Tuesday, July 08, 2014

Gangs: an idea with promise

Here's an interesting idea:

The Dunedin City Council is investigating giving council contracts to Notorious Mongrel Mob and Black Power.
This comes after the once warring gangs made national headlines when they gave a joint submission at annual plan hearings in May, asking councillors to consider giving them a contract to maintain some of the council's green space.

More

I was a bit surprised there are many gang members down in Dunedin to be honest. But if the work units combined older and younger members they might provide a really valuable solution to a serious social problem. Older members burn out and want a better way of living. The difficulty is peresuading their offspring to take a new path.

Their visibility would also give the wider community the chance to acknowledge and include gangs. There's risk but probably more to each other than outsiders. And of course they would be doing another contractor out of work. But if they come in with a competitive price the ratepayers win too. If it had anything to do with me I'd keep an open mind.

2 comments:

Jigsaw said...

I always think about Muldoon and his attitude to the gangs which of course in the end did nothing whatever to solve the problem and indeed probably made it worse. Gangs are a blight on our society.

Anonymous said...

Got to be better than NZ's real gangs: unions.

Better the Mob & Power than NZEI & PPTA!