Random teenage violence has NZ very afraid

When New Zealand's suburban teenagers first began imitating the clothes, language and antisocial posturing of America's `gangsta' culture, they were laughed off as ludicrous, if unnerving, fantasists. Perhaps they still are, but 10 murders in two years, and a spate of vicious alcohol-fuelled assaults, have forced police to acknowledge they can cause a lot of harm. Tim Hume investigates an increasingly entrenched subculture of random violence which has middle class New Zealand very afraid.

One Saturday in late October, an Auckland youth gang leader by the street name of "Gucks" sends a text message to the Sunday Star-Times with a tip-off about a planned gang fight. Members of a rival Crips crew have beaten up his friend, and this is a chance for retribution. "We've got eight car loads of dudes," he says. "We've got hammers, knives. This is our chance to really get at these c***s." At about 2.30pm, a convoy of vehicles rolls into the car park of Glenfield's Marlborough Park, overwhelming the dozen-odd youths assembled in wait. There are about 50 males in total, aged from their mid-teens to their mid-20s; one twirls a baseball bat, one brandishes a hammer and another, an iron bar. A standoff ensues before, suddenly, a police car arrives, sirens blaring. The gang members scatter. The police are not unduly troubled by the confrontation; it's something to do with "colours", one suggests, gathering a hammer and crowbar left behind on the pavement.

Gucks is a part-time bartending student and small-time drug dealer who lives on a quiet street on Auckland's North Shore with his nan. The stocky 19-year-old is an engaging, gregarious character, with a catalogue of war stories, many of which go more or less like this:

"When I had just turned 15, me and my boys went to a party out in Manurewa. It was all Crips. They rolled out and blocked the driveway, like: `You're not getting in here'. My mate ripped off his singlet and pulled out a tomahawk. The other guy turned away to shield himself, and got axed in the shoulder. The dude started screaming, and we gapped it." As with many of Gucks' yarns, that's where the story ends; he has no idea what became of the victim. "We didn't know those guys or anything," he explains.

Gucks, whose "hit", or street name, stands for "Got U Counterfeit K***s Sussed", is the leader of a 20-strong street crew known as SU, or Switched Up, and, as such, is a representative of a violent criminal youth subculture which has the country very worried. A fair-complexioned former age-grade national league player of partial Pacific ancestry, Gucks explains the gangsta mentality thus: "People nowadays want to live like a pitbull. It's a dog's mentality, you want to be the top dog." He nonchalantly rattles off a litany of vicious clashes he has been party to, all played out on suburban Auckland streets: being shot at with an air-gun, mugging strangers with a crowbar, being bottled (three times), and countless tales of more mundane, but equally savage hidings. For his peers, violence is almost a form of entertainment. "People will do all sorts of stupid things to get their name around," he says. "We used to get two or three cars and go down to South Auckland and smash random people, just to get our name out."

Hip-hop-style youth gangs have existed in New Zealand for nearly 20 years, but mainstream society has never known quite what to make of them, and by default has not taken them particularly seriously. Suburban teenagers aping the subculture of American ghettos by wearing bandannas and proclaiming to be "Crip killers" have been typically dismissed as ludicrous, if slightly unnerving, fantasists. "We used to laugh at them because they were just copy-catting what they'd seen on American movies," says Inspector Jason Hewett, the policeman charged with addressing South Auckland's gang problem. "They were more of a nuisance than anything else."

That all changed in October 2005, when the first of Auckland's 10 recent youth gang-related homicides the stabbing of 38-year-old Iulio Naea, father of a Mangere gang member occurred in Otara, triggering a spate of violence which also saw a number of young men maimed, and young women pack-raped. The attacks prompted a top-level government response, including Ministry of Social Development (MSD) research into Manukau's youth gang problem. Police say the situation has calmed, but problems continue: two weeks ago a Manukau family was forced to move house after shots were fired into their home, and last week, in Te Atatu, 18-year-old Isiah Wall was nearly beaten to death in a fight with local Bloods. Meanwhile, in Wellington, police are hunting a group they describe as "pack animals", responsible for a string of assaults (one indecent) and robberies. Police Association head Greg O'Connor recently went as far as stating that the "biggest threat to New Zealand society is LA-isation of our mostly Polynesian youth".

