Civilians used for burglary inquiries

By BRIDGET CARTER

Police are sending civilian staff in place of sworn officers to investigate burglaries.

The crime-scene investigators use marked police cars, which have been stopped by members of the public seeking help.

Reports of public confusion concern Police Association president Greg O'Connor, who says non-sworn staff are not meant to drive police cars.

"It is not good because what actually happens is police cars drive past or ignore instances that they should stop for," he said.

"Once you put someone in a police car, there is a full expectation that they are going to be police."

Roles taken by non-sworn staff have increased over the years to keep up with new styles of intelligence-led policing. In the past few years non-sworn staff have been hired to ease the administrative load and carry out tasks normally done by police officers, such as taking fingerprints and interviewing witnesses - leaving officers free for frontline work.

In this case, those driving the police cars are civilians dressed in navy-blue overalls that appear identical to police uniforms apart from a small badge on the sleeves signifying they are non-sworn. They work as crime-scene investigators at burglary scenes as part of a pilot programme running in Auckland.

Police spokeswoman Andi Devlin said the pilot programme ran out of the Mt Wellington CIB and eastern area and began in 2002.

Most of the non-sworn staff had backgrounds working with crime scenes or police work.

Ms Devlin said although there had been cases where civilians had taken marked police cars out on the road, it was uncommon. They mostly used unmarked police vehicles.

She was not aware of any instances where people had flagged down police cars when crime-scene investigators were driving them.

"There should be no public concern over non-sworn staff working on their own," she said. "They are highly trained and closely monitored by sworn members of the police."

Mr O'Connor said a broader concern was that day-to-day policing was being done more and more by civilians and less and less by police.

Security guards from private firms were already being used to guard crime scenes.

Mr O'Connor called it "politicising of the police force" where short-term measures were put in place to do things such as improve response times for burglaries.

He believed such action overlooked the bigger picture.

"So much of policing now is being done by what the front page is," he said. "Too much decision-making is being done because the Government is very conscious of the impact of law-and-order issues."

Since 1992, police numbers have risen from 5278 sworn staff and 1194 non-sworn to 7400 sworn and 2159 non-sworn.

Mr O'Connor agreed the pilot scheme had been brought in quietly and said it was likely it would be a policy rolled out nationwide.

"I have never known a pilot yet that has not become normalised."