vehicles, as community leader Nagin Bhai Patel addressed the gathering.
New Zealand Indian Central Association ( NZICA) vice president Manisha Morar, who was at the forefront of the protest, said: “We need tougher action on crime. Things are too soft. They [offenders] have become brazen, they are not afraid to pull out a knife, to pull out a gun.”
Thakur Gopal, a dairy owner from Island Bay, told the Indian Weekender that his store had been robbed multiple times, usually at night, and that the culprits were let off by the police on the grounds that they were minors.“The police don’t care, because they know Indians are soft. We won’t put a knife into anybody, because we have families and we don’t want to go to jail.”
Protestors debated the need to tighten laws around underaged offenders. Some argued parents must be held liable and pay for losses suffered by affected businesses. Others held the view that National’s proposal of sending youth offenders to a boot camp kept them off the streets for a year or two.
But whatever their viewpoints, protestors were united on the conviction that the law was not firm enough to deal with young offenders.
The offences ranged from “take and run” to “smash and grab” and car-borne ram raids. Nearly everyone present nursed a sense of futility and hopelessness in approaching the authorities.
“He’s only 16, so you cannot charge him for the crime. But he is old enough to vote?” Newtown-based dairy owner Nilesh Vallabh asked, in an obvious reference to the proposed move to lower the voting age. However, Vallabh is mindful that many young offenders take to crime as a result of challenging conditions in their own lives.
At one point, the protestors were prepared to take their protest to the Parliament grounds, but quickly dropped the plan for lack of the necessary clearance from the authorities.
NZICA’s Morar went around collecting signatures as part of a dairy owners networking initiative aimed at keeping them in touch with one another, and updated on developments.