Pakeha judicial system blamed

Press, 4 October 1985, Page 1

Pakeha judicial system blamed

New Zealand’s pakeha judicial system had only itself to blame for the high proportion of Maori people appearing in crime statistics, said a Christchurch lawyer yesterday. Speaking at a Christchurch seminar on young offenders, a barrister and solicitor who regularly appears in the Children and Young Persons Court, Mr Mike Knowles, said that Maori and other Polynesian people were going to prison in disproportionate numbers. “If you are a young Maori you are 11 times more likely to appear on a complaint and nine times more likely to appear in the children’s court on a criminal charge,” he said. Crime statistics dealt only with reported pro-

cesses of crime, such as those reported to court and cases subject to the same sort of decision in court, he said. “These statistics don’t necessarily tell us about the majority of crime in society.” Because of the disproportionate statistics, police operations which were based on those figures tended to concentrate on places where Maori people met, worked and drank. “Think hard about drawing the inference that Maori people are natural criminals and are committing most of the offences in our society,” said Mr Knowles. “I suggest there are obvious reasons for the statistics. We don’t get anywhere near to dealing with the statistical data unless we

are prepared to acknowledge that there may be something in our historical past in the pakeha treatment of . the indigenous people in this land that may be something to do with that data. “Racism is occurring on a personal and an institutional level.” Mr Knowles was addressing about 100 people from the Justice Department, the Social Welfare Department, the Maori community, the police, and those involved in community welfare organisations attending a two-day seminar on young offenders. “You see a young Maori who appears before the court wearing tattered jeans with his or her head bowed, with a tattooed face, no money, with legal aid. “How easy is it for justice

to be given to a person confronted by people of a different face, obviously more articulate and obviously in a system where that person has little opportunity to talk about what is happening to his or her life and the society in which he or she lives? “Any of us who have been on a marae knows that that is one place where people can talk’ and can talk directly. They don’t need lawyers or judges. “I suggest that the criminal justice system gives no opportunity to a person in a culture different from our European culture to express anything at all.” Mr Knowles said that the judicial system “didn’t work too x badly” for a pakeha. He quoted a case before the Children’s Board (pre-

liminary to the court hearing) where two young offenders came before the board. The first was a young Maori boy, on a charge of stealing a chocolate bar — his first offence. After him came a pakeha boy charged with stealing a cassette recorder from a car that he had broken into. “The young Maori boy was a person ‘at risk’, so he went to court. The young pakeha had-a good family, a dad who could pay back the money. He was no risk to us so he didn’t go to court. “If you want to continue with the methods of dealing with crime like this we are simply going to increase the racial tension in our society.” Mr Knowles said the Maori people had the resources, on the marae, to deal with their own people in their own ways. “They are the experts. I suggest we start realising that and start, particularly in the criminal justice system, in dealing more with our own criminals — the large companies, the tax evaders — and acknowledge the value of the Maori community and the strength of the Maori leadership and perhaps give them a go.” Mr Knowles’ comments were echoed by a Christchurch Maori elder and the co-ordinator of Maatua Whangai, the Social Welfare, Justice, and Maori Affairs departments’ community care programme for young Maori children at

risk, Mr Joe Karetai. “Over the last year we have taken off the streets of Christchurch something like 160 kids. We have sent them home to their, families from North Cape to Bluff,” he said. “There are times when they need their faces turned homewards, to be sent there and the wheels cut from under them for a time.” Mr Karetai said that society needed to start looking back and readopting basic principles of Christianity, such as love and good will. “It is a long way back and some of us are reluctant to make the trip, but we are going to' stay that way until we change our attitudes.” The young people in the streets lacked support and love, and lived in a vacuum created by that lack. The young people needed the teaching of several decades of elders to replace the materialistic modern world of the streets. Pakeha society thrived on double standards — “How do you teach a young Maori kid who turns on a television at night, hears the most foul language used, then goes out the next day and uses it and ends up in the children’s court?” There had been a “heritage of injustice” placed on Maori people, going back to the pakehas taking Maori land, Mr Karetai said. “The bitterness breeds down through generations.”