Garth George: Joe Public has become a customer of the police

How infinitely sad it was this week to read of the Commissioner of Police squirming beside his political mistress and trying to explain the difference between "quotas" and "performance targets" imposed on frontline police officers.

How infinitely sad it was to see our top policeman forced into the same sort of dissembling and circumlocution that is the everyday language of politicians, who seem to be able to tell the truth only when it is sure to show them up in a favourable light.

I wonder if the minister, Annette King, realises that the press conference she called to deny that police had a quota system for the issue of speeding tickets has driven another nail into the coffin of public respect for the police.

There was a time when all but the most recalcitrant New Zealander would tell you that our police force was among the best - if not the best - in the world.

Today, unfortunately, that is not the case.

And every time a senior policeman is forced to defend a policy that is purely political the whole force suffers from another quantum drop in the public's faith in the men and women in blue.

Don't think for a moment I'm criticising those dedicated, overworked and under-resourced frontline police. They're doing the best they can under the orders they have been given.

But when their senior officers are called managers rather than commanders, probably wear business suits rather than uniforms, and are more concerned about bean-counting than thief-catching, they must know that age-old concept of policing as a service to the public has passed into history.

Instead, we, the public, have become customers of the police, and it seems that their performance target is to extract as much money out of the customer as is possible in every hour officers are on duty and at the same time to provide as little service as possible

What makes it worse is that the things that matter to citizens - house burglaries, car thefts, motor accidents and other serious crimes - are not receiving the attention they deserve.

Police "managers" can explain and excuse until they're blue in the face but the public no longer believe them.

One of them, Waikato police crime manager Detective Inspector Peter Devoy, is reported in the same edition as the ministerial press conference fiasco as "rubbishing" reports that his CIB staff are shelving serious criminal investigations because of staff shortages at the front line.

And that despite his admission that 24 serious crime cases in Hamilton, some of which reportedly relate to the sexual violation of children, are at present not being allocated for detective work, apparently because detectives are being roped in to do jobs properly handled by the uniform branch.

Now what scares me about all this is that there seems to be a concerted attempt - once confined to politicians but now apparently adopted by senior police officers - to try to tell the public that black is white, that right is left, that day is night.

The fact is that the police management performance targets, or guidelines, are, in reality, a form of quota system and all the dissimulation in the world isn't going to alter that.

I can sympathise with Commissioner Broad, who told the press conference that it was "very difficult" to discuss the performance agreements because people immediately translated them as meaning there was a quota.

Of course we do. A performance agreement that forces a police officer to issue a certain number of offence notices every hour he or she is on patrol is, in the understanding of even the dimmest member of the public, indisputably a quota.

And if the CIB of a moderately-sized city has 24 serious crimes lying uninvestigated on its books while detectives are deployed to fill gaps in the uniformed ranks, then there is ample evidence of an incompetent allocation of resources.

Mr Devoy can deny that until hell freezes over; the public will come to their own conclusion.

And that can only be a growing suspicion that the Government has fallen down badly on one of its most sacred duties - the protection of the public and the maintenance of law and order.

Then, when your house has been burgled and the police don't turn up for days, if at all, and you drive past a booze bus surrounded by a dozen or more cops and a fleet of patrol cars, that suspicion turns into certainty.

Why is it that our senior police won't come out and tell the truth?

Why can't they just tell it like it is? That, yes, they are short on resources and short on manpower but that they are doing the best they can with what they've got. That, yes, there are quotas on traffic tickets because the police are contracted to Land Transport New Zealand and have to meet performance targets to get paid?

Why can't they - as they used to do before the micro-management of successive socialist Governments - fight their battles with the Minister of Police (and, no doubt, the Prime Minister) behind closed doors, confine their public comments to operational matters, and leave the dissembling over policy to the politicians?

Perhaps we do live in Helengrad. Because I'm sure that Stalin and his NKVD, Khrushchev and his KGB and Putin and his FSB would look with approval on how our increasingly politicised police force is being run.