Editorial: Police need seasoned recruits

The decision of the police to begin recruiting trainees as young as 18 could do with more public discussion.

The department probably has to relax its preferred age of entry if it is to meet a new Government target of 1000 extra police over the next three years. However, that number is the politically negotiated compromise between Labour and New Zealand First, one of several minor parties who plucked police numbers out of the air in the hope of impressing voters with their concern for law and order.

NZ First actually proposed 5000 extra police, which would have enlarged the force by about 50 per cent and was far beyond the capacity of the department to find and train. That was just a numbers game that nobody, before the election, took too seriously.

Well now, we must. Even with the number cut to 1000 in Labour's agreement with NZ First, it is having implications for the quality of recruitment.

While the police have always been able to take in trainees as young as 18 they have adopted a policy of preferring recruits to have had about 10 years' experience of adulthood before they put on a police uniform. It is a sensible policy. Policing is done most effectively with patience and restraint, backed by an air of authority.

No doubt there are 18-year-olds who possess such qualities, but that is asking a lot. At 18 young people are seen as mature enough to marry, vote, even buy alcohol, although the lowering of the legal drinking age from 20 remains a subject of contention.

If nothing else, the recruitment of police at 18 should put paid to the case for returning the drinking age to 20. It would be odd if an 18-year-old had no right to enter a bar unless he or she was a police officer called to deal with older inebriates.

At times even officers aged 28 or more will have to deal authoritatively with people older than them. But there is a point in young adulthood that most people find their feet with people of all ages. That point is normally somewhat older than 18.

In their quest to find an extra 1000 suitable recruits, the police could review other criteria of selection. It might be asked whether the physical requirements are always necessary.

A correspondent on this page recently complained that although she was a fit, professional woman in her late 20s, with martial arts experience, her ambition to join the police had been frustrated for several years by her inability to run 2.4km in less than 11 minutes, 15 seconds.

That sort of physical specification belongs in an era of high unemployment when their is an abundance of applicants for the police. This is a period of near full employment when the appeal of the job is not what it was.

The Government ought to be looking to lift the status of the job before handing down arbitrary recruitment targets. In that respect its new Police Minister, Annette King, has made a good start. She wants to improve public confidence in the police and may start by tackling the widespread impression that traffic policing has become a form of revenue gathering.

If she wants to counter that suspicion she will have to ensure that highway patrols no longer lurk in speed traps to fill ticketing quotas. Relief from that unpleasant task might do much to improve the appeal of police work to potential recruits.

Police officers are chosen and trained for one of society's most sensitive tasks. The quality of those chosen is more important than any precise quantity. The police should be open to suitable 18-year-olds, but should continue to prefer recruits with some experience of life.