January 14, 2025 • 20 mins
Growing concern about public safety has reignited the idea of arming our frontline police officers.
The police union says 68% of officers support routine arming – and, our new police commissioner, Richard Chambers, is apparently ‘open’ to discussions around it – although he’s also said we’re ‘proud of having unarmed police’ and he’d like to keep it that way.
This is all while, in the first hours of 2025, a car rammed into a police vehicle at a Nelson gathering – Senior Sergeant Lyn Fleming later died in hospital, another officer was critically injured. This was followed by another attempted ramming a week later.
So do we need to look at better protect those whose jobs are to protect us – or are there risks to giving more power to the police?
Today on The Front Page, Auckland University criminology lecturer Dr. Emmy Rākete joins us to discuss.
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You can read more about this and other stories in the New Zealand Herald, online at nzherald.co.nz, or tune in to news bulletins across the NZME network.
Host: Chelsea Daniels
Sound Engineer/Producer: Richard Martin
Producer: Ethan Sills
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:05):
Kyotra. I'm Chelsea Daniels and this is the Front Page,
a daily podcast presented by the New Zealand Herald. Growing
concern about public safety has reignited the idea of arming
our frontline police officers. The Police Union says sixty eight
(00:26):
percent of officers support routine arming, and our new Police Commissioner,
Richard Chambers is apparently open to discussions around it, although
he has said we're proud of having unarmed police and
he'd like to keep it that way. This is all
while in the first hours of twenty twenty five, a
(00:49):
car rammed into a police vehicle at a Nelson gathering.
Senior Sergeant Lynn Fleming later died in hospital. Another officer
was critically injured. This was followed by another attempted ramming
a week later. So do we need to look at
better protecting those whose jobs are to protect us or
(01:10):
are their risks to giving more power to the police?
Today on the Front Page, Auckland University criminology lecturer doctor
Amy Ruanket there joins us to discuss emmy, why do
you think conversations around arming our frontline offices happen so often?
Speaker 2 (01:34):
Well deliberate political agenda. First of all, the Police Association
is organized body which has been pushing hard for frontline
police armament for years now. So one reason that this
keeps coming up is because they keep bringing it up.
I think another reason is that we see reporting about crime,
and we see frightening reporting about crime and more violence.
More force is always proposed as the solution to crime,
(01:58):
that if there was more oppression, more violence, than those
frightening stories would go away.
Speaker 1 (02:02):
The Police Union says sixty eight percent of officers support
routine arming. Why do you think this.
Speaker 2 (02:09):
Is It's a job that is based around the use
of force. That's what police officers are trained in doing.
There are lots of ways that we require police officers
to do other kinds of work. We make them be
mental health workers, who make them be social workers, we
make them do all kinds of things. But what they
are trained in is in the use of force, and
so that's what institutionally, the police as a body relies
(02:33):
on when it's time to solve problems. Now, the issue
is that more violence doesn't seem to be an effective
way of resolving the problem of crime, and so police
armament categorically will not fix the things that it's being
proposed as a solution.
Speaker 1 (02:47):
To police Data reveals officers encountered nearly seventeen thousand firearms
in under six years Auckland, accounting for over a quarter
of those found nearly half of real injuries and deaths.
That means cops are carrying out routine police work and
finding nearly ten guns every day across the country. I
(03:08):
guess you can see kind of why these officers would
be open to carrying firearms themselves, but how would we
be sure that they wouldn't use them irresponsibly though?
Speaker 2 (03:17):
Yeah, Well, first of all, it would be a misrepresentation
to say that New Zealand police officers don't carry firearms.
They do. Every police car has guns, and all of
our police officers routinely carry tases. So the idea that
police officers are completely vulnerable and open to being harmed
with no means of defending themselves, actually that's not true.
(03:37):
That's not what the situation is. But secondly, the idea
that more guns in these situations will make things safer
just isn't the case. The number one way to escalate
a fight, in my experience, is to start making more
shows of force. So the idea that every police officer
having a firearm on their hip will pull these situations
(03:59):
down on a supported idea, and we see this when
we look to the United States of America, a country
which does have frontline police armament, and it is a
much more frightening and violent place than Ultior has ever been.
