KEY POINTS:
Something's wrong with the police. Some kind of institutional illness is affecting their competence - and our respect.
The force isn't with us any more. Or doesn't appear to be. Our guardians seem less and less able to guard their own reputation, let alone the community they're sworn to protect.
It's impossible for anyone outside the organisation to diagnose the cause of this malaise. But the symptoms are obvious.
And serious. We've seen failures to prosecute - and prosecutions that fail. We've seen charges not laid and major crimes remain unsolved. We've seen farcical oversights - and the world's media have seen them too.
And at the weekend, worst of all, we've seen police squander more than half that precious time doctors call "the golden hour", standing behind a timid cordon while a man vomited and bled and his wife begged for their help as curious passersby wandered in and out, seeking whatever satisfaction they could take from this revolting situation.
This looks gutless, Commissioner Broad. This looks less like the boys in blue and more like the boys in a blue funk.
You need to understand, Sir, we want the police - we need the police - to be as willing to put themselves in harm's ways as those who can't do without their Saturday six-pack.
We don't want your officers outside, behind the line, while Mr X is inside, leaving money on the counter to pay for his RTDs.
This isn't how it's supposed to be, Mr Broad. This isn't what we expect of the police and neither, we suspect, is it what they expect of themselves.
Something's happened, Mr Broad. Some OSH-ish fretfulness has crept into your operations that is tainting your purpose and tarnishing the reputation of your force.
As has much else. There've been too many calamities and omissions lately. And if the ugly tragedy in Manurewa makes you look callous, these simply make you look inept.
It's one thing, Mr Broad, for a prosecution to fail. But when that prosecution follows the killing of two babies - a crime that repelled almost every New Zealander - and when it took a jury just 10 minutes - or less if you accept reports they spent most of that time enjoying a light lunch - then we wonder, Sir, how it took so long to build so flimsy a case.
It appears that no one tested its flaws before taking the matter to court. It appears no one analysed the weaknesses fastidiously guarded for two days - but never inspected.
However, it is fair and it is necessary to ask if the flaws exposed in that case are now endemic. And if the verdicts in the Kahui case and the Hawkes Bay farm shooting - not to mention the persistent challenges provoked by events like the Sounds killings - expose those flaws, hidden like a body in plain view.
Then there's the medals, Mr Broad. Stolen from the army museum at Waiouru. Yes, we've got them back, but you haven't found the people who stole them. And profited much from their return.
A lawyer did that, Mr Broad. He told us so himself. He told us how easy it was. He told us how it only took a couple of phone calls to find the thieves.
And then he rang the police. And they turned up with the cheque. They paid the reward that others had offered.
But, Sir, we don't want to see criminals rewarded in this manner any more than we want to see a wounded man lying unattended in his blood-stained store.
Offering for ransom medals earned by courage shown is the essence of cynicism. To have the case solved and the perpetrators found by a private citizen rather than our own police force is the epitome of incompetence.
These are not minor matters, Mr Broad. It is not a minor matter when the leader of one of our two major political parties has thousands of documents stolen and given to others to sabotage his election campaign.
There was a similar case in the United States, Mr Broad. It was called Watergate and it brought down a President.
And while our case involved hacking into computers rather than breaking into an office, the essence of both is the same.
Like the theft of the medals at Waiouru, this matter goes to the very heart of our nation's affairs. It was either an inside job or an outside job, a crime committed by a politically motivated thief or a politically motivated traitor - who could be a member of our next government.
Either way, it matters! It's important to us. Yet, after more than a year, the case is meekly closed; no charges laid, no felons found.
Another test has been failed.
There have been too many such tests that have failed, Mr Broad - in Manukau and Manurewa, in Waiouru and Wellington.
Something is wrong with your police force, Sir. We need you to put it right.
