The military-style bootcamps for young offenders National is proposing will work differently from an earlier plan along similar lines that critics say wasn’t effective, says the party’s spokesperson for police.
“Well, they did have some success with it [earlier], but the model was wrong,” Mark Mitchell said during his visit to the office of The Indian Weekender this week. “The [new] model we're using for this…has been running for 14 years. It’s defence-led.”
Critics have often pointed to a bootcamp scheme launched many years back under a previous National government to say it didn’t do much to reduce re-offending rates.
Labour leader Chris Hipkins on Thursday made that point again, saying the bootcamps “have an 80 per cent failure rate”.
But Mitchell doesn’t agree with such assessments, saying the new model runs on a 70 per cent success rate.
“It targets 17-year-olds, up to sort of mid-20s young people that have been in trouble with the law, some of them have been in prison, they come and they do an eight-week boot camp.
“So we think that if we run this programme, and we extrapolate that out over 12 months, we can have an even better success rates.”
The former defence minister is also promising a National government will put more police on the streets, shoring up the numbers to provide a personnel for every 480 people, as against 541 in 2017.
“I want to see a lot more of the back-office staff coming back out onto the front lines, I want to see police officers here on the beats and highly visible in the communities.
“Beat officers are very effective in terms of developing relationships with dairy owners and retailers. They take ownership for their patch, they give them the human intelligence…we just haven't seen enough of it in the last five or six years,” he says.
Mitchell also spoke about a petition small businesses submitted to the government this year for a new law that will make parents of young offenders liable for crimes, hinting there might not be an easy answer for that.
“We will never walk away from proof of responsibility. And we recognise that many of these families have deeply, deeply complex issues. But they have to be addressed.
“It's not going to be a community solution or an iwi-led solution. It's going to be all of government, local government, community, iwi, whoever might be involved, and they should come up with solutions to deal with those issues.”
Mitchell says if he were to become police minister after General Elections 2023 next month, some of his top priorities will include empowering the police, cracking down on gang patches and limiting the judiciary’s power to grant discounts on sentences.
He has offered to hold himself to account if he were to fail on his promises. “If people in New Zealand don't inherently feel like we're heading in the right direction, I don't feel safer than 12 months ago, then I’ll stand down from my role because obviously I am not the right guy for it.”