Many small business owners feel the Government is failing to protect them from crime and the National Party believes it's down to fewer young offenders being sent to youth justice residences.
But those running youth programmes in the community say so-called "youth prisons" aren't the answer.
These young people from South Auckland are not criminals.
But the man working with them says without the right support, it's a road they could go down.
"We are currently working with a group of eight to 12-year-olds, who if we don't do anything soon, they're going to end up in the justice system, so we need to do better, earlier," Graeme Dingle Foundation managing director Stephen Boxer said.
A recent spate of crime against small businesses by teenagers has fuelled concern about youth offending - Sunny Kaushal told the AM Show dairy owners are employing their own security guards.
"30 percent of the business owners who call me are asking how they can get the gun licence, it's gone to that serious," Kaushal said.
National's Justice spokesman Paul Goldsmith says guns are not the answer but the plea demonstrates the very real fear felt by victims of the recent attacks.
"No, we certainly wouldn't dairy owners to arm themselves for vigilante-style attacks, but that's a reflection of the pressure they're under," Goldsmith said.
Goldsmith is blaming the youth crime surge on a decrease in young offenders being admitted to Oranga Tamariki's youth justice residences.
"Look it shows we've got a rising youth crime, serious crime, we've seen it with the ram raids," he said.
Offending rates for children and young people are down by around 65 percent since ten years ago, according to the most recent Ministry of Justice figures.
Boxer says there are fewer teenagers in youth justice residences because of work like his in the community. And he says that's the right approach.
"The research even tells us that if you put intervention in the community with quality programmes, you're more likely to get a higher success rate then incarcerating a young person," Boxer said.
A trial of an early intervention programme for eight to 12-year-olds in 2015 was successful but Boxer says there's still no sustainable resource behind it from Government and that needs to change in order to keep youth crime trending down.
Instead of a focus on crime, a focus and more funding for kids like these.