Gucks says the concern is too little, too late: that "gangsterism" is now a deeply entrenched subculture embraced by thousands of disaffected local youth, which no amount of belated social engineering will eradicate. He was introduced to gangs in his early teens by cousins in the west Auckland neighbourhoods where he was raised. They styled themselves as "Bloods", after the notorious Los Angeles street gang, which has meant that for the past six-odd years, Gucks has decked himself in red clothes and routinely engaged in random, violent clashes with blue-clad near-strangers who model themselves on the "Crips", the Bloods' sworn enemies. The attacks are typically savage, spontaneous, and alcohol-fuelled; they can just as easily target innocent passers-by. Says Hewett: "They're drinking prior to tooling up with various weaponry, and going out looking for trouble. They use fence palings, hammers, bricks, spades pretty much anything you could pick up and strike someone with." Organised gang clashes also take place, advertised through text message: "I remember hearing of one group that tied white rags around their wrists so they could identify themselves in the darkness."

Few local gang members have ever been to the United States, let alone have any connection to the American crews they model their lifestyles upon. Hewett knows one local colours gang which made the mistake of contacting their American namesake to establish an affiliation: "The answer came back: `You're nothing to us. Pull your head in'."

Allegiances to colours are almost entirely arbitrary, Gucks explains; apart from a proclivity for Samoans to become Bloods, and Tongans Crips, aspiring gang members generally gravitate towards the colours of their friends, family, or even their favourite rappers. "When Snoop Dogg came out, everyone became a Crip," he says. "Now The Game is popular, there's heaps more Bloods around."

Says Hewett: "They might as well have just chosen to support Labour or National. There's no meaning behind it at all." While tenuous associations have developed between autonomous Crips and Bloods crews around Auckland, under the respective umbrellas of the "Crip Family" and the "Red Army", the groups have no centralised leadership, says Hewett: "There's no Bloods bank account."

But while the particular flavour of their gang affiliation may be superficial, the culture they buy into runs deep. Local youth gangs subscribe to a set of values imported from predominantly black, urban American areas where the level of social dysfunction dwarfs that of New Zealand's roughest streets. The culture comes with its own soundtrack the commercially-dominant strain of hip hop known as gangsta rap, which makes an art form of hyper-macho posturing, glamourises violence, and espouses credos of casual misogyny, unyielding gang loyalty, and contempt for the police.

The gangsta uniform, such a common sight it barely warrants description, consists of oversized clothing, coloured bandannas, baseball caps, and occasionally t-shirts emblazoned with gang names, or, less frequently, the names and images of deceased friends. The vocabulary, too, is heavily Americanised; crews from Manukau have appropriated the "Dirty South" mantle of rappers from southern US states as their own. While the definition of the term "hoodrat" seems to have got lost in translation somewhere between Compton and Mangere from a "promiscuous ghetto woman" to a "lowly neighbourhood gangsta" much of the terminology has been adopted without modification; local Crips and Bloods use the American pejoratives "crabs" and "slobs" to insult each other. The culture has become so deeply ingrained, particularly amongst Polynesian youth, that even American gangsta rapper Snoop Dogg, one of the subculture's biggest exponents, seemed taken aback on a recent visit, remarking to an Auckland audience that: "We've got to be related somewhere back along the line."

The adoption of foreign, music-oriented youth cultures by local teenagers isnothing new, with each successive pop cultural movement importing antisocial aspects to greater or lesser extents: hippydom's drug culture, punk's nihilism, Goth's morbidity. But none, save perhaps the virtually extinct youth tribe of racist skinheads, has proven anywhere near as pathological, atavistic and violently antisocial as gangsta culture. While gangs, too, have long been part of New Zealand's social landscape, never has their lifestyle been promoted through such an influential mass culture medium.

Hewett, the police representative on the multi-agency network established to combat Auckland's gang problem, can understand hip-hop's special appeal to New Zealand's Polynesian youth. "Most rappers are from ethnic minorities and come from deprived backgrounds, and people here from a similar background feel a kinship to that," he says. But he despairs of the subculture's influence on his patch, which he blames for exacerbating the already tribalistic and violent tendencies of teenage males. Youth gangs "didn't feature on anyone's radar" until Naea's killing, he says, after which the problem escalated dramatically. He blames extensive media reporting of the issue for inspiring the formation of a slew of copy-cat gangs. "The perception was every young person in South Auckland was in a youth gang," he says.

