Good One, Keith and Anita
Green politician Keith Locke (whom everyone says is a nice guy) and Mana Party spokeswoman, Anita Sykes have done us a great service exposing the institutional and operational racism clearly regnant in the NZ Police force. As we write this, we find ourselves seething with (righteous) anger against the Police and the contemptible political system which operates in this benighted country.
We pride ourselves on being fair-minded and reasonable on this blog, but this is just unconscionable.
The statistics are emphatically clear.
Maori and Pacific Islanders--darker skinned people--represent just over twenty-one percent of the New Zealand population. But Police have now been forced to divulge their taser use rate (thank goodness for "Freedom of Information" laws in this country). It turns out that 60% of the time when they have used tasers, they have used them on Maori and Pacific Island people. This clearly shows that they are using them disproportionately upon darker skinned people. If ever we needed proof of institutionalised racism in this country it is manifest in these statistics.
Mr Locke and Mz Sykes have rightly put their collective finger on a disturbing underbelly in this country. The only solution we can think of--apart from removing completely the use of tasers from a clearly racist police force--is to introduce a proportionate taser-use quota system. This would be very simple to do. At the very least, NZ Police should be restricted in the use of tasers upon Maori and Pacific Islanders to a twenty percent application rate. Once approaching that rate (the stats could easily be updated daily) no further application to those ethnicities would be permitted, until the use increased proportionately upon not-so-dark-skinned people.
This is the least that should be done. Better still--given the clear institutional racism that clearly exists in the NZ Police, positive discrimination would be an excellent outcome. It would go a long way to healing the damage already done to our society. We suggest a maximum use rate of tasers upon darker skinned ethnicities of no more than ten percent would be appropriate.
The NZ Police ops manual could be easily rewritten so as to require police attending violent incidents, firstly to check whether they are within the statistical quota legitimately to use a taser upon a Maori or Pacific Islander. If the on-board computer were to deny racial use they would know in advance of entering a "situation" that if they encounter either Maori or Pacific Island offenders they could not use tasers. To remove all doubt, its seems eminently sensible to require the police first to inquire--before any other action being taken--whether the people they are speaking to are of Maori or Pacific Island descent. If the answer were in the affirmative, they would be required to holster their tasers and not use them.
But this raises much wider issues. It's not just taser use. Any racist police action should be completely banned in New Zealand. Once racial quotas have been exceeded (whether in arrest rates or incarceration) no further police action should be permitted against people of Maori or Pacific Island descent until the ethnicities are in statistical balance again. Since more than 60 percent of our prison population consists of Maori and Pacific Islanders there is an urgent need and a compelling argument to cease all policing action of these ethnicities until a true racial and demographic balance has been achieved.
Whilst we normally find ourselves on the other side of the political debate to Keith Locke, and the Green and the Mana parties, let alone Mz Sykes, in this instance we wholeheartedly endorse the points they are making. They say that politics makes for strange bedfellows--but there are vital ethical and moral issues at stake here that must transcend politics. Good on them for raising these "inconvenient truths".
On this matter we stand with them, as indeed must all good men and women. And if not, well you, dear reader, must be racist.
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