pn929. If Sam Uffindell had been Māori, how would the law have dealt with him?

Morgan Godfrey **

"OPINION: It seems obvious, but it’s worth stating for the record that if Sam Uffindell, the National Party MP who gang-bashed a third former while he was a fifth form boarder at Auckland’s King’s College, was a Māori student with a violent temperament he never would have had the opportunity to quietly depart his prestigious school, enter university two years later, and enjoy a lucrative career in finance."

So opens this Morgan Godfrey article.  Here are  other snippets to read, with my bold emphases, before reading the full article. 

"What, then, explains the difference between his treatment and the treatment of the mostly Māori men and women who are imprisoned for the same violence or less? Ethnicity, obviously. In 2020 JustSpeak found hat police were almost twice as likely to charge a Māori offender as they were a Pākehā offender apprehended for the same crime. (see note below).   In this sense, Uffindell benefits from an accident of birth. He happens to be Pākehā.     

"But equally important is Uffindell’s class. He’s obviously a wealthy man, and he comes from a family with the means to educate their children privately. When upper middle-class people commit violence, the consequences are either non-existent or so minor as to amount to a mere inconvenience. For Uffindell, the consequences appeared to amount to inconvenience, quietly shifting schools and continuing life more or less as normal.

"No-one in New Zealand demonstrates this aphorism more ably than Uffindell. In his maiden speech to Parliament the Tauranga MP attacked “gangs” and a “growing culture of lawlessness, lack of accountability, a sense of impunity, and significant underlying generational social problems”. 

'It takes an impressive cognitive dissonance to make these claims, calling for a tough on crime approach without taking even a moment to self-reflect on whether that makes one a hypocrite. 

But Uffindell is in the in-group whom the law protects but does not bind. Gangs are an out-group whom the law binds but does not protect."

Note,  JustSpeak: Our research shows that when first encountering police, Māori who have had no prior contact with the justice system are 1.8 times at risk of a police proceeding and seven times  more likely to be charged by Police, than Europeans. When someone is charged they are more likely to end up trapped in the justice system. Their chance of re-offending increases with negative outcomes for whānau and communities.   

** Morgan Godfery (Te Pahipoto, Te Arawa; Samoa) is a senior lecturer in the department of marketing at the University of Otago. He has a background in journalism and public policy, including as a parliamentary staffer with the Labour Party.  He is currently the te ao Māori editor at Metro and a fortnightly columnist for both the Guardian and Stuff. 

-- ACW