The former gang member and prison inmate turned doctor

Dr Timoti Te Moke wears his scrubs around the streets of South Auckland and on the bus. The former prison inmate wants young people to see more doctors than gang patches.

"I need to stay in South Auckland because it needs to be normalised to be a brown-skinned doctor. That's why I wear my scrubs.

"It's not an ego thing. What it is, is I need people in South Auckland to see a brown-skinned doctor, a Māori doctor, a Pasifika doctor, and see it so often that they take it as normal. This is exactly what we do."

Te Moke recently graduated after six years at med school, aged 56. He's working as a house officer at Auckland's Middlemore Hospital, with plans to specialise in the ICU.

His criminal history made it hard to get into medicine, but after three knockbacks, AUT finally accepted him.

The first six years of his life, being raised by elders in his family were "the best years of my life", he recalls.

"When I was born, my mum wasn't ready to be a mum and she whāngai-ed me to my koro. Now in Māori culture, it's quite common to do this, to give a child to another family member," Te Moke tells RNZ's Nine to Noon.

But when he turned six, his mum decided to take him back. He was uplifted to live with her and her partner. They were dysfunctional and substance abusers.

"My stepfather, every time he saw me, he saw another man and he just couldn't handle that. And so I got bashed a lot as a young child," Te Moke says.

"So much so I was just, I'd be in my room shaking. Because I'd hear his car rolling up and I know what was going to happen. He'd just get out of his car and just walk into my room and just flog the utter crap out of me.

"And sometimes it would happen to me three times a week. ... By the time I turned 14, I'm broken and I'm acting out."

Te Moki, feeling he was "not meant to be anything", started sniffing petrol and glue, getting into trouble and ending up in boys' homes. He became embroiled with gangs, then found himself behind bars.

In his book, The Unlikely Doctor, Te Moke describes a moment in a cell at Waikeria Youth Prison - where he caught a glimpse of blue sky - which provided clarity.

Then in his 20s, he realised the next time he landed behind bars, he wouldn't be leaving.

"I grew up with 19 other guys. And I'm the only one that's not in prison or dead," he says.

"When I got out of Waikeria that time, I still had those [destructive] thoughts running around in my head and I still acted out that way. But there were little increment moments from that, that within a year I'd left the gang. And then little increment moments from that, I ended up getting some work and an apprenticeship and then being able to have enough money to go overseas."

After 15 years living in Australia, Te Moke returned to Aotearoa with the plan to become a paramedic, and from there to study medicine.

But, his final year of study, he found himself fighting a manslaughter charge, following an incident with a man off Dominion Road, late at night, while he worked at a drug and alcohol rehabilitation centre part-time.

"Because I'm Māori, because I'm poor, because I've got a history, they charged me with manslaughter," he tellsNine to Noon.

"My lawyer comes back and she says she's been talking to the police and they've offered me three and a half years if I plead guilty. And if not, they're just going to try for the maximum.

"I haven't done anything, but now the easiest thing that will happen to me is three and a half years for something I didn't do. And that's because society hasn't evolved alongside me. They still see me as that Māori, that poor, that's in trouble."

He was found not guilty and it was revealed that the police actually made the decision to charge without consulting the Crown Solicitor. A claim he has lodged with the Waitangi Tribunal around police bias is ongoing.

Te Moke says barriers have been placed in front of the potential of a lot of individuals.

"I'm here because I was able to adapt the skills I'd learnt coming through life in order to mitigate those barriers that were put in front of me. But I am the exception, not the rule, and we should be making me the rule.

"I was raised in these really impressionable times a specific way. I was raised to believe that I was hopeless. I was raised to believe that I was useless. I was beaten. So by the time I'm 14, it doesn't matter how much love, it doesn't matter how much support, it doesn't matter how much effort you put into me, I am this way. And I'm this way because society made it for it to be this way."

He believes he was able to take his negative experiences, and use them for good.

"When I was in prison and I was part of a gang, we had a mentality that it was just a view, a single-minded view of this is how it is, this is how I'm going to act, and nothing is going to get in my way of me achieving what I'm supposed to be achieving.

"And where I am now, I still have that aspect. Don't get me wrong. I wouldn't have been able to get into medicine because I got knocked back three times if I didn't have that single-minded mentality."