Protecting our police: Should NZ frontline officers carry guns? - The Front Page

Armed Offenders Squad AOS officers raid a house on Game Place in Red Hill Papakura New Zealand Herald photograph by Hayden WOodward 17 February 2024

Growing concern about public safety has reignited the idea of arming our frontline police.

The police union says 68% of officers support routine arming — and new police commissioner Richard Chambers is apparently ‘open’ to discussions around it — although he’s also said we’re ‘proud of having unarmed police’ and he’d like to keep it that way.

This is all while, in the first hours of 2025, a car rammed into a police vehicle at a Nelson gathering.

Senior Sergeant Lyn Fleming later died in hospital, and another officer was critically injured.

This was followed by another attempted ramming a week later.

The arming of officers is a subject that has reappeared time and time again — notably after officers have been killed on the frontline.

Fleming is one of 34 police officers killed while on duty.

Auckland University criminology lecturer Dr Emmy Rākete told The Front Page more violence and force are always proposed as the solution to crime.

“The issue is that more violence doesn’t seem to be an effective way of resolving the problem of crime. And so police armament, categorically, will not fix the things that it’s being proposed as a solution to.

“It would be a misrepresentation to say that New Zealand’s police officers don’t carry firearms. They do. Every police car has guns in it. All of our police officers routinely carry tasers. So, the idea that police officers are completely vulnerable and open to being harmed with no means of defending themselves, that’s not true,” she said.

Rākete said the idea that more guns would make things safer was not the case.

“We see this when we look to the United States, a country which does have frontline police armament, and it is a much more frightening and violent place than Aotearoa has ever been,” she said.

According to the Washington Post, on average, police in the US shoot and kill more than 1000 people a year.

Since the Post began recording these numbers, while half of those shot by police were White, Black Americans were shot at a disproportionate rate — they account for roughly 14% of the population and are killed by police at more than twice the rate than white Americans.

“We have data from New Zealand, collected by the police themselves, which shows how they use force.

“What we can see from that data is that Māori are around seven times more likely to be the victims of police violence than Pākehā. We know exactly what would happen if this policy was rolled out. We know exactly who would be the victims of it. We know exactly what a bad idea this would be,” Rākete said.

An NZ police report, Appropriate Tactical Settings, developed in 2020 found that since 2015, reviews of critical incidents had not identified any events in which they assessed carrying a firearm would have saved the lives of police or members of the public.

Another key insight from the ATS report:

“Following a review of Gun Safe incidents where a firearm was presented at unarmed police, and considering how these incidents might have differed if police were routinely armed, it is possible to conclude that more people (police and non-police) would have been shot.”

New Zealand has an opportunity to take a different route, Rākete said.

“In this country, we once had zero unemployment because the state made sure that everyone had a job. This is a country that once had zero homelessness because the state made sure that everybody had a home.

“We could do things that would solve the fundamental causes of crime, give people the full, dignified human lives all of us deserve. But, it would require taking money away from the rich and giving it to those of us who made that money through the sweat of our brows and the labour that we do every day to make this country the place that it is.

“Until we do that until we give people what they need to live lives, crime will happen. And no amount of policing, no amount of armed patrol teams, no amount of pepper spray, tasers, firearms, none of this repression will ever make that fundamental contradiction go away,” she said.

Listen to the full episode to hear more about the case against routine arming of police and how NZ could move forward without it.

The Front Page is a daily news podcast from the New Zealand Herald, available to listen to every weekday from 5am. The podcast is presented by Chelsea Daniels, an Auckland-based journalist with a background in world news and crime/justice reporting who joined NZME in 2016.

You can follow the podcast at iHeartRadio, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.