With an average of just 80 recruits graduating from the Royal New Zealand Police College each month, it could take almost a year for Police to backfill the loss.
"It's not something that the Government should take lightly," an unvaccinated police officer, who has chosen to remain anonymous, told the Herald. "Even losing a couple hundred sworn staff will have a massive impact.
"There'll be major ramifications."
But Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern was confident it wouldn't come to that.
"Time will tell how many we lose but I do not expect, as with all of our other workforces like health and education, it to be a large number," she said while visiting Auckland last week.
Ardern also believed the Police had enough of a "buffer" from recent recruitment drives, should they lose any officers as a result of the mandate.
However, progress on the 1800 increase to constabulary staff promised by the Government last term has gone backwards - down from 1194 in July 2017 to 1162 this month, and current officers argue the experience they stand to lose through the mandate is what's of most concern.
"Skills come with time, knowledge you can generate yourself but there's no substitute for experience," the officer said, while another added, "We're already stretched thin, and it's very concerning.
"The Government is putting hundreds if not thousands of years of experience at risk of being lost."
Police had no further comment aside from the press release quoting Police Commissioner Andrew Coster last month.
In it, he said, "This mandate is an important step for us. While staff have taken all precautions to prevent the spread of Covid-19, vaccination is an essential component of safety.
"In today's environment, the community has an expectation that our staff are protected from the virus and are fully vaccinated.
"Our work does not always allow us to stay at arm's length from the people we deal with and vaccination is the only control that can mitigate the safety risk in those situations."
However, Police Association president Chris Cahill disputed the number of totally unvaccinated frontline staff would end up as high as the 5.9 per cent NZ Police cited on December 7.
"We won't know how many till the health order kicks in and police are able to match their data with health data," Cahill said.
"We certainly don't believe it will be anything like 600 and we would be surprised why it isn't in line with other organisations that are captured under the health mandate or the education mandate and those sort of figures are sort of around the one to one and a half per cent and we think that's where we will likely end up."
Concerns have been raised by businesses and residents across Auckland during 2021 over a significant rise in crime.
There has been a 63 per cent increase in assaults for the first five months of this year compared with the same period in 2019. By May this year, when the latest figures were available, there were 232 assaults in the Auckland Central police area.
"You have crime on the rise and the people you rely on to deal with that and protect the rest of society, are already reaching a breaking point. Now you want to take away more staff," the officer said.
"New Zealand won't know the impact of this mandate until it happens, and then it's too late."