But MSD research found the vast majority were "wannabes": teenagers who form groups with ABC-style names, wear colours, throw signs and proclaim to be hardened criminals, but in reality may only dabble in occasional petty crime. The research defined them as not gang members at all, but little more than poseurs, whose ephemeral groupings were loosely structured and easily disbanded. They posed no real threat to society, other than the tendency for some of their number to graduate to more organised groups: territorial crews, which commit opportunistic crimes and violently defend their turf; unaffiliated criminal youth gangs, which commit crimes for their own benefit; and affiliated criminal youth gangs, which offend on behalf of traditional adult gangs, like Black Power, often as part of a "prospecting", or recruiting, process.

The hordes of posturing wannabes make it difficult to gauge actual youth gang numbers. The research cites a police estimate of 600 youth gang members in Manukau, representing 73 crews; some media reports have pegged gang membership Auckland-wide at 2000, a figure Hewett rubbishes. What is clear, he says, is that youth gang activity, once acute, has calmed significantly over the past year, progress he attributes to strengthened anti-gang measures. Police initiatives have included youth action teams patrolling "hot spots", while the MSD has boosted youth worker numbers, appointed social workers to assist 133 gang families, and opened three short-stay "reception centres" for young offenders picked up by the police. "There's no greater statistic than counting murders," says Hewett, "and we haven't had a homicide in about a year."

Hip-hop, invariably, is the accompaniment to a Saturday night spent driving around Auckland with Gucks and his friends, in an effort to shed light on their lifestyle. The boys are in a cheerily antisocial mood that sees them ridicule the Polynesian server at the McDonald's drive-through for her "fob" (fresh off the boat) accent, then methodically dispose of every piece of their meal's packaging out the car window. Discussion centres around the previous night's party, to which they were unexpectedly denied entrance: Gucks says it's because the hosts were racist; his mate, Sysk, believes it was more likely because the girls in their group wanted to bash the host's girlfriends. Sysk gauges reaction to a proposed new tattoo: "F–-", on one forearm, "You", on the other. There follows a brief but heated debate on which popular rappers are "faggots", before Gucks seizes upon a conversational lull to take up one of his favourite topics: wannabe gangstas who trade on his name to boost their own standing. An acquaintance, a Takapuna white boy who lives in his parents' "million-dollar house", comes in for particularly heavy criticism. "He's got this crew called Notorious Affiliates, but there's only one affiliate him," laughs Gucks, neglecting to mention a graphic on his own Bebo page trumpets the unity between SU and Notorious Affiliates as though it were some sort of North Shore youth gang supergroup.

For a definitive exposition of gangsta self-identity, it's hard to go past Gucks' Bebo page. Virtually every gangsta has an account on the online networking site. Video clips of fights are posted ("People try to film the hidings so they can shame the guy even more," explains Gucks) and insults are routinely traded between gangs, which occasionally spill over into real-world fights. It's little wonder the site is routinely monitored by police for intelligence on the gang scene. Gucks' page features a video of him fanning thousands of dollars in drug money, and photographs of his marijuana plants, his graffiti "hits", and various menacing-looking Bloods associates. A series of pictures features him posing with a rifle, an axe and a hammer, his face obscured with a bandanna. ("A mate's dad's hunting rifle," he explains.) There are heroes and villains: pictures of his imprisoned Mongrel Mobster uncle, and a digitally manipulated image of members of the rival Dope Money Sex gang, with phalluses scrawled on their faces.

Gucks started SU when he moved to the Shore several years ago; its ranks swiftly grew with teenagers seeking status in the social pecking order, and protection from other gangs. Also: girls. The 60/40 rule, he says, holds that "60% of girls like gangstas, 40% don't": "They get the jungle fever, these rich girls." The recruits are generally teenagers who have dropped out of school or have troubled home lives, although many gangs also have one or two "rich boys", prized for their expensive cars.

Gucks' atypical family upbringing places him somewhere between these two social groups. While he has family gang connections, he spent eight years of his childhood far removed from that scene, growing up in Europe where his father was a professional athlete. He lived with his mother on his return to New Zealand, but became estranged from her in his early teens after assaulting her new partner, for which he was arrested. He was sent to the islands for a year to "straighten him out"; it didn't work. On returning, he moved in with a woman, whom he met through the courts, who routinely takes in Child Youth and Family charges; he now calls her "nan". He remains estranged from his mother, but has contact with his father, who has a well-paid job overseas, and who he hopes will help him buy a nightclub.

