Helen and her bottleshop blame game

Helen Clark wants to get rid of some bottle shops. She has had another failing knee-jerk reaction and has made a decision on the grounds of "appearing to do something". She said that she wanted Parliament to revisit liquor laws to cut the number of liquor outlets in poor areas, after the Manurewa bottle store shooting. Fat lot of good that will do. It's not how many outlets there are in an area, but the attitudes of the people in an area to crime and alcohol,and what the people in an area do with the booze when they get it that is more important, and how the police respond to crime. According to John Key, the number of sworn officers per head of population in Counties Manukau is the second-lowest in the country.

Figures from Statistics NZ show that in 2006 Manukau City had one off-licensed premise for every 1778 people compared to one for every 942 in Christchurch. But as Cameron Slater notes, in Manurewa ward there are 33 off licence liquor outlets for a population of 80,000 or one booze outlet for 2400 citizens.Clevedon has 11 off licences for a population of 10,000 citizens or one for every 833 citizens.

Going by Clark’s suggestion, there should be nearly three times as many bodies piling up in the streets of Clevedon than Manurewa.

The PM does not comment as to why the knee jerk reaction is this year. It must be election year. She has refused to comment on the fact that attackers of bottles stores have a certain similarity. Here are some recent attacks and killings over the past few years. Spot the similarity. one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve.

That similarity is a more relevant variable than the number of liquor stores in an area. Richer whiter people are unlikely to attack or kill people in bottle stores.