Posts by Matthew Poole
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I was thankful to see an article in Granny last year about how the long-term homicide rate in NZ is declining. We're in the bottom quartile of the world for murders-per-10,000, and always have been. The year-on-year figures have significant variability, but the trend, contrary to what the likes of McThicker and Garrett would have us believe, is downward. To find a place in the US that has similar or fewer murders per year than NZ (that's absolute, not per-capita), one has to look at places like Honolulu (population: less than Auckland), or smaller. Nowhere with a similar population in the US, UK, Australia or Canada is anywhere close to NZ, or even Auckland if one compares cities with similar populations.
Murder is the classic indicator of violent crime trends, since it tends not to suffer from reporting bias or changes in how statistics are gathered, but rarely do we see any acknowledgement from the media that this violence trend is unarguably in negative territory.
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Graham, did you mean triable summarily? Coz from that list I see missing murder, manslaughter, unlawful sexual connection, various crimes with "aggravated" in the name...
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Graeme, is there a schedule of offences that can be tried summarily? Or is it based on the maximum sentence?
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Preventive detention is just a way of giving life sentences to those who commit offences that don't carry life sentences.
Most people don't understand this, even some law students (such as a former flatmate).
If more people "got" that PD already allows judges to send recidivist violent/sexual offenders away under the same terms as a murderer's life sentence, it might quench some of the blood lust that our society has going on. Or maybe not, given the comprehension skills of the average MOTP.
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Heh. This is where I do my 'honestly, I can't really hear the qualitative difference between a 192 mp3, a FLAC and an LP' thing, and all the audiophile nerds look at me in abject horror. Sorry guys. :)
You may as well just tell them that you can't tell the difference between fingernails on a chalk board and their umpty-squillion-dollar hi-fi system :P
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And I'll be thinking of y'all while I'm sweating away in Honiara. Kinda glad I was intending to buy my BDO ticket this weekend, since I now can't make it.
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In fact, wasn't 1990ish the peak of the satanic abuse panic?
Ellis was convicted in '93, so about then. And look at how wonderful that beat-up was. We got a conviction that looks decidedly shaky, especially when the interviews of "victims" are viewed through the lens of current best-practice in child interviewing. "Something must be done", "Won't somebody think of the children", etc.
In any case, you have to go back more than 30 years if you're looking for a golden age of child safety. Even if it's a fake one.
I can't go back very much further than 20 years before it's just hearsay. I can, at least, speak from person experience if we limit things to the mid-80s onward. Even living in South Auckland it was entirely normal for kids to disappear all day, with no fixed destination, right through the end of the 80s.
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12 months home detention
This for multiple convictions of crimes carrying maximum penalties of $300,000 and five years in jail.
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'Yes, you can go play in the park unsupervised. That paedophile hasn't been seen in this area for a while...'.
Oh yeah, the world has changed.
No, it hasn't. The perception has changed. The hysteria over paedophiles lurking behind every bush, waiting to entice a child away to their lair, is so over-blown it's ridiculous. The number of children sexually abused by a stranger is a single-figure percentage of the total. Most sexual abuse is carried out by family, or by friends of family. Your daughters are statistically safer playing in the park than they are playing in their own home, or playing at their grandparents' homes, or playing at the homes of friends.
Stranger danger is minimal, but don't let that get in the way of your belief that the world has become a more-dangerous place. It's more dangerous to cross the road, because there are more cars. But, really, that's about it. The only real change is perception. I've never seen a shred of evidence that the world is actually a more dangerous place for children now than it was 20 years ago, excepting incidents involving road safety where increased numbers of vehicles coupled with decreased child experience (because parents insist that it's too dangerous to even teach their children about safety around roads) can only lead to a riskier environment for children.
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Some things that Myers did would have been illegal had we had a takeovers code at the time.
He would likely have been told he'd been a very naughty boy, maybe given two slaps with a wet bus ticket, and sent back to play in the corporate sandpit. This isn't mere cynicism talking, either, because we've just seen this woeful sentence handed out to a guy who wilfully and actively lied to investors and to the Securities Commission. 12 months home detention for $6.5m that's probably entirely gone? What a fucking joke.