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