I think most of us would like our country to
be less like the United States of America, not more,
and that is where policies like frontland police armament get
(04:20):
us going. Now you ask how we could be sure
that New Zealand's police officers wouldn't use firearms irresponsibly if
they were given them, And that's a very good question because,
first of all, the police have very recently been presented
with the Understanding Police Delivery Report which found that along
every measurable access, New Zealand's police force discriminates against Marti
(04:40):
and other ethnic minorities. Secondly, we've done a trial run
of police armament before, so New Zealand police tried the
armed Response Teams model in three jurisdictions in Auckland and Counties,
Wyecastle and in christ Church a number of years ago,
and they had a patrol CAUs who were carrying machine
(05:02):
guns on patrol in those areas looking for fights, and
for the most part, they didn't find any. None of
these armed response teams found themselves responding to an armed incident.
Mostly they were used for routine policing. They were doing
traffic stops, they were serving search warrants, they were doing
bail checks, all of the stuff that normal cops do
every day. But they were carrying machine guns. That is
(05:23):
simply not an arrangement that most New Zealanders want, and
people didn't support the trial, and it was canned after
it concluded. Police were warned the trial wouldn't provide enough
evidence to prove its worth.
Speaker 3 (05:37):
That's about the success of the trial and more about
the style.
Speaker 2 (05:41):
Of placing that's appropriate for New Zealand. I've been clear
that I see New Zealand as a generally unarmed police service,
and so our commitment is to continue to place in
that way. Finally, we have seen before what happens when
New Zealand's police force is given access to more dangerous weaponry.
(06:01):
The police did a trial rollout of tasers to see
how would police start using tases if they were routinely
armed with them, and what that reporting found was that
as soon as police officers had immediate access to offensive weapons,
they started resorting to those more serious forms of force
in order to resolve conflict during the course of their jobs.
(06:23):
So they used less restraint, less kind of closed fist,
and used taseres and pepper spray much more as soon
as as means are available to them. This is not
a situation into which we need to introduce more deadly
forms of force, because we have already seen they will
use it. They will use it in increasingly indiscriminate ways,
(06:44):
and they will use it primarily against marginalized populations like Maori,
ethnic minorities, people experiencing mental illness.
Speaker 1 (06:51):
Yeah. I actually read an interesting study that examined police
shootings in New Zealand and up against England and Wales,
and it looked at rates from say nineteen seventy to
twenty twenty, and ultimately found in the last decade so
that twenty eleven to twenty twenty, New Zealand doubled the
rate of shootings and it decreased in England and Wales
at the same time. What is it about New Zealand
(07:13):
do you think that could potentially explain this?
Speaker 2 (07:17):
The chriminaloist John Pratt argued that New Zealand's really been
subject to this populist way of talking about crime, and
so politicians, police association officials, police commissioners, as it may be,
have all really relied on this notion that the public
is endangered, the public is threatened, and the only way
to defend society from this alien invader threat from outside
(07:40):
is more force and more oppression. And so New Zealand
really has had a very very unitive criminal justice system.
We're hearing all these messages now about how the last
government was too soft on crime, and so we need
to put more children into boot camps, and we need
to builtimore prisons, and we need to punish people more.
(08:03):
New Zealand has one of the highest prison populations for
a country like us in the world. We are an
intensely punished society and an intensely punitive society. So the
idea that things need to be more punishing has been
tried and has been tried in this country for the
last forty years. What we've gotten out of it is
a wave of killings by police officers, and chrime has
(08:25):
not gone away.
Speaker 1 (08:26):
You mentioned America before in America actually has to be
the number one example of why this is a bad idea.
Speaker 2 (08:33):
Right.
Speaker 1 (08:33):
According to some reporting from the Washington Post, on average,
police in the US shoot and kill more than one
thousand people a year since they began recording these numbers.
While half of those shot by police were white, black
Americans were shot at a disproportionate rate. They account for
roughly fourteen percent of the population there and are killed
(08:54):
by police at more than twice the rate than white Americans. Now,
tell me why in the world would we want to
emulate this.
Speaker 2 (09:02):
We have data from New Zealand collected by the police
and elves which shows how they use force. What we
can see from that data is that mari are around
seven times more likely to be the victims of police
violence than pakiha are. We know exactly what would happen
if this policy was rolled out. We know exactly who
would be the victims of it. We know exactly what
(09:23):
a bad idea this would be. This is a government
which has relied on creating stories about race. I'm sure
many people who listened to this podcast have just fired
off their submissions on the tree principal skill. I know
that's what I was up all night doing as well.
