Prime Minister Chris Hipkins has found out the hard way what journalists who cover crime in New Zealand know all too well - that police communication is not the gold standard for accuracy.
Hipkins was caught out when he said on February 20 there had only been “third or fourth-hand accounts” of guns being pulled on people at road checkpoints in Hawke’s Bay.
That was despite police actually attending an incident of that nature on February 17. The affected workers had also spoken to media about their terrifying experience.
Here’s Police Commissioner Andrew Coster’s official reasoning for why the PM was uninformed:
“I have since corrected this with the Minister’s office and apologised to the Prime Minister for the difficulty that this caused.”
Police Commissioner Andrew Coster says police are dealing assertively with all reports of crime in cyclone-hit areas.
That the incident was not coded correctly is understandable - Hawke’s Bay during that week was a disaster zone where mistakes could easily occur and communication ranged from being difficult to impossible.
But the reality is that changes in police structure have made coding errors an everyday occurrence that now drives the media to distraction.
The first thing early reporters around the country do each morning is to put a call in to police to see what happened overnight.
It’s a time-honoured tradition, and helps confirm the world as we know it didn’t flood or burn down.
In decades gone by, reporters would walk down to their local stations and get the duty sergeant to open their notebook of events, which they’d chat through with the journalist - everything from bail breaches to murders.
Those meetings were slowly replaced by each region having its own police media liaison on the ground, as police sought to keep the sergeants at arm’s length from journalists.
And then six or seven years ago, the entire police media set-up was centralised to teams in Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch.
It means that in 2023, if an event is coded incorrectly, there is no safety net to catch it now.
Prime Minister Chris Hipkins has been caught in an information trap that media know all too well. Photo / Warren Buckland
There is no sergeant to ask in the morning, and there’s not even a local on the ground in Hawke’s Bay who can quickly walk into their office and chat with them about a media query.
Our reporters are told nearly every morning that nothing of significance happened overnight.
Invariably, they’ll then discover something significant has happened, which they then have to email and wait hours to find out the official word about.
In the past few months alone, we’ve been told the deliberate ramming of a vehicle off the road was a single-car crash.
We’ve been told events happened on Wednesday, when they were on Friday.
And we’re regularly told (perhaps most glaringly) that events have happened in ‘Hastings’ and ‘Wairoa’, when they’re out in the deepest depths of rural areas.
Local cops can be reticent to break the shackles and speak out about events directly to media.
We had one speak to us recently about an investigation, only to get a call from a higher-ranking officer to say he shouldn’t have because they were now getting calls from other media.
None of this is a criticism of the media teams. They’re great people who do want to help, and go out of their way to do so.
But the loss of police media locality has left information deserts in the regions.
Now it’s trapped the Prime Minister politically, and shaken the trust of a region already struggling with incessant rumours, a fear of reporting gang crime and infuriating claims of casualty cover-ups.
The ironic thing is that Hipkins was partly right - the account of the incident had been through three or four pairs of hands before getting to him. Sadly, that’s the same of every crime in Hawke’s Bay.
