MEDIAWATCH: NZ Herald who profit from crime clickbait asks why Kiwis are so frightened of crime
The NZ Herald asking why people are so concerned with crime is like Trump hosting a seminar on the lack of courtesy in modern political life…
New poll on crime and safety shows New Zealanders feel less safe today than five years ago
Two-thirds of Kiwis are more concerned about being a victim of crime today than they were five years ago and harsher prison sentences and more police would make them feel safer, a new Weekend Herald poll reveals.
Experts say addressing crime requires society-wide solutions and our sense of safety has been affected by the visibility of crimes in the media and social media.
As part of the editorial series, The New New Zealand: Rebuilding Better, the Herald is looking at the state of crime in our country and the solutions available to address it.
A poll conducted for the Herald by Dynata from May 25-29 asked 1000 respondents if they were more or less concerned about being the victim of a crime today than five years ago.
…the fear and hysteria around crime is generated BY the very same NZ Herald clickbait who are now polling you on why you are so frightened of crime!
It’s like the the drug dealer also running the drug rehab clinic.
Images of ram raids and organised crime violence has shocked, frightened and angered the country with a 25.2% increase in theft and a 19.7% increase in acts intended to cause injury.
The stabbing and killing last year of a Dairy worker in the former Prime Minister’s own electorate has become emblematic of a narrative the Government is soft on crime while the get tough on crime cheerleaders promise terrible retribution.
Ram Raid news stories make news producers orgasm.
They are cheap, easy to produce and present as live breaking news and the kids committing the crimes boasting on social media for notoriety guarantees a self feeding loop which terrifies the middle classes and sets the get tough on crime lynch mob off.
The perception is that crime is out of control, despite the evidence showing a spike, but in context, isn’t the hysteria clickbait the mainstream media are selling it as.
The number of serious repeat ram raiders is about 100, 80% of whom are already known to welfare agencies who are the kids from John Key’s draconian welfare reforms that saw kids in cars, state house tenants thrown onto the street for wrongful meth testing and whose parents were incarcerated in our private prison industry.
How will more draconian policies fix the problems the last set of draconian policies created?
This fear mongering clickbait is generating real world ramifications with ACT and National promising ankle bracelets on children and a return to counter productive Military Boot Camps.
The same people screaming that the mainstream media are scaring us over Covid are more than happy to promote crime clickbait by that very same media!
Youth crime has spiked and it needs actual solutions, what we are getting is just more raw meat fear mongering for ratings.
The anxiety a recession creates cancels out compassion, empathy and rational debate. As the desperation drives violent crime via a Crime Porn News filter to insecure viewers, watch how the crime debate disintegrates into lynch mob level bumper sticker slogans.
Your anger is being manipulated by the ‘Get Tough on Crime’ Cheerleaders for counter productive policy and
The Right are manipulating the Prison and Crime narrative.
They say the soft-on-crime-cuddle-a-crim Labour Party are fecklessly letting out 4000 prisoners while the crime rate soars.
They are not only confusing correlation as cause, they are ignoring how and why Labour gained those numbers in the first place.
When the National Party tightened Prison policy they allowed for non violent offenders to apply for home detention while in prison. All Labour did was provide assistance to the Prisoners eligible for that process to fill in the forms, because most of the prisoners are illiterate.
They aren’t skipping out the front gate and ram raiding Michael Hill Jewellers, they are on home detention and we put them on home detention because we know being inside prison is the best indication you are going to go back to prison!
70% reoffend after being released for two years!
They do that because Prison is a brutal, violent, corrupt, understaffed nightmare that is deeply traumatising and damaging for those who don’t pose a violent threat.
Only the worst are being kept in there, people whose actions are deeply damaging and all we are gaining is time inside where they can’t hurt the general public.
Our prison system is damaging, it takes angry hurt men and turns them into angrier monsters.
That’s why you want them out of prison!
So why is our crime rate soaring?
Let’s be honest, some certainly are sawing off their ankle bracelet and joining the Frey, but that is a single digit minority, not anywhere near what is generating the current crime wave.
What is generating the current crime wave is the same thing that is generating crime waves throughout the post-covid Western World.
The same is happening in Australia, UK, Canada and America.
Post covid societal and economic stresses causing crime waves at the same time there is 12.4% food inflation and a cost of living crisis while surviving the ongoing economic, cultural and social impacts of climate crisis storms and geopolitical shockwaves is as predictable as National having to walk something back 24 hours after Luxon says it!
Of course crime is exploding everywhere because the covid sacrifice was felt unevenly across our unequal society, pretending building more fucking prisons is a solution to all of that is sophistry at its most intellectually bankrupt.
Having the NZ Herald poll on a response to crime when they feed that response is dishonest journalism.
Increasingly having independent opinion in a mainstream media environment which mostly echo one another has become more important than ever, so if you value having an independent voice – please donate here.
If you can’t contribute but want to help, please always feel free to share our blogs on social media
.
Is the nation actually capable of producing one serious broadsheet newspaper? Just one?
The National Business Review hardly counts, as it is no longer a daily, and they can’t even afford to get it printed any more.
Most of the other papers now resemble a sort of unadventurous, mid-market tabloid — full of fluff and attacks on the poor, but little coverage of the biggest issues. Regulators allowing absolute monopolies in every daily newspaper market has been disastrous.
Hipkins and Coster did it better when they gaslit the public over the real gang crime surge after the Napier cyclone.
All those “unconfirmed reports”
“Nothing to see here people move along”
So what are the stats for NZ actually looking like?
https://m.scoop.co.nz/stories/PA2303/S00170/labour-s-lack-of-leadership-sees-crime-rate-surge.htm
“ “Data released by Police shows that total victimisations increased from 241,000 in 2017 to over 350,000 in 2022. That’s a 46 per cent increase.
“Worse still, serious assaults resulting in injury have skyrocketed from 9,800 in 2017 to 23,000 last year. That’s a 140 per cent increase.
“This is on top of the increasing number of ram raids with 886 incidents in 2022 – one every ten hours. A 551 per cent increase since 2018.”
But safer communities together?
You don’t need the media to see your local shopping centre boarded up in plywood or armoured in steel like a third world war zone as a result of crime. Its everywhere!
THere is a huge movement for the Americanisation of policing in NZ that the media is trying to stoke. They want cops to be above the law, due process to be suspended and civil liberties to be shredded. If certain people in this country had their way, cops would be able to beat and gun down who they like. Prior to 2021. No police officer in the USA was conviceted for excessive force. A cop could literally get is gun out and just shoot anyone at random, and nothing would happen to him.
Once again Bollocks .Your blogs are getting more rabid by the day .Is the thought of National/Act in charge making you unhinged.
Didn’t the NZ Herald help set up the day of shame at Albert Park 25/3/ 23 by misleading its readers about the purpose of Kellie-Jay Keen’s invite to New Zealand ? If so, then they enabled crime, including old women being bullied and bashed, and women prevented from being able to speak in a pre-booked public place. Didn’t the Herald also fail to report the violence that occurred that day, and pretend that it was all sunshine and light and inclusiveness when it was a brutal silencing of women’s voices and worse ? This isn’t just dishonest, it was gutter-level misogyny, and for no good reason except to peddle their paper in any direction which pays. IMO. It won’t last. IMO.