This is a cultural war kind of strategy here. This
is a way of making us have these discussions about
(09:46):
the motive issues like crime, turning these into problems of
public order that can then only be solved by a
more punishing state and less support for people. But we
could do things different here in this country. We once
had zero unemployment because the state made sure that everyone
had a job. This is a kind of which once
had zero homelessness because the state made sure that everybody
(10:09):
had a home. We could do things that would solve
the fundamental causes of crime, give people the full dignified
human lives all of us deserve. But it would require
taking money away from the rich and giving it to
those of us who made that money through the sweat
of our brows and the labor that we do every
day to make this country the place that it is.
(10:29):
Until we do that, until we give people what they
need to live lives, crime will happen. And no amount
of policing, no amount of patrol teams, no amount of
pepper spray, tasers, firearms, none of this repression will ever
make it fundamental contradiction go away.
Speaker 1 (10:55):
What have you made of Richard Chambers' comments about being
put into discussions about arming police officers, that's.
Speaker 2 (11:03):
The kind of comment that can only be made due
to the cowardice of the last government. The last time
the question of frontline police armament was raised by the
Armed Response Team trial, under the previous police commissioner or
the Minister of Police kind of disavowed any responsibility for
making policy decisions about whether frontline police armament happens or
(11:24):
doesn't happen in this country, so the decision was left
to the judgment of the Police commissioner. But this isn't
a merely operational decision like police deciding which street they
are or are not going to patrol. This is a
fundamental question of what does justice look like in this country?
Does it look like a unarmed community officer who maybe
(11:48):
knows something who they are around and is able to
solve problems in ways that don't rely on violence every
single time, Because that's the mental image I think most
New Zealanders have when they're think of what policing should
be like the make it click commercials for McDonald's are
playing out. I remember that ad very well from my childhood,
because there is a friendly cop in it, who like
(12:09):
waves goodbye to all of the children when they get
inter Ronald McDonald's car. I love that ad when I
was a kid. I still love that ahead. And that's
an image of policing that will disappear if we give
every cop a gun, because within a year, two years,
three years, at the decision being made, we will see
more bullets in the bodies of young brown people in
(12:30):
this country, and the police force in this country will
again be associated with the kind of racist terror that
it was known for during the era of dawn raids
and red squads and formal police racism against all the
communities that they've repeatedly apologized to for that discrimination. We
could do things differently here. If we want to rely
on a racist police violence and state terror in order
(12:53):
to try to distract people from the fact that people
comit in crimes because they don't have homes or jobs
or mental health care, fine, we can do that, but
there will be people in the community, people and organizations
like the ones which I belong, people like It's Prinzaltior
people and community organizations, people on the organized leafs who
will be there to fight back against these racist, discriminatory
(13:16):
policies to try to build something like a same society.
Speaker 1 (13:19):
How do we go about doing it? Though? So if
we don't arm our police, what else can be done
to better protect them on the front line? I guess
I'm thinking back to New Year's Day or the early
mornings of the death of Lynn Fleming is an absolute tragedy,
of course, and that was followed by another attempted incident
in Fungaday a few days later. Going back to those stats,
(13:41):
seventeen thousand firearms in six years, you've got incidents like
what happened to Lynn Fleming. How else are our officers
meant to protect themselves, do you think? Or is it
just pard and parcel of being a frontline officer and
looking at society and looking at getting people jobs, homes, etc.
Speaker 2 (14:00):
Yeah, I mean it's terrible and no one should just
get killed at work, think none of us except that
that is a reality what people need to do when
they shop for jobs. But we are not currently living
through a crisis of violence against New Zealand police. We
simply aren't. These are relatively benefrequent and that is obviously
an excellent thing. What we are living through is a
(14:22):
crisis of police violence. Police as you said, have become far,
far more likely to kill New Zealanders in the course
of trying to solve problems that they're experiencing, and that
is the issue with which we should be much more concerned.
We cannot democratically control the behavior of every New Zealand
or the country. I wish that we could pass the
law saying no one will be violent anymore and everyone
(14:44):
stopped being violent. That will be the role that I
would vastly prefer to live in. We do not have
that capacity, but we do have the capacity to democratically
decide how are we going to do justice in this country.
