A former drug dealer, who's spent half his life in prison, says gangs are a scourge and must be outlawed.
Rotorua-based Billy McFarlane once ran a large methamphetamine operation in the Bay of Plenty, for which he was jailed in maximum security prison for 14 years, following earlier incarcerations.
Now he runs a residential rehabilitation programme for ex-offenders called Pūwhakamua. But gang members are not welcome in the programme, and he says he's turned down hundreds of them.
Photo: supplied
Billy McFarlane says he's worried that gang numbers are growing, and in Rotorua, there have been gang skirmishes even in primary schools between children of gang families.
“We know in South Auckland there’s over 50 street gangs. This is not predominantly the main gangs that we know of in New Zealand, these are other gangs that are starting up too, the culture is bubbling underneath as well.
“There’s over 80 gangs in New Zealand, a lot of them people don’t even know anything about, so we’re counting the problem at a lower level I believe.
“The other day I watched a man walking his child to school with his gang colours on, holding his child’s hand in the same colour as his gang.”
Last month, Police Minister Poto Williams told parliament there are nearly 7700 gang members on the police national gang list, an increase of 2300 in five years.
Meanwhile, legislation giving police more powers to seize illegal firearms and assets from gang members was rejected by Parliament on Wednesday night.
McFarlane tells Kathryn Ryan that a lack of action and increase in gang numbers will only make dealing with gangs worse in the coming years.
“Our whānau are shooting each other in the streets, and when I looked at all the gang activity that is going on in the country in the last month, I was appalled, it’s not getting any better.
“I suppose the first thing we need to is make our minds up whether we’re going to do something about it or not, talk is cheap and we can’t keep talking about the problem, we have to put some action in behind that talk.”
He doesn’t believe the influx of 501 deportations from Australia is to blame for the majority of New Zealand’s gang problem.
“That’s an excuse, in my opinion, for what’s going on.
“We also keep blaming the gangs for the drug problem, and some gang members are not doing drugs or dealing drugs and some gangs won’t allow that stuff to happen around them.
“But a lot of the people that are driving the drug stuff are not even gang members, some of them are businessmen, some of them are sitting in high places organising these big drug organisations.”
Poverty is one of the biggest drivers for gangs, he says.
“If we wind the clock right back to the times of colonisation and the land confiscations, when you take people who are tangata whenua and you take everything off them, you take their land off them too and you disenfranchise them, you push them into a poverty space.
“Māori people have become tenants on their own land.
“We can also talk about the urban drift which caused our people to go away from their marae and move into state homes, where they’ve actually lost their sense of identity, so they’re brought up not really knowing who they are, being called Māori but not practising Māori values.
“We’ve also got the poor influence of adults in these children’s lives and so they’re growing up in gang spaces, they never really knew any different either because their parents put those colours on them when they were in a cot.”
But prisons have also become breeding grounds for recruitment, he says. Corrections figures show that as of late February, there were about 2700 gang-affiliated prisoners.
“I think we’ve also got to offer some other opportunities because the opportunity that’s on sale right now is jail.
“If you’re a potential or prospecting gang member and you go to prison, you’re just going to fall right into your space, where you’re just going to really get closer to your gang, not further away from it.”
He believes gang presence on the streets, including wearing of patches and affiliation colours, needs to be outlawed, but he also says that alone won’t resolve the issue.
“We have responsibility to the public, we have a responsibility to keep them safe, so you know, in Australia, they’ve outlawed them, they’re not allowed to wear their patches out in the street. Do something about it, make a difference now before it’s too late.
“We’ve got our own Māori people accepting it like it’s okay to bring those patches on to our marae now. That disgusts me.
“There’s a reason why we won’t take gang members on Pūwhakamua, it’s because of the strength of the gang culture, we don’t do Christianity on Pūwhakamua because of the strength of Christianity culture.
“Our Christianity has moved on to our marae now and it’s changing our tikanga and now we’ve got gangs moving on to our marae and changing our tikanga too.”
In addition to not allowing active gang members join his programme, he also makes sure they’re ready to fully embrace tikanga Māori.
It has already steered some on the right path, he says.
“When I set up a unit in Kohuora in Auckland’s south, the first thing was ‘let’s go and talk to the gang leaders’, because they are going to have the biggest influence inside the prison.
“I sat with eight gang leaders in their prison and it was a unanimous decision for them all to accept our culture because they all wanted change. These are gang leaders that were willing to influence men under them and they wanted some cultural information to help them live their lives better.”
