Kyotra. I'm Chelsea Daniels and this is the Front Page, a daily podcast presented by the New Zealand Herald. Growing concern about public safety has reignited the idea of arming our frontline police officers. The Police Union says sixty eight percent of officers support routine arming, and our new Police Commissioner, Richard Chambers is apparently open to discussions around it, although he has said we're proud of having unarmed police and
he'd like to keep it that way. This is all while in the first hours of twenty twenty five, a car rammed into a police vehicle at a Nelson gathering. Senior Sergeant Lynn Fleming later died in hospital. Another officer was critically injured. This was followed by another attempted ramming a week later. So do we need to look at better protecting those whose jobs are to protect us or are their risks to giving more power to the police?
Today on the Front Page, Auckland University criminology lecturer doctor Amy Ruanket there joins us to discuss emmy, why do you think conversations around arming our frontline offices happen so often?
Well deliberate political agenda. First of all, the Police Association is organized body which has been pushing hard for frontline police armament for years now. So one reason that this keeps coming up is because they keep bringing it up. I think another reason is that we see reporting about crime, and we see frightening reporting about crime and more violence.
More force is always proposed as the solution to crime, that if there was more oppression, more violence, than those frightening stories would go away.
The Police Union says sixty eight percent of officers support routine arming. Why do you think this.
Is It's a job that is based around the use of force. That's what police officers are trained in doing. There are lots of ways that we require police officers to do other kinds of work. We make them be mental health workers, who make them be social workers, we make them do all kinds of things. But what they are trained in is in the use of force, and so that's what institutionally, the police as a body relies
on when it's time to solve problems. Now, the issue is that more violence doesn't seem to be an effective way of resolving the problem of crime, and so police armament categorically will not fix the things that it's being proposed as a solution.
To police Data reveals officers encountered nearly seventeen thousand firearms in under six years Auckland, accounting for over a quarter of those found nearly half of real injuries and deaths. That means cops are carrying out routine police work and finding nearly ten guns every day across the country. I guess you can see kind of why these officers would be open to carrying firearms themselves, but how would we be sure that they wouldn't use them irresponsibly though?
Yeah, Well, first of all, it would be a misrepresentation to say that New Zealand police officers don't carry firearms. They do. Every police car has guns, and all of our police officers routinely carry tases. So the idea that police officers are completely vulnerable and open to being harmed with no means of defending themselves, actually that's not true. That's not what the situation is. But secondly, the idea that more guns in these situations will make things safer
just isn't the case. The number one way to escalate a fight, in my experience, is to start making more shows of force. So the idea that every police officer having a firearm on their hip will pull these situations down on a supported idea, and we see this when we look to the United States of America, a country which does have frontline police armament, and it is a much more frightening and violent place than Ultior has ever been.
I think most of us would like our country to be less like the United States of America, not more, and that is where policies like frontland police armament get
us going. Now you ask how we could be sure that New Zealand's police officers wouldn't use firearms irresponsibly if they were given them, And that's a very good question because, first of all, the police have very recently been presented with the Understanding Police Delivery Report which found that along every measurable access, New Zealand's police force discriminates against Marti
and other ethnic minorities. Secondly, we've done a trial run of police armament before, so New Zealand police tried the armed Response Teams model in three jurisdictions in Auckland and Counties, Wyecastle and in christ Church a number of years ago, and they had a patrol CAUs who were carrying machine guns on patrol in those areas looking for fights, and for the most part, they didn't find any. None of these armed response teams found themselves responding to an armed incident.
Mostly they were used for routine policing. They were doing traffic stops, they were serving search warrants, they were doing bail checks, all of the stuff that normal cops do every day. But they were carrying machine guns. That is simply not an arrangement that most New Zealanders want, and people didn't support the trial, and it was canned after it concluded. Police were warned the trial wouldn't provide enough evidence to prove its worth.
That's about the success of the trial and more about the style.
Of placing that's appropriate for New Zealand. I've been clear that I see New Zealand as a generally unarmed police service, and so our commitment is to continue to place in that way. Finally, we have seen before what happens when New Zealand's police force is given access to more dangerous weaponry.
The police did a trial rollout of tasers to see how would police start using tases if they were routinely armed with them, and what that reporting found was that as soon as police officers had immediate access to offensive weapons, they started resorting to those more serious forms of force in order to resolve conflict during the course of their jobs. So they used less restraint, less kind of closed fist, and used taseres and pepper spray much more as soon
as as means are available to them. This is not a situation into which we need to introduce more deadly forms of force, because we have already seen they will use it. They will use it in increasingly indiscriminate ways, and they will use it primarily against marginalized populations like Maori, ethnic minorities, people experiencing mental illness.