Are we going to brutalize, degrade and incarcerate people who
are behaving in an unacceptable way, or are we going
to create the kind of society in which that behavior
does not occur. So there are a number of things
(15:05):
that are happening here. We're using the police for stuff that,
as they rightly point out, they are not actually capable
of responding to. So we have police officers trying to
respond to mental health crisis. I've known a number of
mental health professionals who work in the crisis sector who
know that that is a difficult job to do, and
(15:27):
none of them work there anymore because there's no money
to fund those positions. We don't have the kind of
frontline response that we would need for a trained mental
health professional to be present when someone is having a
mental health episode in public and needs support, So we
send the police instead, and as police violence Stater shows,
the police often resort to tasering that person and then
(15:50):
throwing them in the cells. Is that what you would
want for someone you love who is having a moutdown
in public? I know that it's not what I would want.
So the answer here isn't what is the one thing
we need to do differently in order to allow the
police to finally start fixing their social problems. The ancy
here is recognizing that there are a number of social
functions which we are trying and failing to make the
(16:12):
police fulfill. There are some stuff for which they are
exactually the right agency to respond. If there is a
white creamers as terrorists shooting up a masque, yes they
are probably the right people to be dealing with that.
But most of the things which we send the police
to do, frankly, either do not warrant any kind of response,
or warrant a response that the police are not capable
(16:33):
of giving. We send the police to enforce evictions, we
send the police to try to calm down fights, to
deal people who are in suicidal distress. They can't do
any of that stuff. What we need to do is
to fund agencies and organizations who are able to do
that stuff. And until we do that, no, it's never
going to work.
Speaker 3 (16:55):
I'm sick and tired of the criminal low light and
the repeat violent offenders who put public safety at risk,
and that's why we're going after them, and in particular gangs.
If you are in a gang, be prepared to be
harassed by the police. If you're committing crimes, be prepared
for tougher sentences because we are introducing limits on repeat sentence,
(17:15):
discounts for remorse and if you keep offending, sorry, frankly,
isn't going to cut it anymore. We are cracking down
on crime, we are going after the gangs, and we
are going to restore law and order in New Zealand.
Speaker 1 (17:32):
Well, when it comes to crime in this country, of course,
society usually errs on the side of let's get tough
on crime. That approach and I mean, look National's election
campaign people must think that way. Why do you think
we tend to prefer this approach over a restorative approach.
Speaker 2 (17:51):
For the last forty years in this country, the state
has really stepped back. So we used to have a
very comprehensive social safety in thet state, provision of housing, employment,
health care, education, all the things that people need to
live full lives. And bit by bit, piece by piece,
that social welfare system, that social state has been pulled apart,
(18:14):
and more and more the state is saying, well, that's
your problem to deal with. Your benefits are going to
get cut. You figured it out. No, you can't have
a food grant. You figure it out. Good luck finding
a house. We're not building any state housing. We're not
going to help you find a place. You figure it out.
We are trained to think of people's problems as their problems.
If someone's life is bad, it's because they didn't do
(18:36):
a good job making themselves a good life. And the
state has supported this illusion right. Every aspect of state
policy has been aimed at forcing this responsibilization on all
of us, to make all of us into individually responsible
free market agents. But human beings aren't. Those human beings
(18:57):
live in a society in a context which has been
given to us in the past, which has been transmitted
to us, and so we've kind of been forced to
see people responsible for their own lives in a way
that they frankly are not. Some people would never have
had the chance to live a well adjusted, functional life
because of the conditions which have been voiced upon them
(19:17):
by history. And as long as we are trained to
see those people that individually responsible for the kind of
life that they live, yes, it makes very much. It
makes a lot of sense for us to then think, well,
they need to be punished in order to help them
learn to make better decisions. But because that's not how
human decision making works, that's not how history works, that
(19:37):
approach is doomed. So we've been trained into a way
of thinking about crime and justice and punishment that is
fundamentally at odds with the human reality we all inhabit.
But it is very very convenient for the rich if
we think in these ways, because we don't demand structural justice,
we don't demand economic justice. We demand that the dysfunction
(19:58):
people get dragged away and treat it poorly and get
put somewhere where we don't have to look at them,
we'll think about why they exist.
