Frogs in a Boiling Pot of Crime, Part IV

Miles to Go

In his book, Badlands David Fraser makes the point that the NZ Police force is undermanned.  To be sure, no-one appreciates a fat, bloated inefficient government department.  But policing is a core government responsibility, and even less appreciation should apply when a police force is overwhelmed by crime. 

But is it really true that the police force is undermanned and that crime is winning?  The current received wisdom is that for the first time in a long time we are winning the battle against crime.  The government has set targets for fighting crime: by June 2017, reduce total crime by 15 per cent, violent crime by 20 per cent, and youth crime by 5 per cent.  In July 2013 it announced progress made:

In the past year, youth crime fell by 12 per cent and total crime by 6 per cent. Justice Minister Judith Collins said young people made up a third of all arrests, and if they could be kept out of court in their teens then they stood a good chance of staying out of the justice system for life. NZ Herald.

So far, so good.  Will it continue?
  We hope so.  To be sure, policing is a lot smarter now than it was fifteen years ago.  It is a lot more thoughtful, researched, intelligent and focused.  But we also need to be reminded of the sheer size of the task.

How can the New Zealand police force, whose size in 2008 was only just over 8,000, cope with a crime rate of almost 3 million crimes a year--as measured by the Victim Survey?  Just on the basis of the police recorded crime figure of 427,000 crimes per year (2005) the police are expected to deal with 52 crimes for very police officer each year, or approximately one new crime per policeman per week.  These are impossible odds. . . . (N)o matter how resourceful, how clever, how determined the police are, they will not win the war against crime because they are too thin on the ground.  To make matters worse, when their hard work is rewarded with an arrest, they are frequently undermined by the courts who more often than not release the criminals back into the community. [David Fraser,  Badlands. NZ: A Land Fit For Criminals (Kaukapakapa, Auckland: Howling At The Moon Publishing, Ltd, 2011), p.40f.]

Nor must we be ignorant of the non-virtuous circle which so easily sets in.  Discouragement at the lack of progress in seeing our communities becoming more peaceful and law abiding leads to a consistently high burn out rate and attrition of officers.  The Police force has to work hard just to stay still.  And competence on the job can take years to learn.

Another significant impediment in the fight against crime is the creeping expansion of criminal rights.  New Zealand, along with most Western countries, has merrily tripped along the path of writing into law the various human rights declarations and promotions by the United Nations.  These are found in statutes such as the Bill of Rights Act (1990), the Privacy Act (1993) and the Human Rights Act (1993).  The unintended consequence of these acts has been generally to make it

more difficult for the police to chase, follow, and intercept criminals, and so make it much harder to build a case against them and bring them to book. (Ibid., p. 45). 

Naturally this was never the intent of these pieces of legislation which were aimed far more at the threat of authoritarian and totalitarian regimes moving progressively to enslave their own people.  It was not the intent to make life easier for criminals.  But, as is so often the case, the unintended effects are what produce a rotten harvest.

At the same time, it is generally true that what these pieces of legislation stipulate concerning the safety and protection of the lawkeeping citizen is largely ignored.  The UN Declaration on Human Rights (to which NZ is a signatory) stipulates that "Everyone has the right to life, freedom, and safety from harm" and "everyone shall have equal recognition and protection under law."  Failure to win the fight against crime and to bring criminals to justice is a breach of these articles.  But rarely is this held out as a fundamental human right and something the government must see to.

There is a direct connection between sentencing policies and the breach of these articles by the government and judicial authorities.  When career criminals are released back into society by means of bail, or parole, or early release, or non-custodial sentences and go on to commit crimes against life, limb, and property of citizens, the government is violating these articles.  As Fraser argues

These Articles directly implicate all of those involved int he development of criminal justice sentencing policies, because these result in the destruction of these human rights of countless numbers of law-abiding citizens.  Their guilt in this respect is all the more certain because they are able accurately to predict the likelihood of further offending, yet despite this, they allow the release of thousands of criminals to be supervised by the probation service, knowing that it is certain these offenders will carry on committing crime and by so doing, undermine the safety of the public, supposedly guaranteed by the 1948 Declaration [of Human Rights], and again by the Bill of Rights. (Ibid., p. 46.)

We are thankful for the progress made in the last two years or so in fighting and punishing crime.  It would be so easy to conclude the job has been done and move on to other priorities.  The reality is we have only made a beginning.  Whilst the woods may be lovely, dark, and deep we have miles to go before we sleep--yes, miles to go before we sleep.