KEY POINTS:
Nineteen years of painstaking police work to build links with Maoridom have been dashed by the recent treatment of Tuhoe in the search for "terrorists", a new poll says.
Wellington law researcher Moana Jackson has repeated a poll he did of 2000 Maori people in 1988 which found that Maori ranked the police 20th out of 20 occupations, and found that earlier this year the police had climbed to 11th out of 20.
But he went back to this year's sample again 10 days ago - after the police search for terrorism suspects in the Ruatoki area - and found that police were back down to 20th out of 20 again.
"What that shows is the fragility of the relationship between Maori people and the institutions charged with justice in this country," he said.
Mr Jackson, an outspoken critic of the police arrests of 17 people including Maori sovereignty campaigners on terrorism and other charges, was invited to give a keynote speech at a youth offending conference in Wellington yesterday.
His 1988 report for the Ministry of Justice was disowned by the Government at the time because it advocated a separate Maori justice system.
He told the conference that very little had changed for Maori in the intervening 19 years.
For an updated report, due to be published next June, researchers had retraced 1347 of the original 2000 Maori people polled in 1988.
The other 653 had died, left the country or could not be traced for other reasons.
A new sample of a further 2000 Maori people had also been interviewed.
Both groups were asked to rank police, lawyers and judges in a list of 20 occupations, where they were allowed to choose which other occupations to include.
In the initial re-run earlier this year, police were ranked 11th, lawyers 18th, real estate agents 19th and "a new group identified by our people, of television celebrities", who were ranked 20th.
"The shift in the police position is a result of work done by a large number of people culminating in the establishment of a Responsiveness to Maori initiative within the police," Mr Jackson said.
But those gains were lost after the Ruatoki exercise.
Mr Jackson restated his 1988 analysis that high Maori crime rates could not be blamed solely on immediate factors such as poverty or dysfunctional families, but could be traced back to 167 years of dispossession and marginalisation.
"If you are dispossessed, if your land is taken, if your power is denied, if your right to say things in your own way and to make sense of the world in ways that are unique to you and your history are taken away," he said, "then you are oppressed."
