New Zealand's foremost expert on gangs says there's a simple explanation for why gang violence is trending downward - they're mostly old men.
Figures released to Newshub show violent offending by gang members or their prospects has dropped 10 percent since 2014. Sociologist Jarrod Gilbert, author of Patched: The History of Gangs in New Zealand, says the trend has been evident since the 1990s.
"If you're old enough to remember the gang wars of the '70s or '80s, or if you're like me you went through the media archive and looked at them, the inter-gang battles were huge - even into the 1990s," he told The AM Show on Monday.
"We just don't see that level of violence now."
Since the publication of Patched in 2013, Mr Gilbert says gangs have started recruiting more, and are in "pretty rude health". But they're still largely made up of those who joined in the days before Once Were Warriors.
"In the '70s and '80s, into the '90s, [being in a gang] was a young man's game. In the '70s and '80s if you were 30, you would have been seen as an old man. Nowadays, 30 would be seen as young - you've got people in the gangs who are 50 and 60.
"And what we do know from crime data and recidivism data is that violent offending drops away as you age. As the gangs have aged, the violent crime has come down - that's what we'd expect to see, and that's what we are seeing."
He also says gangs are more likely to cooperate in criminal enterprises nowadays, having learned that violence is "bad for business".
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Lifetime Black Power member Denis O'Reilly told Newshub the statistics rang true.
"My own experience is that it's a lot less violent out there than it was in the 1970s, where we had the big pubs and Jake the Muss wandering around town," he said, referring to the terrifying character portrayed by Temuera Morrison in the 1994 film.
Cathy Toi-Cassidy from the Gang Intelligence Centre said they only collect data on New Zealand gangs, and suggested "deportees" from Australia may have set up local chapters of their gangs back across the ditch.
Newshub.
