Domestic disputes, arguments driving murder toll, says Alexander

Shane Su­perville

Se­nior Re­porter

shane.su­[email protected]

Home­land Se­cu­ri­ty Min­is­ter Roger Alexan­der says most of the homi­cides record­ed for the year thus far were not gang-re­lat­ed or care­ful­ly planned at­tacks, but ran­dom ar­gu­ments and do­mes­tic dis­putes.

He there­fore urged the pub­lic to ex­er­cise re­straint and walk away from po­ten­tial­ly dan­ger­ous sit­u­a­tions for their own safe­ty and the safe­ty of oth­ers.

The mur­der toll stood at 203 yes­ter­day morn­ing, com­pared to 212 for the same pe­ri­od last year.

Speak­ing with Guardian Me­dia dur­ing the launch of a bar­ber­ing course for young men at his El Do­ra­do Road, Tu­na­puna con­stituen­cy of­fice, Alexan­der re­port­ed that while this year’s mur­der toll was still trend­ing be­low the pre­vi­ous year’s, the mar­gin was small­er.

He added that giv­en the na­ture of ar­gu­ments as a mo­tive for mur­der, it was dif­fi­cult for the po­lice to pre­dict and for­mu­late strate­gies to pre­vent vi­o­lence that could hap­pen ran­dom­ly, ar­gu­ing that con­tin­u­ous, com­mu­ni­ty-lev­el en­gage­ments aimed at anger man­age­ment were crit­i­cal to mak­ing a mean­ing­ful change in these cat­e­gories of mur­ders.

“We want peo­ple to un­der­stand and re­spect the lives of oth­ers. De-es­ca­la­tion is an im­por­tant part of the process. There are things you can de-es­ca­late,” Alexan­der said.

“Not be­cause you and a man are in a bar and you all fall out, it means it has to go to vi­o­lence. You can buy a beer for me, I can buy a beer for you and we can move on with our lives.”

Alexan­der not­ed that while the au­thor­i­ties were mon­i­tor­ing this trend in mur­ders, en­gage­ment through var­i­ous com­mu­ni­ty re­sources, in­clud­ing con­flict res­o­lu­tion and anger man­age­ment pro­grammes, were be­ing utilised.

The trend Alexan­der was re­fer­ring to was first re­port­ed dur­ing a po­lice town hall meet­ing in St Au­gus­tine by head of the North-Cen­tral Di­vi­sion Snr Supt Vern­ly Gift, who not­ed that while mur­ders in his dis­trict were among the high­est of all ten po­lice di­vi­sions, they were large­ly due to ar­gu­ments, with many of the vic­tims be­ing vis­i­tors to the re­gion and not res­i­dents.

Gift al­so rec­om­mend­ed in­ter­ven­tions from the Tu­na­puna Po­lice Sta­tion Coun­cil with me­di­a­tion and com­mu­ni­ty jus­tice clin­ics, to of­fer res­i­dents an al­ter­nate means of dis­pute res­o­lu­tion.

Since the be­gin­ning of the State of Emer­gency (SoE), which was de­clared on March 3, 2026, sev­er­al pur­port­ed un­der­world fig­ures were tar­get­ed us­ing Pre­ven­tive De­ten­tion Or­ders (PDOs), which were cred­it­ed with the dis­man­tling of crim­i­nal or­gan­i­sa­tions re­spon­si­ble for mur­ders through pro­longed gang war­fare.

How­ev­er, while the num­ber of mass shoot­ings ap­pears to have dropped, vi­o­lent crimes—in­clud­ing mur­ders—re­mained a chal­lenge to law en­force­ment.