On 20 July 2023, on a building site in Auckland’s CBD, 24-year-old Matu Tangi Matua Reid killed two colleagues with a shotgun, wounded seven other people including a police officer, then killed himself.

The gravity of the attack and the rarity of this kind of violence in New Zealand made the shooting “newsworthy”.

It received extensive coverage, with particular focus on the background of the offender, his criminal history, and the fact that he was on home detention at the time.

All of this served to create a certain narrative about this crime: A (brown) man who was on home detention committed this violent crime.

Embedded within that story was the message that the failure to prevent the crime rests with a government that doesn’t hand out enough custodial sentences.

It added weight to the call for tougher criminal justice policies.

But not all crimes receive equal coverage. Nor are they framed in the same way, however violent they may be.

Political point scoring

What the media and politicians choose to focus on varies greatly, and that has serious consequences for groups who often find themselves negatively targeted in these crime stories.

At the outset, that shooting was used to score political points by linking it to an “out of control problem of crime” – opposition leader Christopher Luxon’s words on the day.

The shooting was used to tell a story: that there’s a political failure to curb criminals and protect citizens.

The shooter’s status of being on home detention for domestic violence charges was repeated in the news stories. It immediately sparked criticism of the government’s approach to sentencing.

The political rhetoric on crime isn’t surprising. But it’s not an even-handed response, and not all crimes receive this treatment.

Consider the relative political silence on the case of the (white) woman who was facing charges of murdering her children, where the media’s obsessive focus on the details of the murder did not spark political commentary on the need to be tough on crime.

Here, the horrific nature of the crime elicited a sensitive response of trying to understand the psychological state of the perpetrator* and her husband.

If we put the obsessive coverage aside for the moment, the framing of this crime in the context of mental health contrasts with media and political discourses about similar crimes involving Māori, such as the 2006 case of the Kahui twins, where the discourses lacked sensitivity and little understanding or sympathy was extended to the mother, Macsyna King, although she wasn’t charged for the murders of her babies.

Problem populations

The political language and the media coverage don’t simply inform people about crimes such as the shooting in Auckland.

Rather, they create a narrative that amplifies hostile and racist sentiments and attitudes that harm communities who come to be labelled as problem populations that must be controlled.

Such narratives reinforce the idea that crime is a problem of law and order, but only sometimes – and especially when the perpetrator is brown.

Using the perpetrator’s photo and name serve to signal to the public that this is specifically a Māori crime. And it reframes and channels the outrage at Māori who some then accuse of causing all sorts of social unrest and social problems.

Coincidentally, the persistent use of the shooter’s picture and name is in sharp contrast to the pattern of coverage of the 2019 terrorist shooting in Christchurch.

In that case, the (white) perpetrator’s face and name were seldom used in coverage and the stories focused on how the country was coming together to deal with the aftermath. “This is not us,” we were reminded.

The de facto name and image suppression was framed as refusing to give notoriety to the perpetrator or his white supremacist cause. Given the uneven media coverage, this rationale appears cynical.

Consider, for example, that in 2021 the media repeatedly used the image and name of the (brown, Muslim) perpetrator of the stabbing in a supermarket in LynnMall in west Auckland.

Media coverage included an image of the perpetrator holding a rifle, a weapon he did not use or even have with him in LynnMall.

The narrative about that attack recalled pre-15 March media stories, quick to identify terrorism with brown Muslim people.

There was no call for unity or a national distancing from the attack. Instead, the coverage reframed the perpetrator as a public enemy.

Media bias

The contrast that these cases provide isn’t accidental. It corresponds to international patterns of media bias where coverage tends to elevate the security threat and the ethnic identity of non-white offenders.

But the story of the Auckland building site shooting also distorts the reality of gun violence.

Mass shootings are distinct moments of violence. They aren’t conducted to facilitate other crimes. For instance, using guns in an armed robbery doesn’t make the event a mass shooting. Mass shootings are characterised by being an end in themselves.

By contrast, gun violence typically reported in the news concentrates on gang and criminal-related activities.

This is not simply a semantic or technical issue. Conflating mass shootings, which by their nature aren’t connected to other crimes, with gun violence in the context of criminal activities has the potential to affect policy and policing.

Policies not reducing crime

Gangs have become a salient point, with some politicians seeking even more punitive criminal policies, even though a history of stiff anti-gang policies reveals the repeated failures of that approach.

Criminologists who study crime rates and crime policies in New Zealand warn against the politicisation of crime because tough-on-crime policies do not reduce crime. Yet such policies are made to appear natural and logical, with dire consequences particularly for communities of colour and Māori communities.

Mass shooters fly under radar

The narrative that racialises crimes and conflates incidents of mass shootings with gang activities misses the fact that mass shooters are typically white men who tend not to have visible criminal pasts.

In fact, mass shooters fly under the radar because they aren’t usually surveilled by law enforcement.

Mass shootings in New Zealand over the past 30 years have been predominantly carried out by white perpetrators. The Auckland shooting was an exception.

Our policy response must be driven by evidence rather than political point-scoring.

Getting the profile of the shooter wrong has put us in trouble before.

After 9/11, racialised narratives about national security made terrorism into a thing that Muslim people do – and so politicians and policymakers turned the country’s security apparatus on the Muslim community.

But all that was shattered by the 15 March 2019 terrorist attack. The focus on Islamist-motivated terrorism meant we dropped the ball on the growing threat of white supremacy – and the Muslim community paid with their lives.

This is not to mention the continued impact of Islamophobia on the Muslim community. Racialising crime, including terrorism, allows racist attitudes against non-Pākehā to flourish and puts communities of colour, including indigenous communities, in the face of perpetual social backlash as well as state violence.

Communities of colour have to reckon with heavy surveillance and policing while also fending off racist forms of harassment.

But it also puts the whole country at risk of more violence as policymakers fail to see the distinction in the risk-profile of the crime in question. There’s a risk of diverting police and policymakers from the typical perpetrator profile, and guns may end up in the wrong hands, undetected until it’s too late.

Of course, all incidents of gun violence raise questions about gun regulations. Amendments to the country’s gun laws after the 2019 terrorist attack have controlled civilian access to military-style firearms. The police commissioner noted that gun regulations✝ will yield positive effects in the years to come.

Backlash against judiciary

Lastly, linking the shooting to the status of being on home detention produced a kind of reactionary backlash against the judiciary. This appears to be imported from the US, especially since the 2016 election of Donald Trump.

In this case, the outrage over the status of the offender saw calls on social media to track down and harass the judge who issued the home detention order.

Although the threats were not detailed in the media, they warranted a change in security procedures to protect judges.

*At the time of writing Lauren Dickason has been found guilty and is awaiting sentencing.

✝ National and Act have, however, agreed to rewrite the Arms Act as part of their coalition agreement.

The full version of Sara Salman’s original article was published in 2023 on E-Tangata, an online Sunday magazine run by the Mana Trust dedicated to building a stronger Māori and Pacific presence in NZ media. Abridged and edited by permission of the author.