Speaker 1 (20:04):
Thanks for joining us, Emmy. That's it for this episode
of the Front Page. You can read more about today's
stories and extensive news coverage at enzedherld dot co dot mz.
The Front Page is produced by Ethan Sills and Richard Martin,
who is also our sound engineer. I'm Chelsea Daniels. Subscribe
(20:27):
to the Front Page on iHeartRadio or wherever you get
your podcasts, and tune in tomorrow for another look behind
the headlines.
Kyotra. I'm Chelsea Daniels and this is the Front Page,
a daily podcast presented by the New Zealand Herald. Growing
concern about public safety has reignited the idea of arming
our frontline police officers. The Police Union says sixty eight
(00:26):
percent of officers support routine arming, and our new Police Commissioner,
Richard Chambers is apparently open to discussions around it, although
he has said we're proud of having unarmed police and
he'd like to keep it that way. This is all
while in the first hours of twenty twenty five, a
(00:49):
car rammed into a police vehicle at a Nelson gathering.
Senior Sergeant Lynn Fleming later died in hospital. Another officer
was critically injured. This was followed by another attempted ramming
a week later. So do we need to look at
better protecting those whose jobs are to protect us or
(01:10):
are their risks to giving more power to the police?
Today on the Front Page, Auckland University criminology lecturer doctor
Amy Ruanket there joins us to discuss emmy, why do
you think conversations around arming our frontline offices happen so often?
Speaker 2 (01:34):
Well deliberate political agenda. First of all, the Police Association
is organized body which has been pushing hard for frontline
police armament for years now. So one reason that this
keeps coming up is because they keep bringing it up.
I think another reason is that we see reporting about crime,
and we see frightening reporting about crime and more violence.
More force is always proposed as the solution to crime,
(01:58):
that if there was more oppression, more violence, than those
frightening stories would go away.
Speaker 1 (02:02):
The Police Union says sixty eight percent of officers support
routine arming. Why do you think this.
Speaker 2 (02:09):
Is It's a job that is based around the use
of force. That's what police officers are trained in doing.
There are lots of ways that we require police officers
to do other kinds of work. We make them be
mental health workers, who make them be social workers, we
make them do all kinds of things. But what they
are trained in is in the use of force, and
so that's what institutionally, the police as a body relies
(02:33):
on when it's time to solve problems. Now, the issue
is that more violence doesn't seem to be an effective
way of resolving the problem of crime, and so police
armament categorically will not fix the things that it's being
proposed as a solution.
Speaker 1 (02:47):
To police Data reveals officers encountered nearly seventeen thousand firearms
in under six years Auckland, accounting for over a quarter
of those found nearly half of real injuries and deaths.
That means cops are carrying out routine police work and
finding nearly ten guns every day across the country. I
(03:08):
guess you can see kind of why these officers would
be open to carrying firearms themselves, but how would we
be sure that they wouldn't use them irresponsibly though?
Speaker 2 (03:17):
Yeah, Well, first of all, it would be a misrepresentation
to say that New Zealand police officers don't carry firearms.
They do. Every police car has guns, and all of
our police officers routinely carry tases. So the idea that
police officers are completely vulnerable and open to being harmed
with no means of defending themselves, actually that's not true.
(03:37):
That's not what the situation is. But secondly, the idea
that more guns in these situations will make things safer
just isn't the case. The number one way to escalate
a fight, in my experience, is to start making more
shows of force. So the idea that every police officer
having a firearm on their hip will pull these situations
(03:59):
down on a supported idea, and we see this when
we look to the United States of America, a country
which does have frontline police armament, and it is a
much more frightening and violent place than Ultior has ever been.
I think most of us would like our country to
be less like the United States of America, not more,
and that is where policies like frontland police armament get
(04:20):
us going. Now you ask how we could be sure
that New Zealand's police officers wouldn't use firearms irresponsibly if
they were given them, And that's a very good question because,
first of all, the police have very recently been presented
with the Understanding Police Delivery Report which found that along
every measurable access, New Zealand's police force discriminates against Marti
(04:40):
and other ethnic minorities. Secondly, we've done a trial run
of police armament before, so New Zealand police tried the
armed Response Teams model in three jurisdictions in Auckland and Counties,
Wyecastle and in christ Church a number of years ago,
and they had a patrol CAUs who were carrying machine
(05:02):
guns on patrol in those areas looking for fights, and
for the most part, they didn't find any. None of
these armed response teams found themselves responding to an armed incident.
