Editorial: Police policy cause for deep concern

New Zealand First MP Ron Mark has come by quite disturbing police messages that suggest officers on road patrol are ignoring calls to more serious crime. In one case, so a dispatcher alleges, a unit failed to respond to a request to stop the abduction of a 2-year-old child from its mother. In another, an elderly woman was being harassed by neighbourhood children but police instructions evidently precluded any of seven highway patrols from being diverted to the incident. An email obtained by Mr Mark complained that traffic units were being used for too much crime work to the detriment of their "core business". It said they were to be called to criminal incidents only in emergencies and if there was no alternative.

If those messages are disturbing, the response of Police Commissioner Rob Robinson yesterday is even more so. While he expected all police to be available for emergencies and he would investigate one or two of the incidents cited by the MP, the Commissioner did not deny the priority now accorded road patrols. It was warranted, he said, because people were more worried about being killed on the road than about crime.

"Every time we survey the public, they tell us their number one concern is being killed or maimed on our roads," he said. Furthermore, the way police used resources was ultimately up to the Government. "They buy a certain number of hours of road policing, they buy a certain amount of hours for response to crime, to crime investigation and VIP protection," said Mr Robinson. If that is the way policing is being prioritised these days - by public polls and political budget allocations - we are really in trouble.

The profession of policing is not to make people merely feel safe, or believe they are safe, but to ensure they truly are as safe as they can be within the limits of available resources and considerations of civil liberties. The professionals are the best judge of the deployment of their resources. They ought not be guided by public surveys, still less by a system of financial allocation which serves only the purposes of accountancy. Certainly the Treasury needs an indication of how much time and money the police propose to spend on various elements of their task, but those allocations are not supposed to be the last word in defining their job.

Traffic law enforcement seems to present a perennial problem because it is subcontracted, as it were, from the transport bureaucracy. Land Transport NZ appears to believe the highways will not receive sufficient police attention unless it "purchases" from the police a certain quantity of patrols or, worse, infringement notices. Mr Mark, and many other people, consider this system merely a revenue-gathering exercise. More likely it is simply the need of bureaucracies to express activities in a form they can count.

Not so long ago New Zealand had two classes of police, the regular force for maintaining law and order generally, and traffic officers, who policed only the roads. The "traffic cops" were held in much less public regard because they had a narrower focus for their authority, which made them seem more petty and officious than the "real" police. When the forces were merged the country gained more general police and traffic law enforcement became just one part of their purview. The roads were policed like any other public domain, less overtly and with a better sense of proportion.

Inevitably, the split did not please those among the public who missed the visibility of dedicated traffic patrols and it may be the police have responded excessively to their concern in recent years. Police highway patrols seem more numerous now, and more given to wasting hours in some lonely roadside lair for the sake of catching the odd car travelling above the speed limit. If, while there, they can tune out of more urgent calls, the police should think again. Their public does not want them dozing in speed traps when greater dangers arise.