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Opinion by Jarrod Gilbert
OPINION
The pre-election period is rarely a time for sensible discussions around crime and justice. Now that’s behind us, it’s important for whoever the new Police Minister is – almost certainly Mark Mitchell – to address some serious issues.
Whatever priorities the new Government has in law and order, theywon’t be realised unless there is a rethink on current front-line police priorities. In fact, forget a rethink, these issues are well-known – not least by police themselves – and action is required.
Police resources are being utterly consumed by activity that isn’t, or at least oughtn’t be, part of their core activity. This isn’t a failing of police, it’s the fact that other agencies aren’t stepping up.
Calls to police for people under mental distress or who have attempted suicide have skyrocketed in recent times. Last year, police attended nearly 16,000 calls for mental distress and over 18,000 calls related to threats or attempts of suicide. Since 2000, these have leapt from around 4600 and 2800 (or 248 per cent and 543 per cent increases) respectively. Only a tiny fraction of these calls actually required actual police action – an arrest, for example. Of the thousands of these events police attend, just 2 per cent of mental distress incidents and just 4 per cent of threats or attempts of suicide have a criminal offence recorded against them. Yet each represents considerable police time. Often these calls will require two police officers to take the distressed person to a place of help and wait with them until they are seen by a medical professional. This can take an entire shift.
Want to know why you’re not seeing enough police on the street or responding to crime? Here it is. As one front-line cop said to me, “It’s frustrating when somebody is talking to you about their hallucinations, and you can hear on the radio somebody’s house is being broken into and there’s no one to respond.”
NZ Police.
Nobody, least of all me, is saying that these calls from terribly unwell people don’t need attention. But the only reason police are attending is because nobody else is. Furthermore, police aren’t trained to deal with these events, and the blue uniform may at times be an exacerbating factor and not a mitigating one. We are expecting front-line cops to be social workers and psychologists, all the while screaming at them to do more of the work that they are essentially employed to do.
So, despite all of the political talk about what the police should be doing – which will now be demanded by the new Government – the real talk needs to be about what police shouldn’t be doing. If this isn’t addressed, it’s all just hot air because there simply aren’t the resources to do it – or at least do it well.
Increasing police numbers alone won’t cut it. Why? Because the demand in the areas of mental health is now so big, police aren’t even responding to large numbers of the calls they are getting (police can only attend just 33 per cent of mental distress calls). This means that any increases in police staffing levels will simply be absorbed in this area alone.
This isn’t just a local issue. In the UK, London’s Metropolitan Police has simply said, ‘Nope, this isn’t our job’. New Zealand police could do that here – and who would blame them – but what are we going to do with these issues? Who will step up?
I often talk about the need to expand our thinking around tackling crime, and the need for the likes of the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Health to be part of a preventative approach to the crime playbook. But nowhere is there a clearer-cut case for another agency to take a lead role than here. In the overwhelming majority of these cases, police are not required and a healthcare worker trained in crisis resolution is.
We need a total rethink of how we tackle crime. Nothing I heard during the election (from either side, actually) filled me with confidence that we will get the one we need. I hope I’m proven wrong. Over to you, Minister Mitchell.
Dr Jarrod Gilbert is the director of independent research solutions and a sociologist at the University of Canterbury.
