I have had the privilege of representing New Zealand Police overseas a number of times throughout the 28 years that I have been lucky enough to be a police officer.
On each of these occasions, I have worked with, reviewed, studied with and interacted with law enforcement agencies in other countries. One of the things that strikes me every time I look at how things get done in other countries is that there is usually a fundamental difference in their approach compared with ours.
In most places, law enforcement agencies police their communities, whereas here in New Zealand, we police with our communities. New Zealand Police are held up internationally as an exemplar in community policing, and rightly so. We are asked to go to a lot of different places around the world, and have staff in some of these places right now, to show other agencies how to police with the permission and consent of the people, not just how to enforce the law.
The visible part of policing is sometimes the red and blue lights, patrol cars and handcuffs, and that is an important bit of what we do.
However, the vast majority of police staff come to work to make their part of the world safer, and we do just as much (if not more) on the "softer" community side of the business - it just doesn't make for good reality TV, so it's not quite as visible.
