Greg O'Connor

Greg O'Connor

By GREG O'CONNOR*

Before 1992 New Zealanders enjoyed a policing situation unique in the Western world. Road policing was done by traffic officers, part of an identifiably and legally separate organisation from police, who concerned themselves only with protecting the public from crime and disorder.

That situation changed when the National Government merged the organisations and the Ministry of Transport's black-and-white patrol cars disappeared from the nation's roads.

The revelation last week that police in the central North Island are issued with ticket quotas exposed a raw nerve with New Zealanders. They think their police, whom they believe to be among the best in the world, should not be engaging in such unfair practices. They wrongly believe it to be a revenue-gathering exercise.

What underlies the issue is that the police-traffic merger has brought together two contrasting styles of policing accentuated by the different way each branch is funded.

Traffic policing, to be effective in reducing death and injury on the roads, requires a low-discretion, low-tolerance and high-impact approach. There was ample evidence of that in the six years after the merger when police cars virtually disappeared from our highways as the traffic branch was absorbed into the general duties or traditional police areas.

As a result, compliance decreased, average speeds increased and the road toll rose quickly to 800 a year, with a corresponding rise in the number of injuries.

In 1998, the Accident Compensation Commission, the Land Transport Safety Authority and the Ministry of Transport began to demand that police provide auditable evidence that they were doing the traffic policing those organisations were paying them to do.

One way of ensuring that was by counting the number of times police dealt with the public - that is, contacts - and counting the tickets they issued. Police emphasis changed as commanders and managers became accountable for ensuring traffic policing took priority.

In the late 1990s the public first began to understand fully the impact of the merger as the white police cars and their blue-uniformed occupants began to police the roads in a manner previously associated with the Ministry of Transport.

Speed cameras, drink-drive blitzes, warrant-of-fitness checks and a significant increase in tickets issued had the public - who previously only had contact with "their" police as the good guys policing real criminals - crying foul.

The fact that the road toll was reducing significantly as a result was little consolation to many.