Yeah. I actually read an interesting study that examined police shootings in New Zealand and up against England and Wales, and it looked at rates from say nineteen seventy to twenty twenty, and ultimately found in the last decade so that twenty eleven to twenty twenty, New Zealand doubled the rate of shootings and it decreased in England and Wales at the same time. What is it about New Zealand do you think that could potentially explain this?
The chriminaloist John Pratt argued that New Zealand's really been subject to this populist way of talking about crime, and so politicians, police association officials, police commissioners, as it may be, have all really relied on this notion that the public is endangered, the public is threatened, and the only way to defend society from this alien invader threat from outside is more force and more oppression. And so New Zealand really has had a very very unitive criminal justice system.
We're hearing all these messages now about how the last government was too soft on crime, and so we need to put more children into boot camps, and we need to builtimore prisons, and we need to punish people more. New Zealand has one of the highest prison populations for a country like us in the world. We are an intensely punished society and an intensely punitive society. So the idea that things need to be more punishing has been tried and has been tried in this country for the
last forty years. What we've gotten out of it is a wave of killings by police officers, and chrime has not gone away.
You mentioned America before in America actually has to be the number one example of why this is a bad idea.
Right.
According to some reporting from the Washington Post, on average, police in the US shoot and kill more than one thousand people a year since they began recording these numbers. While half of those shot by police were white, black Americans were shot at a disproportionate rate. They account for roughly fourteen percent of the population there and are killed by police at more than twice the rate than white Americans. Now, tell me why in the world would we want to emulate this.
We have data from New Zealand collected by the police and elves which shows how they use force. What we can see from that data is that mari are around seven times more likely to be the victims of police violence than pakiha are. We know exactly what would happen if this policy was rolled out. We know exactly who would be the victims of it. We know exactly what a bad idea this would be. This is a government
which has relied on creating stories about race. I'm sure many people who listened to this podcast have just fired off their submissions on the tree principal skill. I know that's what I was up all night doing as well. This is a cultural war kind of strategy here. This is a way of making us have these discussions about the motive issues like crime, turning these into problems of public order that can then only be solved by a more punishing state and less support for people. But we
could do things different here in this country. We once had zero unemployment because the state made sure that everyone had a job. This is a kind of which once had zero homelessness because the state made sure that everybody had a home. We could do things that would solve the fundamental causes of crime, give people the full dignified
human lives all of us deserve. But it would require taking money away from the rich and giving it to those of us who made that money through the sweat of our brows and the labor that we do every day to make this country the place that it is. Until we do that, until we give people what they
need to live lives, crime will happen. And no amount of policing, no amount of patrol teams, no amount of pepper spray, tasers, firearms, none of this repression will ever make it fundamental contradiction go away.
What have you made of Richard Chambers' comments about being put into discussions about arming police officers, that's.
The kind of comment that can only be made due to the cowardice of the last government. The last time the question of frontline police armament was raised by the Armed Response Team trial, under the previous police commissioner or the Minister of Police kind of disavowed any responsibility for making policy decisions about whether frontline police armament happens or doesn't happen in this country, so the decision was left
to the judgment of the Police commissioner. But this isn't a merely operational decision like police deciding which street they are or are not going to patrol. This is a fundamental question of what does justice look like in this country?
Does it look like a unarmed community officer who maybe knows something who they are around and is able to solve problems in ways that don't rely on violence every single time, Because that's the mental image I think most New Zealanders have when they're think of what policing should be like the make it click commercials for McDonald's are
playing out. I remember that ad very well from my childhood, because there is a friendly cop in it, who like waves goodbye to all of the children when they get inter Ronald McDonald's car. I love that ad when I
was a kid. I still love that ahead. And that's an image of policing that will disappear if we give every cop a gun, because within a year, two years, three years, at the decision being made, we will see more bullets in the bodies of young brown people in this country, and the police force in this country will again be associated with the kind of racist terror that it was known for during the era of dawn raids and red squads and formal police racism against all the
communities that they've repeatedly apologized to for that discrimination. We
could do things differently here. If we want to rely on a racist police violence and state terror in order to try to distract people from the fact that people comit in crimes because they don't have homes or jobs or mental health care, fine, we can do that, but there will be people in the community, people and organizations like the ones which I belong, people like It's Prinzaltior people and community organizations, people on the organized leafs who
will be there to fight back against these racist, discriminatory policies to try to build something like a same society.
How do we go about doing it? Though? So if we don't arm our police, what else can be done to better protect them on the front line? I guess I'm thinking back to New Year's Day or the early mornings of the death of Lynn Fleming is an absolute tragedy, of course, and that was followed by another attempted incident in Fungaday a few days later. Going back to those stats, seventeen thousand firearms in six years, you've got incidents like what happened to Lynn Fleming. How else are our officers
meant to protect themselves, do you think? Or is it just pard and parcel of being a frontline officer and looking at society and looking at getting people jobs, homes, etc.
