Kerre Woodham: Policing is a community-minded calling

Now the police have been in the spotlight in the past few weeks. It should have been criticism, with Wellington Central MP Tamatha Paul's comments and the criticism of police pulling back from attending mental health call outs, but in fact, the attention has highlighted just how much our men and women in blue are valued.  

I'm pretty sure that wasn't the original intention of Tamatha Paul when she made her much publicised comments that people in Wellington didn't want to see police officers everywhere: “for a lot of people, it makes them feel less safe”. She said it's that constant visual presence that tells you that you might not be safe there if there's heaps of cops. She also accused police of waiting for homeless people to leave their spot, packing up their stuff and throwing it in the bin. She doubled down on her comments later and said it was no wonder some people didn't trust police because they were quick to use force against people with mental distress.  

To give her comments some context, she was speaking at a panel with the University of Canterbury Greens and Peace Action Ōtautahi, where alternative forms of policing were being discussed. So you can imagine it wasn't a police love-in. These were people who were anti-establishment outside of what they would conceive of as a patriarchal, oppressive society, and they have their views their own experiences. And that's what it was. She might well have had anecdotal experience of people having unsatisfactory dealings with police, but plenty of us had our own anecdotes of more than satisfactory dealings with police, and that's what came out. It wasn't a police pile on, in fact, people came very quickly from all corners to defend the police.  

When we were discussing mental health last week, for example, and whether people were now more able to access the care they needed, we had about four or five texts and callers tell us they didn't receive much help from mental health professionals. Where they got the most help and support, tangible help and support, was from the police. Far from being quick to use force against people with mental distress as Tamatha Paul would have it, the police officers they encountered were kind, compassionate, patient, and able to offer practical solutions for friends and family members.  

So there were criticism of police responding to mental health events, and now they're getting in the neck for withdrawing their response to mental health events. I do not blame them for not wanting to be the first port of call – that is not what they signed up for, and that is not what they were trained for. But because every other agency and organisation abrogated the responsibilities, the police were last men and women standing. And police have announced they will be delaying the changes and will stagger the withdrawal of services across districts to give the appropriate agencies more time to prepare, as Police Association President Chris Cahill explained to Mike Hosking this morning.  

“Police have agreed to just slow down and do it by district. I mean the best thing Mike, is finally Health at the national level are recognising they've got to step up and take responsibility for what is a health problem, not a police problem. Originally people in the health area just didn't want to take responsibility and that's what we learnt from overseas, unless police draw a line in the sand and say, nope, you're going to do it, the people suffering mental distress won't get the right care, from the right people, at the right time. And that is not police officers sitting in in hospitals for six hours. That's not good for anyone. So we had to push it. We pushed it, so now we're engaging, and I understand – we want to slow down and just make sure we get it right. We don't want anyone falling through the cracks. But remember, police will still go to anyone who's at risk of harming themselves or the public.” 

Exactly. I was really interested to see, given the pile-on and given the fact that there was a change in the way police were being asked to police under the last Police Commissioner —that's now come back to more of a perhaps orthodox understanding of how police operate— whether policing was still an attractive option for young New Zealanders? And what it is that draws men and women to the job? And I was staggered to see applications for Police College – 1371 for the 80 to 100 places. That's in a month. I thought that was a year when I first looked at the figures. That's in a month – in July of 2024, there were 1371 applications to join the police, the highest since data was gathered in 2014. In August of 2024, it was the second highest – 1037 in the month of August of 24. So on average they're receiving last year about 526 applications per month. Obviously, they'd go down January, December, so that's where you get the figures levelling out. That's up a couple of 100 per month, more than in 2023.  

That's a hell of a lot of people who see policing as a really important career, that they feel they can offer something to, that they feel they can get something out of. And I would love to know, given how much attention has been put on police, what the role should be of police in our communities? Whether they are an oppressive tool of the patriarchy, or in fact that they are, as I see them, compassionate, tolerant, amazing men and women who are incredibly efficient at what they do and are doing their level best. They're not heavy-handed. I mean, I'm old enough to remember what it was like in the 80s when it was a bit young cowboys going in their truncheons ahoy. These days, it's a whole lot more nuanced and complex, and that's the way.  

In a day and age where we are so self-obsessed, we're so insular, we're all about the self, the ego, being a police officer is a really community minded calling. How is it that there are so many people who feel it’s a calling for them?  

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