Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern is surrounded by security officers in Lower Hutt during the 2020 election campaign. Photo / Newsroom via Getty Images
Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern looms large in the minds of those who are shouting at a system they believe is incapable of listening.
And, it turns out, middle-aged Pākehā men are the largest group of those doing the shouting.
These discoveries have emerged from the first two years of the Fixated Threat Assessment Centre, a new agency formed by police and the Ministry of Health. The agency seeks to identify people who might harm those who work in, or for, Parliament.
Since it was set up in 2019, 220 people have been referred to the centre's team of six - made up of police officers, a psychologist and mental health nurses.
The move to set up a centre in New Zealand follows the establishment of similar operations overseas. It's driven by striking research from forensic psychiatrist Dr Justin Barry-Walsh, who now leads the team out of Police National Headquarters in Wellington alongside police Detective Sergeant Aidan Neville.
The research revealed the degree of harassment and violence directed towards politicians.
It found that 87 per cent of MPs in New Zealand faced unwanted harassment and 15 per cent had been attacked.
The attacks include an MP being confronted with a firearm, a caravan hit with a Molotov cocktail and assaults.
Attacks such as those have a pathway easily seen in hindsight and the centre's work is focused on turning that to foresight - almost the inverse of popular television show Criminal Minds.
That doesn't mean those 220 people dealt with in two years would have carried out a similar crime. Barry-Walsh says that number is triaged down to a comparatively small percentage the centre actually contacts. He considers about 20 per cent to be "of real concern".
"I'm pretty certain we've stopped people from causing harm to themselves," Neville says.
The centre is focused entirely on Parliament and its staff, whether in Wellington or at electorate offices across the country.
Referrals to the centre come largely from parliamentary staff. Red flags are raised over those whose efforts to engage an MP are especially determined and frequent.
It could be an individual who repeatedly emails on a specific issue - perhaps a long-held grievance - and uses concerning language. Emails filled with capitalised letters - shouting - and correspondents turning up at Parliament demanding a meeting might also raise the same flag. Signs also include deep research on a specific issue to support the cause on which an individual is fixated.
Barry-Walsh: "The concept of fixation is an intense preoccupation usually with a case, sometimes a person, associated with a grievance.
As the centre has made itself known, the workflow has come from other directions. Neville says there have been referrals from the UK after particularly energetic efforts to have the Queen resolve someone's issue.
"That can indicate unwellness because they are asking her to fix something."
Getting the message out has also meant visiting MPs' offices around the country to meet with Parliament's electorate staff. It's often the front line for someone wanting to push their cause to their local MP. Diplomatic Protection Service staff are also a key contact.
The centre's roots, broadly, lie in the UK which set up a similar unit in 2006. Since then, similar centres have been set up in countries across Europe and the Commonwealth, all with a similar model - medical staff from the public health system and police with expertise in national security issues.
In 2015, a journal paper to which Justin Barry-Walsh contributed found 87 per cent of MPs in New Zealand had been on the receiving end of harassment ranging from "disturbing communications to physical violence". Using data collected before the 2014 election, it found a third of MPs subjected to harassment had been approached at home. Most experienced harassment in multiple ways on multiple occasions.
When asked, MPs said they believed their harassers showed signs of mental illness. As the paper pointed out, most people with mental health issues do not pose a risk. However, high rates of mental unwellness did emerge when studying those who had fixated on issues or politicians as either the cause of, or solution to, the issue at the root of their fixation.
And it wasn't only MPs who bore the brunt of the fixated behaviour. Incidents abroad showed that the person's intensity impacted others, from friends and family to strangers - staff, for example - who became collateral damage to attacks on politicians.
The research by Barry-Walsh was a springboard to the establishment of the centre. In a 2020 journal article, Barry-Walsh used the experience of an 18-month trial to explain how the centre would operate.
The trial period had skewered an assumption the centre would untangle a complex human algorithm to identify individuals who posed risk. Instead, as with MPs' impressions, they found untreated mental illness as the single common factor behind the persistence and intensity of fixated behaviour.
Barry-Walsh likened it to reducing the risk of cardiac disease - finding those with high cholesterol, obesity, smoking and other risk behaviours and intervening in the expectation that dealing with the underlying issues reduces the risk. You'll never know who, specifically, you saved from a heart attack but you will know many are healthier than they might have been.
There's a multitude of sensitivities to be juggled in the team's operation. Largely, it deals with behaviour that doesn't reach a criminal threshold, or the level requiring compulsory mental health treatment.
Its work is of nuance and subtlety. As Neville puts it: "We often deal with things that are offensive, but not an offence."
"We're not here to go after anyone who is upset with or protesting government or anything else that's going on."
It's behaviour that marks out someone who falls under the centre's gambit, not the issue they are pushing or who it is directed towards.
In his two years with FTAC, he hasn't arrested anyone. "We're not here to get people locked up or committed," says Neville. "People get ignored for years. They've been going for so long and it's just become their normal approach.
"There are certainly people who are more concerning to us. There are people we might rate as a higher concern based on a number of factors, and we try to mitigate those factors."
Those who adopt a fixation search for a way to resolve it. That's where MPs come in, or - as the centre has found - the Prime Minister. "She's a magnet for people who want to petition and ask for help. She's seen by people as maternal, responsive and warm."
Events in the public eye can be a lightning rod that escalates fixations - high-profile events such as Ardern and partner Clarke Gayford's daughter arriving or the couple's engagement.
Bound up in that is what Barry-Walsh describes as the narrow or simplistic view of government that the fixated develop. It leaves, in their view, one person - or the role they hold - as the solution to an issue which they have wrestled with for years, which has consumed substantial portions of their time and thinking.
The centre takes referrals and checks the basis for the person being flagged. Both health staff and police have access to records that might reveal further information - each observing strict privacy boundaries.
From there, says Neville, it can be as simple as a phone call to try and find out how that person is going.
Some welcome the call. Some don't. Some stop the communication, some don't. There are those who pause "then go back down the rabbit hole".
"Some people just want someone to hear them." Asked if such calls trigger escalations, Neville says: "The literature suggests it's more likely to have an adverse outcome by not doing anything."
Finding a way out isn't always access to health care. Some cases are passed to police districts when behaviour escalates to criminal levels. Other times, finding ways for the agency at the centre of the fixated frustration to work differently with the individual can ease or solve the issue.
There's not a particular type, although individuals tend to be "older, male and European". The age factor could be because it takes time to develop a fixation to the point where your focus is on petitioning the Prime Minister or Governor-General. And men tend to be more aggressive when pushing their cause.
Those with fixations also tend to be in a state of desperation, are lonely and feel helpless. It is less common with those who are married or who have a social network - either "someone who tells you to pull your head in" or who can "help you have a proportional response".
As Neville says: "If you're isolated, you don't have that."
Through the work the centre has done, Barry-Walsh says the team has identified people with serious mental illnesses, some of whom were not previously known to health services.
"One of our overriding concerns is the person's own welfare. People who make concerning communications with the Prime Minister or other MPs - that's a reflection of their level of distress," says Barry-Walsh.
"Often our concern is the risk that person poses to themselves. There may be 60 murders a year but there are 600 suicides."