These days, Gucks says he is trying to leave the gang life behind; inspired by a conversation with his incarcerated uncle, he resolved to "put down his colours" at the start of the year. But while he has attempted to moderate his behaviour, not a great deal has changed; he still dresses in red and gets in trouble. His plans for the immediate future are in constant flux; one week he is planning to "go straight", the next, he is embarking on a new criminal enterprise. In recent weeks, he has been lying low from the police, after a search warrant was obtained for his house.

Gucks' friend, Sysk, an 18-year-old kitchenhand, also has his own crew. They go by the initials GLN, for Glenfield, or, if you like backronyms, "Gangstas Love Nothing". His picaresque life story is characterised by poor decision-making, such as the time he was expelled from high school, for a second time: "We were drinking on school grounds, found an axe, and cut down some trees," he laughs. The decision to start a crew was equally rashly considered. "One day we thought how boss it would be if we started a crew wearing green." Why? "Because it's different. And because we smoke lots of buds. They're green."

GLN's activities amount to little more than "getting pissed, stealing shit, scrapping". They go to parties in a large group, for show, and for protection. "There will always be someone there who will have a problem with someone you're with," he says. Like Gucks, he has mellowed his behaviour since reaching the age of criminal responsibility; he stopped carrying a flick-knife after a drunken scare when he was confronted by an irate neighbour at a rowdy party. "I pulled out the knife, and it went into his neck a bit," he says. "People were texting me: have you stabbed someone? I was like, `Yeah, sort of'. The guy hadn't really done anything to me. It's an eye-opener you could kill someone just because you were drunk."

Gucks says there's nothing fraudulent in New Zealand teenagers acting like gangstas: "They feel it's who they are." But although he and Sysk would never admit to being "wannabes", they acknowledge many of their peers only do it for the image. Says Sysk: "There's some parts of Auckland where you actually need to do crime just to get by. But over here, you've got people rolling round in BMWs. They just act the way they do because they want to be gangsta." Says Gucks: "You hear guys around here saying: `Bring on westside, bring on southside, bring on eastside: naughty north!' I'm like, dude, go to Otara and see how that works out for you."

In the McCafe at Otara Town Centre, Karlos Diamond is insisting that Crips and Bloods is "little kid shit". "Having said that, you can laugh at them and say they're wannabes, but if you're by yourself, they'll f--- you up." It's hard to imagine; an imposing part-time bouncer, with three gold teeth and a head full of creases from hammer and machete blows, Diamond doesn't seem the type to often come off second best. Otara born and bred, Diamond is an underground gangsta rapper by the stage name of Mr Sicc, and the older brother of rapper Young Sid, a rising hip-hop star. The 20-something stepson of a former motorcycle gang leader, Diamond is a towering Maori who speaks with less bluster than his North Shore counterparts. He is a founding member of one of Otara's main street gangs, the BTWs Bad Troublesome Ward which grew out of a territorial colours gang he joined with his neighbourhood friends, aged 11.

"Everyone was into Crips and Bloods; you were either into that, or sports," he says. "In Otara, there's a little crew on almost every street." His take on escalations in Auckland's gang scene is that bravado-fuelled young gangstas, seeking notoriety, are becoming more recklessly violent, without considering the blowback that will inevitably come their way. "If you're willing to hit someone with weapons, then you've got to be prepared to take it."

BTW is a heavy crew, involved indrugs, formed about four years ago to unify competing colours gangs in Diamond's neighbourhood. I encountered some of their members on assignment two years ago; of the four members interviewed that night, three are currently in prison, one of them facing charges for bashing 17-year-old Riki Mafi to death with a baseball bat.

Diamond says his gang mates are nowadays more focused on family, and, like their Otara counterparts the Killer Beez, trying to launch as hip-hop artists. "But at the end of the day, if you want to be a dick around us, you'll get a hiding." Diamond has stabbed people, and been stabbed himself; he's been shot at, and seen one of his brothers shot. But he never realised how divorced from normality his lifestyle was, until he left Otara for a music tour to Australia. "It's only when you go out of that environment that you realise how f---ed up it is," he says. "But, you know, it's exciting. It's fun."

