New Zealand’s ‘boy racer’ problem has seen a lot of media attention following a series of recent events, beginning with Christchurch being depicted as a city “beset by hordes of boy racers.” on a German television program and culminating in a situation which saw between 300 and 400 people converging on a single police officer and firing an air rifle last Friday.

Confiscating cars and crushing them is one of the new powers Police Minister Judith Collins wants to give law enforcement. Such a move seems incredibly wasteful, a car, in the right hands, serves a practical and legitimate purpose, to turn an inanimate piece of machinery into scrap metal because of the actions of its owner is an ill thought out knee-jerk reaction.

More importantly, will this kind of action have any effect on the problem? As Press editor Collin Espiner noted on his blog

Police, it seems to me, already have plenty of powers that they could use against boy racers. The problems caused at the weekend weren’t due to a lack of powers of arrest...The incident was more fundamentally a complete lack of respect by those boy racers for the police, or for society in general. A disregard for authority and for the consequences of their actions. “Cracking down” may even make things worse.

A critical attitude toward authority is actually a very healthy thing in a democracy (though Fridays actions were certainly not the best outlet for such an attitude) without some distrust of authority people would not look critically at, say, a minister announcing a new number of police powers. The disregard for society comment could be turned around; through the media the term “boy racer” has become synonymous with “criminal” it is worth examining if the ‘boy racer’ label has contributed to the problem. To quote Criminological Theory: A Brief Introduction labeling theory acknowledges that:

Most youth...engage in some form of delinquent behavior as an expression of rebellion or experimentation that is considered part of the maturation process for all teenagers. The difference between delinquents and non-delinquents may be, in large part, an outcome of who gets caught. Simply getting caught can result in a stigma, a generic negative depiction of a person based on certain aspects of their behavior. (178-179)

Although little social science has been dedicated to boy racers in New Zealand (though some has in the UK and elsewhere) the small amounts of evidence from news reports seem to back up the idea that labeling plays a role. Rob Cook who witnessed last Fridays events told The Press that from talking to boy racers it was clear they were upset about mayor Bob Parker’s “continued efforts to discredit them.” Does Bob Parker, that anti-boy racer crusader, actually share some of the blame for this problem?