Gangs are going global and so is the illegal gun trade – NZ can do more to fight it

According to the Global Organised Crime Index, international criminal activity has increased over the past two years. And the politically fractured post-pandemic world has made this even harder for nations to combat.

New Zealand is far from immune. According to official advice in late March to Minister of Customs and Associate Minister of Police Casey Costello:

The threat posed by organised crime in New Zealand has increased substantially in the last five years. Even with the best of will, New Zealand is losing the fight.

New criminal groups are becoming active here – from Burma via Malaysia, to the Comancheros and Mongols gangs. Each brings new networks, violent tactics and the potential to corrupt institutions in New Zealand and throughout the Pacific.

As of October 2024, the national gang list contained 9,460 names. While there is debate about the accuracy of the figures, gang membership has grown considerably. This is fuelled by the global trade in illegal drugs, with local criminal profits conservatively estimated at NZ$500–600 million annually.

The one relative bright spot is that New Zealand hasn’t yet seen the levels of firearms-related violence driven by organised crime overseas. For example, European research shows the illegal trade in guns and drugs becoming increasingly intertwined.

But waiting to catch up with those trends should not be an option. New Zealand already has a lot firearms. In the past six years, police conducting routine patrols have reportedly encountered 17,000 guns, or nearly ten every day, nationwide.

In 2022, official figures showed, on average, approximately one firearms offence had been committed daily by gang members since 2019.

The risk had become apparent much earlier, in 2016, with the discovery of fourteen military assault-grade AK47s and M16s in an Auckland house being used to manufacture methamphetamine. This year, another firearms cache, including assault rifles and semiautomatics, was found in Auckland.

Progress and problems

On the legal front, the main avenues New Zealand gangs use to obtain illegal firearms are being closed off. Under the Arms Act, members or close affiliates of a gang or an organised criminal group cannot be considered “fit and proper” to lawfully possess a firearm.

These people may have specific firearms prohibition orders added against them, which allow the police additional powers to ensure firearms don’t fall into the wrong hands.

The firearms registry is key to this. There are now more than 400,000 firearms fully accounted for, making it harder for so-called “straw buyers” to onsell them to gangs.

Despite the progress, several challenges remain. In particular, the nature of the gun registry has been politicised, with the ACT and National parties disagreeing over a review of the system’s scope.

Arguments over the types of firearms covered and which agency looks after the registry risk undermining its central purpose of preventing criminals getting guns.

Theft of firearms from lawful owners needs more attention, too. Making it a specific offence – not just illegal possession – would be an added deterrent.

Tighter and targeted policy

Accounting for all the estimated 1.5 million firearms in New Zealand will be very difficult – especially with the buy-back and amnesty for prohibited firearms after the Christchurch terror attack likely being far from complete.

There are also tens of thousands of non-prohibited firearms in the hands of unlicensed but not necessarily criminal owners.

Given all firearms must be registered by the end of August 2028, there should be another buy-back (at market rates) of all guns that should be on the register. This might be expensive, but the cost of opening a large pipeline to criminals would be worse.

There needs to be greater investment in staff, education and technology within intelligence services and customs. This will help inform evidence-based policy, and support targeted law enforcement. A recent European Union initiative to track gun violence in real time is an example of how data can help in this way.

New Zealand is a party to the United Nations Convention against Transnational Organised Crime (and its two protocols on people trafficking and migrant smuggling). But it is not a party to a supplementary protocol covering the illicit manufacturing and trafficking of firearms and ammunition.

That should change. Amendments to the Arms Act since 2019 mean New Zealand law and policy fit the protocol perfectly. By joining, New Zealand could strengthen regional cooperation and increase public safety, given the scale of the problem and its potential to get worse.