Mostly they were used for routine policing. They were doing
traffic stops, they were serving search warrants, they were doing
bail checks, all of the stuff that normal cops do
every day. But they were carrying machine guns. That is
(05:23):
simply not an arrangement that most New Zealanders want, and
people didn't support the trial, and it was canned after
it concluded. Police were warned the trial wouldn't provide enough
evidence to prove its worth.
Speaker 3 (05:37):
That's about the success of the trial and more about
the style.
Speaker 2 (05:41):
Of placing that's appropriate for New Zealand. I've been clear
that I see New Zealand as a generally unarmed police service,
and so our commitment is to continue to place in
that way. Finally, we have seen before what happens when
New Zealand's police force is given access to more dangerous weaponry.
(06:01):
The police did a trial rollout of tasers to see
how would police start using tases if they were routinely
armed with them, and what that reporting found was that
as soon as police officers had immediate access to offensive weapons,
they started resorting to those more serious forms of force
in order to resolve conflict during the course of their jobs.
(06:23):
So they used less restraint, less kind of closed fist,
and used taseres and pepper spray much more as soon
as as means are available to them. This is not
a situation into which we need to introduce more deadly
forms of force, because we have already seen they will
use it. They will use it in increasingly indiscriminate ways,
(06:44):
and they will use it primarily against marginalized populations like Maori,
ethnic minorities, people experiencing mental illness.
Speaker 1 (06:51):
Yeah. I actually read an interesting study that examined police
shootings in New Zealand and up against England and Wales,
and it looked at rates from say nineteen seventy to
twenty twenty, and ultimately found in the last decade so
that twenty eleven to twenty twenty, New Zealand doubled the
rate of shootings and it decreased in England and Wales
at the same time. What is it about New Zealand
(07:13):
do you think that could potentially explain this?
Speaker 2 (07:17):
The chriminaloist John Pratt argued that New Zealand's really been
subject to this populist way of talking about crime, and
so politicians, police association officials, police commissioners, as it may be,
have all really relied on this notion that the public
is endangered, the public is threatened, and the only way
to defend society from this alien invader threat from outside
(07:40):
is more force and more oppression. And so New Zealand
really has had a very very unitive criminal justice system.
We're hearing all these messages now about how the last
government was too soft on crime, and so we need
to put more children into boot camps, and we need
to builtimore prisons, and we need to punish people more.
(08:03):
New Zealand has one of the highest prison populations for
a country like us in the world. We are an
intensely punished society and an intensely punitive society. So the
idea that things need to be more punishing has been
tried and has been tried in this country for the
last forty years. What we've gotten out of it is
a wave of killings by police officers, and chrime has
(08:25):
not gone away.
Speaker 1 (08:26):
You mentioned America before in America actually has to be
the number one example of why this is a bad idea.
Speaker 2 (08:33):
Right.
Speaker 1 (08:33):
According to some reporting from the Washington Post, on average,
police in the US shoot and kill more than one
thousand people a year since they began recording these numbers.
While half of those shot by police were white, black
Americans were shot at a disproportionate rate. They account for
roughly fourteen percent of the population there and are killed
(08:54):
by police at more than twice the rate than white Americans. Now,
tell me why in the world would we want to
emulate this.
Speaker 2 (09:02):
We have data from New Zealand collected by the police
and elves which shows how they use force. What we
can see from that data is that mari are around
seven times more likely to be the victims of police
violence than pakiha are. We know exactly what would happen
if this policy was rolled out. We know exactly who
would be the victims of it. We know exactly what
(09:23):
a bad idea this would be. This is a government
which has relied on creating stories about race. I'm sure
many people who listened to this podcast have just fired
off their submissions on the tree principal skill. I know
that's what I was up all night doing as well.
This is a cultural war kind of strategy here. This
is a way of making us have these discussions about
(09:46):
the motive issues like crime, turning these into problems of
public order that can then only be solved by a
more punishing state and less support for people. But we
could do things different here in this country. We once
had zero unemployment because the state made sure that everyone
had a job. This is a kind of which once
had zero homelessness because the state made sure that everybody
(10:09):
had a home. We could do things that would solve
the fundamental causes of crime, give people the full dignified
human lives all of us deserve. But it would require
taking money away from the rich and giving it to
those of us who made that money through the sweat
of our brows and the labor that we do every
day to make this country the place that it is.
