Kerre Woodham: Safeguarding the force

A suspect is led away from the scene of the Christchurch shooting. Photo / Simon Baker

Another week, another police shooting.

And, predictably, there have been calls to arm our frontline police.

With nine police shootings in two years, it would be remiss of the Police Minister not to look at any way or means to try to protect police officers as they go about the business of trying to keep the community safe.

I'm of the opinion that what the police want, the police should get. They know what they need to do their job and if they say they need side arms, then they should be issued.

The police are ambivalent about being armed. A Police Association survey from 2008 shows a 50/50 split in the numbers for and against, although that ambivalence may harden into a resolve to seek better protection on the job as the numbers of officers dead and injured continues to rise.

But from what I have read about the Christchurch shooting, it is unlikely that carrying side arms would have prevented the two officers, and Gage the police dog, from being shot. They walked into an ambush.

A police commander I spoke to last year told me he worried most about his officers when they were making routine inquiries.

When there are armed-offender call-outs, everyone knows the rules. The offenders are armed and dangerous; the police are armed and prepared to shoot - the situation is clear.

In the Christchurch shooting this week, and the Napier shootings by Jan Molenaar last year, the police officers involved were given the ballistic version of a sucker punch.

They weren't anticipating violence and so were unprepared when faced with a psycho with a death wish.

Some might say they should be prepared for every eventuality. I think it shows that our police officers are still decent human beings who haven't yet built up an armour of justifiable paranoia. Again, as more officers are killed and wounded, that will probably change.

I would hate to see our police become the suspicious, trigger-happy cliched cops we see on the streets of bigger cities around the world, but if psychos keep shooting them, who can blame the officers for seeing danger behind the most peaceful of facades?