Team Vision: World Police

Lock your doors! Board up your windows! Plant possum traps amongst the petunias! Don't answer that phone - they might be calling from inside the house!

Yes, like the script of a bad horror movie, the Diva burst forth into the press yesterday with the headline "Gangs pluck prospects from schools - Laws", alleging that Black Power and Mongrel Mob gangs are recruiting directly from Wanganui schools.

While the only actual evidence of this happening was in Auckland, the lack of facts didn't deter the Diva. "It's happening right here in Wanganui too - not so much the loss of policing control as the gang intimidation of our youth and the recruitment of Black Power and Mongrel Mob prospects straight from school."

Why? Because "...most of our policy-makers and potentates in Wanganui are white, live on St. John's Hill, send their kids to private school and... have little experience of the issue."

"But Mickey, aren't you a white potentate, don't you live on St John's Hill and don't you send your kids to private school?" we asked rhetorically, before returning to the tirade.

"The white middle class tends to place their children in either (Wanganui) Collegiate or High School - and that has severely weakened Wanganui City, Wanganui Girls and Cullinane."

So... the Black Power and the Mongrel Mob are recruiting from Wanganui Girls, it seems. One can only imagine the nefarious goings-on at the local Mob HQ - netball games, hair plaiting and knife fights about who's the best on NZ Idol.

And all this could be prevented simply by ensuring more middle class white folks sent their daughters to school there. How this works is unclear, other than by diluting the pool of potential recruits because we all know that nice white kids never go off the rails.

Wanganui police initially had no comment to make, but today said they "were not aware of any incidents of gangs recruiting from schools" (our emphasis).

In a story which is devoted mostly to repeating the Diva's unsupported scare-mongering, the report finally gets round to quoting no less an authority than Principal Youth Court Judge Andrew Becroft, formerly of Wanganui, who told the Christchurch Press youth crime wasn’t skyrocketing. Not anywhere, and specially not in Wanganui, it seems.

But that won't stop the Diva beating the law'n'order drum ahead of the buy-election. It's one of only two tactics he and Winston ever learned. Reduced to their core, they're both the same: Bad people are coming to get you. Only we can save you. Expect a warning about people who look different moving into Wanganui any day now.

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