In Queensland, there’s one officer for approximately 410 people. Here it’s one to 500.
Matthew Hooton has over 30 years of experience in political and corporate communications and strategy for clients in Australasia, Asia, Europe and North America, including the National and Act parties, and the Mayor of Auckland.
OPINION
Christopher Luxon declared law and order his top priorityfor Q3 2024. He’s right. Auckland increasingly resembles 1970s New York, not just at 3am on Fort St but, as one of my daughter’s friends discovered on Friday, on a bus heading to school.
So prevalent are shootings, stabbings and bashings, that many police now always wear their ballistic vests, not just when dealing with immediate violence.
They deserve to feel safer as they respond to community demands to get out of cars and the office and back on the beat.
There’s also political urgency. Police Minister Mark Mitchell promised to resign next month if polls report we’re feeling less safe than last year.
Mitchell should probably be excused from his promise, made during the election campaign, just as Finance Minister Nicola Willis should have dropped her pledge to quit if she didn’t deliver tax cuts just when we’d otherwise be enjoying falling interest rates.
They’re related. It’s not Mitchell’s fault Luxon’s tax cuts meant police spending had to fall from $2.66 billion last year to $2.53b, sliding to $2.35b by 2028, an 11% cut.
That’s surprising under a National-led Government during a violent crime crisis, police needing more recruits just to replace an ageing force, officers being headhunted to Australia and high inflation.
Of New Zealand’s 10,700 sworn officers, around 400 leave most years, but it’s now over 500. They need replacing just to maintain numbers.
Luxon promises a net 500 new officers by the end of 2025 but that was with 250 existing vacancies. To deliver the net 500, police must find, recruit and train about 1750 new officers over two years.
For it to happen, like cancer drugs, Willis needs to draw on her very tight $2.4b new-spending allowances, down 25% from this year.
Demands may come sooner, with police pay in arbitration. The Government offered below inflation. The union wants above.
Even with more money and the new police promised, we’ll still have fewer police per capita than most countries. In Queensland, there’s one officer for approximately 410 people. Here it’s one to 500.
Of course, money isn’t everything. The record $2.66b Labour gave police last year was up 63% from 2017/18, yet crime worsened.
Luxon’s Q3-plan promises more police powers by spring. Planned anti-gang laws, known mainly for banning patches in public, also restrict gangsters from associating with each other.
Don’t expect police to risk their lives going in and removing patches at gang funerals. But, day-to-day, the new law will let police harass and disrupt gangsters, stop and search them, and arrest them for further questioning.
Police then need the same powers when investigating homicide, rape, grievous bodily harm, aggravated robbery and large-scale methamphetamine dealing as the Serious Fraud Office. More investment is needed in the satellite technology tracking drug cartels’ vessels making their way here from Mexico and East Asia and in mental health.
Luxon also promises roadside drug testing which will have a similar function as the gang-patch law. It must be law by summer, but it would be easier just to radically extend police’s stop-and-search powers more generally and to empower them to immediately confiscate any vehicle used to commit or enable a crime. Team policing, which worked well against boy racers in recent weeks, needs further expansion.
Prime Minister Christopher Luxon (left) with Police and Corrections Minister Mark Mitchell. Photo / Marty Melville
After Labour’s gun-buyback scheme misfired, transferring military-style weapons from collectors to criminal gangs, Luxon pledges new laws by spring giving police more powers to confiscate firearms.
My daughter’s friend thinks that should include other weapons, like the steel bar with which his face was smashed in on the bus, and has an online petition calling for it at least on public transport.
Incredibly, there are no plans to re-establish the successful armed response teams abolished under Labour. That’s another thing for Mitchell’s to-do list.
While he’s at it, the concern about arming police has always been that it would cause an arms race with the gangs. That’s probably true, so Luxon ought to ensure police win that war in one move. As in much of Europe, all police should be equipped with and be required to display the Bushmaster semi-automatic rifles that made people feel safe after the Christchurch terrorist attack.
Luxon promises tougher sentencing rules for judges and his military-academy pilot, but they won’t make any immediate difference. It’s a shame Bill English never got around to implementing his social investment programme rather than talking about it, so that interventions could have occurred with those teenagers now committing violent crimes when they were in primary school.
Incrementalism may be politically safe but costs lives.
If Luxon wants violent criminals locked up rather than spending years out on remand, his Government needs to build more courtrooms and appoint more judges, also requiring more funding for prosecutors and defence lawyers. Jury trials should be restricted to crimes carrying over seven years jail.
The penalty for possessing offensive weapons should be doubled to six years but charges heard by judges alone. Criminals should go to jail for twice as long without parole for killing two people as for one.
Unbelievably, our police aren’t fitted with on-officer cameras and their new Tasers are also without cameras. To keep officers safe, they all need on-officer cameras, with real-time footage monitored by artificial intelligence, including face-recognition software.
That should extend to 100% CCTV coverage of our central cities and major shopping and entertainment precincts, other high-crime areas and public transport. Willis will just have to find Mitchell the money.
IT platforms like Safer Cities and the next phase of the New Zealand-designed Auror, now being exported to law-enforcement agencies globally, ought to be fully rolled out here first. Where our police already use Auror, more crime is being picked up, investigations are faster and more efficient, and convictions are more likely.
All this is contrary to the extreme-left “policing by consent” doctrine extended by the current top brass, and their idea police being visible incites crime.
No doubt, it has worrying civil-liberties implications but so did responding to Covid. Stronger police complaints systems and tougher sentences for bent cops would be imperative.
But the more important liberty is being safe riding a bus to spend your tax cut at a mall or getting to school, and police being safe on the streets. It should even be safe to be out drinking, partying and behaving badly at 3am in Fort St, with well-armed police ensuring no firearms, knives, metal bars or fists are present or misused.
If a pollster rings you, tell them you want all this. It’s the only way to get Governments to act.