(10:29):
Until we do that, until we give people what they
need to live lives, crime will happen. And no amount
of policing, no amount of patrol teams, no amount of
pepper spray, tasers, firearms, none of this repression will ever
make it fundamental contradiction go away.
Speaker 1 (10:55):
What have you made of Richard Chambers' comments about being
put into discussions about arming police officers, that's.
Speaker 2 (11:03):
The kind of comment that can only be made due
to the cowardice of the last government. The last time
the question of frontline police armament was raised by the
Armed Response Team trial, under the previous police commissioner or
the Minister of Police kind of disavowed any responsibility for
making policy decisions about whether frontline police armament happens or
(11:24):
doesn't happen in this country, so the decision was left
to the judgment of the Police commissioner. But this isn't
a merely operational decision like police deciding which street they
are or are not going to patrol. This is a
fundamental question of what does justice look like in this country?
Does it look like a unarmed community officer who maybe
(11:48):
knows something who they are around and is able to
solve problems in ways that don't rely on violence every
single time, Because that's the mental image I think most
New Zealanders have when they're think of what policing should
be like the make it click commercials for McDonald's are
playing out. I remember that ad very well from my childhood,
because there is a friendly cop in it, who like
(12:09):
waves goodbye to all of the children when they get
inter Ronald McDonald's car. I love that ad when I
was a kid. I still love that ahead. And that's
an image of policing that will disappear if we give
every cop a gun, because within a year, two years,
three years, at the decision being made, we will see
more bullets in the bodies of young brown people in
(12:30):
this country, and the police force in this country will
again be associated with the kind of racist terror that
it was known for during the era of dawn raids
and red squads and formal police racism against all the
communities that they've repeatedly apologized to for that discrimination. We
could do things differently here. If we want to rely
on a racist police violence and state terror in order
(12:53):
to try to distract people from the fact that people
comit in crimes because they don't have homes or jobs
or mental health care, fine, we can do that, but
there will be people in the community, people and organizations
like the ones which I belong, people like It's Prinzaltior
people and community organizations, people on the organized leafs who
will be there to fight back against these racist, discriminatory
(13:16):
policies to try to build something like a same society.
Speaker 1 (13:19):
How do we go about doing it? Though? So if
we don't arm our police, what else can be done
to better protect them on the front line? I guess
I'm thinking back to New Year's Day or the early
mornings of the death of Lynn Fleming is an absolute tragedy,
of course, and that was followed by another attempted incident
in Fungaday a few days later. Going back to those stats,
(13:41):
seventeen thousand firearms in six years, you've got incidents like
what happened to Lynn Fleming. How else are our officers
meant to protect themselves, do you think? Or is it
just pard and parcel of being a frontline officer and
looking at society and looking at getting people jobs, homes, etc.
Speaker 2 (14:00):
Yeah, I mean it's terrible and no one should just
get killed at work, think none of us except that
that is a reality what people need to do when
they shop for jobs. But we are not currently living
through a crisis of violence against New Zealand police. We
simply aren't. These are relatively benefrequent and that is obviously
an excellent thing. What we are living through is a
(14:22):
crisis of police violence. Police as you said, have become far,
far more likely to kill New Zealanders in the course
of trying to solve problems that they're experiencing, and that
is the issue with which we should be much more concerned.
We cannot democratically control the behavior of every New Zealand
or the country. I wish that we could pass the
law saying no one will be violent anymore and everyone
(14:44):
stopped being violent. That will be the role that I
would vastly prefer to live in. We do not have
that capacity, but we do have the capacity to democratically
decide how are we going to do justice in this country.