Yeah, I mean it's terrible and no one should just get killed at work, think none of us except that that is a reality what people need to do when they shop for jobs. But we are not currently living through a crisis of violence against New Zealand police. We simply aren't. These are relatively benefrequent and that is obviously an excellent thing. What we are living through is a
crisis of police violence. Police as you said, have become far, far more likely to kill New Zealanders in the course of trying to solve problems that they're experiencing, and that is the issue with which we should be much more concerned. We cannot democratically control the behavior of every New Zealand or the country. I wish that we could pass the law saying no one will be violent anymore and everyone stopped being violent. That will be the role that I
would vastly prefer to live in. We do not have that capacity, but we do have the capacity to democratically decide how are we going to do justice in this country. Are we going to brutalize, degrade and incarcerate people who are behaving in an unacceptable way, or are we going to create the kind of society in which that behavior does not occur. So there are a number of things that are happening here. We're using the police for stuff that, as they rightly point out, they are not actually capable
of responding to. So we have police officers trying to respond to mental health crisis. I've known a number of mental health professionals who work in the crisis sector who know that that is a difficult job to do, and none of them work there anymore because there's no money
to fund those positions. We don't have the kind of frontline response that we would need for a trained mental health professional to be present when someone is having a mental health episode in public and needs support, So we send the police instead, and as police violence Stater shows, the police often resort to tasering that person and then throwing them in the cells. Is that what you would want for someone you love who is having a moutdown in public? I know that it's not what I would want.
So the answer here isn't what is the one thing we need to do differently in order to allow the police to finally start fixing their social problems. The ancy here is recognizing that there are a number of social functions which we are trying and failing to make the police fulfill. There are some stuff for which they are exactually the right agency to respond. If there is a white creamers as terrorists shooting up a masque, yes they are probably the right people to be dealing with that.
But most of the things which we send the police to do, frankly, either do not warrant any kind of response, or warrant a response that the police are not capable of giving. We send the police to enforce evictions, we send the police to try to calm down fights, to deal people who are in suicidal distress. They can't do any of that stuff. What we need to do is to fund agencies and organizations who are able to do that stuff. And until we do that, no, it's never going to work.
I'm sick and tired of the criminal low light and the repeat violent offenders who put public safety at risk, and that's why we're going after them, and in particular gangs. If you are in a gang, be prepared to be harassed by the police. If you're committing crimes, be prepared for tougher sentences because we are introducing limits on repeat sentence, discounts for remorse and if you keep offending, sorry, frankly,
isn't going to cut it anymore. We are cracking down on crime, we are going after the gangs, and we are going to restore law and order in New Zealand.
Well, when it comes to crime in this country, of course, society usually errs on the side of let's get tough on crime. That approach and I mean, look National's election campaign people must think that way. Why do you think we tend to prefer this approach over a restorative approach.
For the last forty years in this country, the state has really stepped back. So we used to have a very comprehensive social safety in thet state, provision of housing, employment, health care, education, all the things that people need to live full lives. And bit by bit, piece by piece, that social welfare system, that social state has been pulled apart, and more and more the state is saying, well, that's your problem to deal with. Your benefits are going to
get cut. You figured it out. No, you can't have a food grant. You figure it out. Good luck finding a house. We're not building any state housing. We're not going to help you find a place. You figure it out. We are trained to think of people's problems as their problems. If someone's life is bad, it's because they didn't do a good job making themselves a good life. And the
state has supported this illusion right. Every aspect of state policy has been aimed at forcing this responsibilization on all of us, to make all of us into individually responsible free market agents. But human beings aren't. Those human beings live in a society in a context which has been given to us in the past, which has been transmitted to us, and so we've kind of been forced to see people responsible for their own lives in a way
that they frankly are not. Some people would never have had the chance to live a well adjusted, functional life because of the conditions which have been voiced upon them by history. And as long as we are trained to see those people that individually responsible for the kind of life that they live, yes, it makes very much. It makes a lot of sense for us to then think, well, they need to be punished in order to help them
learn to make better decisions. But because that's not how human decision making works, that's not how history works, that approach is doomed. So we've been trained into a way of thinking about crime and justice and punishment that is fundamentally at odds with the human reality we all inhabit. But it is very very convenient for the rich if we think in these ways, because we don't demand structural justice,
we don't demand economic justice. We demand that the dysfunction people get dragged away and treat it poorly and get put somewhere where we don't have to look at them, we'll think about why they exist.
Thanks for joining us, Emmy. That's it for this episode of the Front Page. You can read more about today's stories and extensive news coverage at enzedherld dot co dot mz. The Front Page is produced by Ethan Sills and Richard Martin, who is also our sound engineer. I'm Chelsea Daniels. Subscribe to the Front Page on iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts, and tune in tomorrow for another look behind the headlines.