I have had the privilege of representing New Zealand Police overseas a number of times throughout the 28 years that I have been lucky enough to be a police officer.
On each of these occasions, I have worked with, reviewed, studied with and interacted with law enforcement agencies in othercountries. One of the things that strikes me every time I look at how things get done in other countries is that there is usually a fundamental difference in their approach compared with ours.
In most places, law enforcement agencies police their communities, whereas here in New Zealand, we police with our communities. New Zealand Police are held up internationally as an exemplar in community policing, and rightly so. We are asked to go to a lot of different places around the world, and have staff in some of these places right now, to show other agencies how to police with the permission and consent of the people, not just how to enforce the law.
The visible part of policing is sometimes the red and blue lights, patrol cars and handcuffs, and that is an important bit of what we do.
However, the vast majority of police staff come to work to make their part of the world safer, and we do just as much (if not more) on the "softer" community side of the business - it just doesn't make for good reality TV, so it's not quite as visible.
We say Safer Communities Together and we mean it. One of the very visible facets of this approach is the strength, volume and quality of volunteers who give up their time to assist in some aspect of policing their communities, and I wanted to take this opportunity to thank these people, as I don't get to do that very often.
There are a load of good folk all around Bay of Plenty who give up their time to be volunteer members of Victim Support, Search and Rescue, Neighbourhood Support, front counter attendants at rural stations, community patrols, CCTV monitors, and our partner groups such as Maori Wardens and Pacific Wardens.
These folk make the police part of Safer Communities Together a lot easier, and the work they do is extremely important and valuable - our police staff really enjoy working with them.
As the author Sherry Anderson said: "Volunteers don't get paid; not because they're worthless but because they're priceless."Superintendent Glenn Dunbier is the Bay of Plenty Police District Commander