While some young South Aucklanders join crews for status, and some for drug money, others are seeking protection, and a sense of family. Others are simply swept along by their mates. "If you show weakness around here, then you're an easy target for bullies," says Diamond. And I don't mean bullies like everywhere else. When it comes to Islanders and Maoris, they don't talk, they give you a hiding," he says. "If you're by yourself, you've got to have your machete or hammer. And if you get a hiding, you call your boys for your guns. At the end of the day, it's either you or them."

Diamond, who, through his music, considers himself a "news reporter", says gangs make sense in impoverished Manukau, where 94% of people in Otara and 78% of people in Mangere live in areas ranked decile nine and 10 on the national deprivation index. He says poverty, and its accompanying social problems, is responsible for Otara's violence, not hip-hop culture. Violence is endemic in the homes of many poor families, so it should come as no surprise that it's reflected on the streets. "We don't get told to stand in the corner when we're bad," he says. "Your parents are drinking, beating you up; you see people getting chased down the road with machetes." The education system is too flimsy a lifeline to rescue most from this kind of dysfunction; Diamond left high school with no qualifications. "I tried to do good, but if you bring your homework to your mum and she says, `Go away', then you think, `f--- this'."

Diamond is representative of what youth worker Allan Va'a calls a "lost generation" of South Auckland youth. Va'a, who has been working for 20 years to "flip the script" for Otara's young people (including Diamond in his younger days) has been deeply involved in the recent spate of violence; the clashes of October 2005 saw two young men virtually left for dead on his doorstep, prompting him to help establish 274, an MSD-funded youth work project. The young people he deals with are profoundly alienated from society; they have no concept of empathy, they don't know right from wrong.

"They haven't connected with mainstream stuff like family, culture, sports or school, and they're carrying these chips on their shoulder."

While for some, older gang members may be their only role models, not all come from bad homes; government research found parental disengagement was often a consequence of low-paid parents working multiple jobs. Similarly, gang members may not always be recognisably "bad kids"; George Naea, who was convicted of injuring two rival gang members with intent in attacks which led to the retributive killing of his father, was a school prefect, youth group leader and aspiring missionary. The solution, says Va'a, is to connect with teenagers on their level, and engage them in pro-social activities which bolster their compromised sense of morality.

In her North Shore living room, Gucks' "nan", Una Tohu, is recalling the night their house was attacked by the Crips. "It was the most terrifying night of my life," says the 59-year-old cleaner, relating how four carloads of armed youths surged up her driveway to give Gucks a hiding. A catalyst for the confrontation, claims Gucks, was that he had recently beaten a Crip's high score in an arcade punching game. Following a confrontation that resembled a medieval siege, they repelled the invaders; Tohu's adult children slept in their car on the driveway that night in case they returned.

Tohu is a permissive sort. She has no objections to Gucks' drug dealing, and can see a positive side to gangs in the way they provide social connections for disconnected teenagers, drawing them out of their shells. Gangs will never disappear, she says, but, if engaged in constructive activities, they could be more of a positive force. Her own children went off the rails as teenagers, something she attributes to poor communication within the family.

"That's the root of all evil, the lack of communication," she says. "You're too busy working for the dollar to find the time to talk. The kids slip out the back door and you never even see them go."

In the corner, Gucks' nine-year-old "little bro" is playing on the computer. Does Tohu think he will be able to avoid following Gucks' path? "I hope so, but how do you do that, except keeping a tight rein on him?" she says. Later, in the car, Gucks tells a different story. "He's hard out into his red, but he keeps it on the down low," he says admiringly, adding the boy has already beaten up a 14-year-old. "He's going to be a hard little dude."

Several days before publication, Gucks sends another text message to the Sunday Star-Times, pleading to have his name taken out of the story. It grates to consider absolving him of accountability for actions over which he has exhibited considerable bravado and little remorse. But eventually he wins his case, when it becomes clear his concern is less over police interest in his activities, than a sincere fear that being identified would ruin the tentative steps he is taking to repair his estranged relationship with his mother. "Her side of the family will disown me if they read this," he says. "It will ruin everything." It's hardly very gangsta, but that's not a bad thing.