Chippie’s Organised Crime announcement the performative art of looking tough on crime

Gang assets targeted as Government announces law changes

It will be easier for the Police to seize illicit assets of criminals under a law change announced by the Government today.

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern announced a “raft” of changes targeted at gangs at her post-Cabinet press conference on Monday, which were intended to strip gangs of the benefits of criminal activity.

The changes amend the Criminal Proceeds (Recovery) Act, expanding its measures to cover associates. This means that if someone is associated with an organised criminal group and it is suspected they could not have funded their assets legitimately, then they can now be required to prove to the court how they came to possess them – or face having them seized.

The threshold will be about $30,000 “unaccounted for”, and the Government expects to seize about $25 million more due to the law change.

Meh.

Making it more difficult for crims to put money into their retirement funds and suddenly expanding the State’s capacity to seize your property based on nothing more than guilt by association seems underwhelming and alarming in equal measure.

The most recent Police crackdown has been swift and taken off the streets enough organised gang bosses and enforcers that there is a labour shortage within the Gangs to continue planned violent reprisals.

There will still be bursts of violence as individuals explode under the combined pressures of economy and drug addiction, but the organised war and hits are paused for right now because the gang world like every other sector is experiencing a lack of workers.

Hilarious right?

Jokes aside, we can’t take this pause as proof that we are making progress against organised crime.

The vast number of warrantless searches used to kick down doors during the recent Police crackdown will start winding their way through the court process and I would be very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, surprised if they stand up in Court.

Claiming a gun is on the property to gain access to that property means anything found that isn’t a gun will struggle to remain evidential once the defense lawyers start complaining to the Bench that the State are just drift net fishing for arrests and evidence.

The gang leaders who are in prison are now resetting their lines of communication to run the syndicates and gangs from inside prison, a problem Corrections is ill equipped to monitor…

Outdated laws limit Corrections’ monitoring of high-risk prisoners, says discussion document

Corrections NZ is proposing legislative changes to address shortfalls in how high-risk inmates are monitored within prisons.

A recent discussion document, which is open for public consultation, details how shifts in New Zealand’s criminal landscape and innovations in communication technology have compromised Corrections’ ability to promote safety within its facilities.

…so once the defence lawyers start getting cases thrown out and once the gang bosses get their communication lines sorted inside prison, it’s all back on.

The real moves here will be behind the scenes with Chippy banging bureaucratic heads together in the back room.

The GCSB and SIS are intercepting communications between the South American Cartels and 501 syndicates importing meth from them. The meth is cheaper and purer and gives the 501s market advantage over the domestic gangs who import a more expensive and less pure product from Triads in Asia.

Instead of making that intel available to the domestic police force to intercept meth imports, the SIS and GCSB are handing that information up the food chain to the NSA because the Americans want to know what the South American Cartels are doing.

That information of course shouldn’t be exclusively provided to the NSA, it should be forwarded to Organised Crime to action in real time, the challenge Chippie will have is forcing that issue through!

Ultimately, the only tool to fight meth is a fully funded rehabilitation program. Meth is too addictive to pretend it won’t devastate lives, and it’s too plentiful to completely stop.

Fully funded mass rehabilitation programmes are your only way to stop the meth trade, you have to heal the demand, not punish it!

The problem is that rehabilitation is excruciatingly expensive, luckily there is a solution!

Legalise pot.

BERL reported that you could generate $675million PER YEAR for rehabilitation services.

To curtail organised crime, we need less 501s being deported here from Australia, better intel provided to Organised Crime Unit and we need mass rehabilitation programmes fully funded by a legal cannabis market.

That’s how we break the curse of organised crime in this country.

Everything else is just performance art.

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