Are we going to brutalize, degrade and incarcerate people who
are behaving in an unacceptable way, or are we going
to create the kind of society in which that behavior
does not occur. So there are a number of things
(15:05):
that are happening here. We're using the police for stuff that,
as they rightly point out, they are not actually capable
of responding to. So we have police officers trying to
respond to mental health crisis. I've known a number of
mental health professionals who work in the crisis sector who
know that that is a difficult job to do, and
(15:27):
none of them work there anymore because there's no money
to fund those positions. We don't have the kind of
frontline response that we would need for a trained mental
health professional to be present when someone is having a
mental health episode in public and needs support, So we
send the police instead, and as police violence Stater shows,
the police often resort to tasering that person and then
(15:50):
throwing them in the cells. Is that what you would
want for someone you love who is having a moutdown
in public? I know that it's not what I would want.
So the answer here isn't what is the one thing
we need to do differently in order to allow the
police to finally start fixing their social problems. The ancy
here is recognizing that there are a number of social
functions which we are trying and failing to make the
(16:12):
police fulfill. There are some stuff for which they are
exactually the right agency to respond. If there is a
white creamers as terrorists shooting up a masque, yes they
are probably the right people to be dealing with that.
But most of the things which we send the police
to do, frankly, either do not warrant any kind of response,
or warrant a response that the police are not capable
(16:33):
of giving. We send the police to enforce evictions, we
send the police to try to calm down fights, to
deal people who are in suicidal distress. They can't do
any of that stuff. What we need to do is
to fund agencies and organizations who are able to do
that stuff. And until we do that, no, it's never
going to work.
Speaker 3 (16:55):
I'm sick and tired of the criminal low light and
the repeat violent offenders who put public safety at risk,
and that's why we're going after them, and in particular gangs.
If you are in a gang, be prepared to be
harassed by the police. If you're committing crimes, be prepared
for tougher sentences because we are introducing limits on repeat sentence,
(17:15):
discounts for remorse and if you keep offending, sorry, frankly,
isn't going to cut it anymore. We are cracking down
on crime, we are going after the gangs, and we
are going to restore law and order in New Zealand.
Speaker 1 (17:32):
Well, when it comes to crime in this country, of course,
society usually errs on the side of let's get tough
on crime. That approach and I mean, look National's election
campaign people must think that way. Why do you think
we tend to prefer this approach over a restorative approach.
Speaker 2 (17:51):
For the last forty years in this country, the state
has really stepped back. So we used to have a
very comprehensive social safety in thet state, provision of housing, employment,
health care, education, all the things that people need to
live full lives. And bit by bit, piece by piece,
that social welfare system, that social state has been pulled apart,
(18:14):
and more and more the state is saying, well, that's
your problem to deal with. Your benefits are going to
get cut. You figured it out. No, you can't have
a food grant. You figure it out. Good luck finding
a house. We're not building any state housing. We're not
going to help you find a place. You figure it out.
We are trained to think of people's problems as their problems.
If someone's life is bad, it's because they didn't do
(18:36):
a good job making themselves a good life. And the
state has supported this illusion right. Every aspect of state
policy has been aimed at forcing this responsibilization on all
of us, to make all of us into individually responsible
free market agents. But human beings aren't. Those human beings
(18:57):
live in a society in a context which has been
given to us in the past, which has been transmitted
to us, and so we've kind of been forced to
see people responsible for their own lives in a way
that they frankly are not. Some people would never have
had the chance to live a well adjusted, functional life
because of the conditions which have been voiced upon them
(19:17):
by history. And as long as we are trained to
see those people that individually responsible for the kind of
life that they live, yes, it makes very much. It
makes a lot of sense for us to then think, well,
they need to be punished in order to help them
learn to make better decisions. But because that's not how
human decision making works, that's not how history works, that
(19:37):
approach is doomed. So we've been trained into a way
of thinking about crime and justice and punishment that is
fundamentally at odds with the human reality we all inhabit.
But it is very very convenient for the rich if
we think in these ways, because we don't demand structural justice,
we don't demand economic justice. We demand that the dysfunction
(19:58):
people get dragged away and treat it poorly and get
put somewhere where we don't have to look at them,
we'll think about why they exist.
Speaker 1 (20:04):
Thanks for joining us, Emmy. That's it for this episode
of the Front Page. You can read more about today's
stories and extensive news coverage at enzedherld dot co dot mz.
The Front Page is produced by Ethan Sills and Richard Martin,
who is also our sound engineer. I'm Chelsea Daniels. Subscribe
(20:27):
to the Front Page on iHeartRadio or wherever you get
your podcasts, and tune in tomorrow for another look behind
the headlines.
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