Jarrod Gilbert: Winston Peters and PM at odds with Mark Mitchell over recruiting police

Police Minister Mark Mitchell. Photo / Mark Mitchell

Opinion

OPINION

Police Minister Mark Mitchell was right to extend the timeline on recruiting 500 new police officers last week. But he was only right for a matter of hours. Then he was wrong. This story has been framed as one of politics and a flip-flop – and it certainly was that – but the true implications have not been articulated.

The very morning after Mitchell made the considered and rational view that the ambitious recruitment goal will take three years and not two, Mitchell had his legs cut out from underneath him by Deputy Prime Minister Winston Peters and Prime Minister Christopher Luxon, who both came out and said Mitchell was wrong.

Following the very public chastising, Mitchell also decided he was wrong, and articulated that the recruitment period should indeed be two years. But here’s the rub: he wasn’t wrong. He was entirely correct. And the fact that politics has trumped practicalities here has dangerous implications.

Prime Minister Christopher Luxon (left) and Deputy Prime Minister Winston Peters at Parliament. Photo / Marty Melville

The public can be forgiven for believing this is simply an issue of working harder to achieve the recruitment goal in the timeframe set. Police just need pull up their boot straps and get on with it.

But that’s not the issue at all, and here’s where the dangers emerge. Police have been on an extended recruitment drive for several years searching for 1800 new police officers, and the well of potential recruits is simply running dry. In attempting to reach the new targets they will be pressured into dipping into unsuitable wells, which means dropping standards and accepting or graduating suboptimal recruits.

It’s impossible to overstate the difficulty of transforming a person from a civilian into a police officer in the space of a 16- (soon to be 20) week recruit course. If you don’t have high-calibre people capable of making that transition, you are only going to create serious issues down the track by giving blue uniforms to people who shouldn’t have them.

The state gives police enormous powers: to detain people, to carry and use lethal weapons, the ability to apply discretion around incidents and therefore public perceptions of justice. They often deal with people at their very worst due to the nature of their activities or, and increasingly, due to mental health issues.

Giving that job to people who are not up to it, and who are forced through simply due to unrealistic timeframes, would be disastrous. They will make the wrong decisions, be more susceptible to corruption, create unsafe conditions for the public and their colleagues, and apply the wrong laws or processes and therefore threaten justice or allow offenders to not be convicted based on technicalities.

They may not be perfect, but New Zealand has a remarkably well-regarded police service compared to other similar nations, and by softening our recruitment policies we risk putting that in jeopardy.

When Mitchell became police minister he learned of the problems around recruitment, and he clearly and articulately outlined them when he informed Parliament and the public of his wise decision to extend the deadline in order to protect police integrity.

But Peters – without any of this knowledge – looked at his newly inked coalition agreement that said it would take two years to recruit the new 500 police officers and not three. Holding on to that commitment was clearly more important to him than making sure the incredibly important process is done well. He chose politics over the police. Soon he wasn’t alone in that.

Prime Minister Christopher Luxon. Photo / Mark Mitchell

In a wonderful example of MMP-tail-wagging-the-dog, Peters immediately pressured Luxon who then cravenly decided he wouldn’t defend his police minister for doing the correct thing, and instead unceremoniously threw him under the bus.

While these lousy, cynical and dangerous decisions by two party leaders will impact on the public’s trust and confidence in the police, they should really impact on the trust and confidence in politicians.

· Dr Jarrod Gilbert is the director of Independent Research Solutions and a sociologist at the University of Canterbury.