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I can't say I buy his argument about asset seizure at any level being a reasonable departure from the bill of rights, just like how we have roadside breath tests and they violate the right against unreasonable search.
It rightly should be a much higher threshold imo. So many stories out of the US of the police legally robbing people using asset forfeiture and the onus being on the person to jump through hoops to get stuff back, often they don't.
A higher burden of proof, certainly, but less than 30k is still a large amount of money.
Isn't assuming gang members are Maori kinda racist?
Potentially, unless the data indicates that the majority of gang members are Maori. But even if they are, anti-gang legislation isn't anti-Maori. The legislation isn't targeting their ethnicity, it's targeting their illegal actions.
That's exactly what I find unbelievable about this, the government isn't deliberately targeting Maori, merely that a significant portion of gang members are Maori. And I don't think that should be a barrier to stopping them.
The whole comment is ridiculous.
Well there seem to be two main ways from what I've read:
throwing a disportionate amount of policing attention and resourcing at gangs, because in the public image they're scary brown people and highly visible, relative to other crimes like tax evasion, domestic violence etc
racial profiling, because the proposed definitions of what constitutes a 'gang' have to be so subjective that it's rife for abuse in its enforcement. The govt is apparently considering the colours red and blue, and the letter M for the purposes of the patch ban, for example. Police will inevitably use more signifiers than that when determine where and who to enforce it on.
throwing a disportionate amount of policing attention and resourcing at gangs, because in the public image they're scary brown people
Do you have any experience with gangsters? They're not the type of people you want in your community. It doesn't matter if they're white, yellow, red, brown, black, or green. Gangsters typically engage in all of the behaviors that you want to eliminate in a healthy society. Gangs make money and obtain power through illegal activities such as drug dealing and trafficking, human trafficking, prostitution, extortion, and racketeering. They control their territories through violence, murder, and intimidation. We're on a truly terrible path as a society if we're willing to tolerate those activities from a group just because we're afraid of appearing racist.
because in the public image they're scary brown people and highly visible,
You do understand gangs make a concerted effort to be scary and highly visible, right? The nail that sticks up gets hammered.
