Tauranga cop Rob Lemoto is nearing the end of his first full season as host of national crime-fighting TV show Police Ten 7. He talks to Juliet Rowan about his passion for policing, giving selfies to criminals and how his wife keeps him balanced and reminds him to mow the lawns.
When Rob Lemoto joined the police, it was about "the chase, the catch, the rush".
"Yeah," he says with a laugh: "I wanted to drive a Holden."
The Tauranga detective sergeant and host of Police Ten 7 drives a white Toyota these days and cringes when he thinks of his 21-year-old self starting out on the beat.
He would arrive at domestic incidents full of bravado, only to be met by big, angry men who would scoff and say, "What do you want, boy?"
"Well, clearly you've assaulted her, you're under arrest."
"Get f***ed, get f***ed."
"Sweet as, I'm happy to do this the hard way."
Says Lemoto now of his approach: "Dumb, dumb, dumb."
At 40, and with two decades of policing under his belt, including 7½ years in the Armed Offenders Squad and seven months in Bougainville, Papua New Guinea, he has learned the importance of working with communities. He knows that giving a suspect a minute to rant, a show of respect, or even a bit of counselling is likely to elicit a better result.
"As a younger police officer, [it was] 'Let's get the baddies'. As an older police officer, [it's] 'How do we stop future victims from being affected?'"
The transition to TV
Lemoto joined Police Ten 7 in September 2014, hosting 12 episodes last season and now near the end of filming another 40 for this year.
He had appeared on the show once in 2004 profiling an aggravated robbery at Mt Maunganui and was asked to audition to take over as host from detective inspector Graham Bell.
Lemoto was chosen from 50 officers who applied, ending Bell's 13-year reign on the nation's screens.
The former Rotorua cop was well known for his no-holds-barred descriptions of criminals and when Lemoto started doing promotional work for the show, he was repeatedly asked which of Bell's expressions was his favourite.
He would reply, "All of them", but eventually the interviewers saw through the lie.
"Did you watch the show?" "Nah, mate, I'm a policeman," Lemoto would reply.
But his family were fans and, like most in the country, Lemoto knew Bell's voice.
"I'd hear him from the lounge [saying] 'these bloody mongrels'," Lemoto says.
The detective works three days a week on Ten 7 and two days doing administration for the Bay of Plenty's child protection team.
He says its officers are exposed to some of the country's worst offending.
"I think you'd have to be without a soul not to feel it at times."
Working in the crime squad, he also dealt with predators and paedophiles and recalls interviewing a man in his late thirties who had abused a 5-year-old girl.
"The first thing I thought was, 'the victim's the same age as my daughter'.
When I was interviewing him, the welfare officer was present monitoring the interview, and she said she could hear me grinding my teeth when he talked."
Lemoto says it was excruciating sitting through the man's descriptions of what he had done to the girl, particularly as he punctuated the end of his sentences with the phrase, "You know what I mean".
"As a police officer, I'm thinking, 'Right, how can I stop this guy from doing it again? I need to understand him as much as possible to prevent him from behaving this way.' As a dad and as a member of the community, I just wanted to physically remove him from the planet."
Lemoto is a father of two girls aged 15 and 12, and says child protection is an area of policing that cannot be ignored. He praises the agencies who work with children, saying they cop a lot of flak.
"You know who the buck stops with first and foremost? It's the parents," he says.
Lemoto is big on family, growing up in South Auckland as one of four children to a Tongan father and European mother. His father worked two jobs to support the family and kept his kids out of trouble with discipline and sport.
"My dad was such an awesome role model. I was a product of my environment."
He took it hard when his dad, also Rob, died of cancer in 2007.
As a new recruit at Counties Manukau, Lemoto realised how sheltered his upbringing had been when he saw the dysfunction of other families.
Lemoto immersed himself in crime work in the Bay for the next two years, only stopping when his wife, Kathryn, reminded him of the need for balance in his life.
They met in high school (he played rugby for James Cook "to get a girlfriend" and says it worked when he met her) and Lemoto credits Kathryn with being a grounding influence throughout his career.
"I'd go home after a massive, major operation, high as a kite, and she'd be like, 'So, are you going to mow those lawns?' I'm like, 'I'm Superman. We just locked this guy up for murder. We just solved a big drug ring.' She's like, 'And you'll be spending time with the kids this week'."
Lemoto loves the show, not because it's a chance to be on TV, he says, but because it's a policing opportunity.
He loves that the Thursday night slot gets results, giving the example of an attack on two 14-year-old girls in the Wairarapa which had gone unsolved for five months before it screened.
"That night, the officer in charge had so many calls, he had the offender in the can on Friday morning. Getting that on TV solved it. We're the only show where our viewers help us."
The fame
Since being on TV, Lemoto regularly gets recognised and asked for selfies on the street.
He's happy to oblige but says he won't give one to people known to police unless they can prove they've been out of trouble for a year.
Lemoto takes a photo shoot with The Bay of Plenty Times Weekend in his stride, despite hassles from colleagues outside Tauranga Police Station, but is still unused to his face on TV.
"I'm not a fan of it. My brother teases me constantly about having a face for radio."
Guys at work hassle him, "When are you going to be funny?"
He retorts, "How can I be funny walking through a kidnapping?"
But while he is supposed to be confined to the desk in child protection, Lemoto still likes to "go out and play policeman" whenever he can.
Last Thursday, in Auckland for his weekly Ten 7 studio day, he helped arrest a man who had been on the run from Tauranga police for a year.
The man was at a house in West Auckland and Lemoto and colleagues prepared to make the raid in a nearby street.
Lemoto relishes telling the story, especially a comic moment when a police dog threatened to expose their position by leaping across the patrol car seats and turning on the vehicle's flashing lights.
Lemoto says it was a buzz making the arrest, but jokes about doing penance with his boss anytime he steps outside his administrative role.
"I'll go into Newmarket and do admin for four hours to make up for it."
Despite his jokes, Lemoto also knows what it is to feel fear.
In 2005, when in the AOS, he spent 13 hours holed up in Tauranga's Devonport Towers as a man claiming to have a large amount of explosives threatened to blow up the 15-storey building.
"I'm thinking, 'If he has got that many explosives, it would've been nice to say goodbye to my kids this morning'."
Violence also greeted him in Bougainville, where a woman was hacked to death with a machete three days after he arrived, and in another horrifying story, he reveals the trauma of living with witnessing the aftermath of murder.
In July 29, 2012, Lemoto had just finished serving a summons on the Filthy Few at their Tauranga gang pad when he heard a job coming in on the radio saying a man was standing over a woman with a knife.
He was near the street so did a U-turn "and shot there at a rate of knots".
"I could hear the uniformed boys tooling up - arming up with a Taser and a firearm - but they'd pulled over to do that. I just made the decision, 'Well, you know, I'm in a 3 tonne patrol car. If he's going to stab her, I'm just gonna run him down'."
When he arrived, he saw the man standing next to the woman, who was in a car.
"I didn't know what was going on so I put him down. As I put him down, I saw she was slumped in the car bleeding ... I dragged her out and was trying to do CPR with her. Then the first patrol car pulled up and she'd suffered too many stab wounds. She had multiple, multiple stab wounds, and we couldn't revive her."
The realisation that she had bled to death hit Lemoto when he saw the blood-soaked car seat afterwards.
"You always sort of second guess, could I have got there quicker, could I have done this, could I have ... because that's the last thing you want to see, is someone hurt."
He tells of doing the scene examination, listening to the man's ranting as he transported him to the police station (Lemoto says in his opinion: "he was a horrible man, a narcissist."), and doing the formal questioning.