Greg O'Connor: Police abused every day for doing their job

The attack in Tuakau left an off-duty officer seriously injured. Photo / Richard Robinson

Opinion

During the weekend before the one just passed, there was a spate of highly publicised serious assaults on police officers.

These included:

* An off-duty officer being bashed into a coma by teenage thugs when he intervened in a fight in Tuakau.

* An officer having his lip bitten off by a drunk driver.

* An officer being seriously assaulted by a carload of youths after breath-testing the driver.

* And an officer being knocked to the ground and threatened with a nail gun.

I wish it were possible to put this spate of attacks down as an unfortunate statistical blip, but sadly that is not the case. Such attacks on police are becoming more and more frequent.

There has been considerable public and political outrage following the latest attacks, and rightly so.

An attack on a police officer, who is going about his or her duty protecting the public, is not only reprehensible violence against an individual, but also shows a callous disregard for society and the rule of law itself.

The public inevitably begins to lose confidence in the police's ability to protect them when police seem unable to protect themselves.

However, there is a tendency to react to these shocking "upper end" cases by asking what more we can do to punish and deter the worst attacks.

And we do need to ensure sentencing for such attacks reflect the seriousness of the offending, which goes beyond the serious and often permanent physical harm inflicted.

But there is little focus on tackling the burgeoning culture of contempt for police and the rule of law which leads a growing minority to think police are fair game.

That contempt begins with the abuse, insults, hiding in a crowd and pelting police with bottles, spitting and physical assaults routinely inflicted on police on a daily basis.

Conduct such as leaning into an officer's face on a Friday night and snarling "F*** you, pig" is tolerated - by the public, by the media, and by judges who write it off as essentially being "just something police have to put up with" and not serious enough to warrant legal sanction.

We need support from the public, the media, politicians, and the justice system - the judiciary and the Independent Police Conduct Authority - to begin to impose some consequences for the low-level behaviour that breeds the worst assaults.

If bottle-throwing, hurling abuse, spitting, shoving and punching police attracted half the public criticism and backlash that is so often directed at police who are involved in a chase, we'd have a far safer society for everyone - not just for police.

When there is no consequence, that sort of behaviour feeds on itself.

It becomes a game to taunt and abuse police, the seriousness spirals and ultimately it culminates in the sort of serious assaults we saw over that weekend. The sorts of assaults that can very easily become homicides.

The constant focus on police conduct, instead of the conduct of offenders, reinforces the attitude that police who are doing their job are the bad guys or in the wrong.

Nowhere is this more obvious than in relation to criminals who use vehicles to flee from police.

Thanks to the constant criticism of police by the Police Conduct Authority and others, there is now a firm belief among offenders that "if you drive fast enough, police have to let you go".

We have even had offenders who were caught complaining angrily that police didn't pull out of a chase "like they're supposed to".

A respectful, professional and tolerant police is the ideal - but a tentative one serves no one's interests.

Forcing police, society's last line of defence, to fear the consequences of "getting it wrong" so much that they no longer take the initiative to intervene and quell threats early, can only empower the law-breakers.

Then, serious assaults and shootings of police, as we have seen recently, become an inevitability.

We need to take a broad view of the problem and the solution. Deterrent sentences alone will not fix the problem.

The justice system must be prepared to impose sanctions for overt abusive language and behaviour directed at police carrying out their duties.

The system must also support - rather than criticise and condemn - police when they have to take decisive action, such as using reasonable force or the other coercive powers they rely on to keep the public safe.

And, yes, this also means accepting that sometimes officers who need to make decisions in a stressful situation will make mistakes.

Only then will we instill in offenders a realisation that society will not tolerate attacks on its protectors.

* Greg O'Connor is president of the New Zealand Police Association.