Enlightened Policing

Citizens in Uniform

There are some encouraging signs coming from the NZ Police.  Over the Christmas break, the NZ Police Commissioner, Mike Bush was quoted in the NZ Herald, saying:

Behind the scenes, we have transformed the way we work. We have put preventing crime and meeting the needs of victims at the forefront of everything police do, with outstanding results.

These include a 20.1 per cent reduction in recorded crime in the past five years, meaning tens of thousands of people were spared the trauma of becoming victims. That's what New Zealand Police is all about.  And we have revolutionised the way our people work by issuing our frontline with smartphones and tablets loaded with customised apps to allow them to spend more time in their communities and less time at the office doing paperwork. On the streets is where they can make the most difference.

Granted this is a PR piece.  But it does underscore some important policing principles.  These include:

• The importance of crime prevention.
• Being victim focused.
• The importance of community and neighbourhood policing
• A constant presence on the streets.

We are sure that much more needs to be done.  One thing stands out: historically, the police force came into existence in the UK as an extension of the public's fundamental role and duty in policing their own neighbourhoods.  The police received their powers from the public, not the state.  Wherever that fundamental reality is lost, the police become more and more ineffectual, and crime soars.
  The blunt reality is this: policing does not work without an on-going alliance between the police and the community.  The more police enlist the public into this civic duty, the more effective policing becomes--which is why the four points made by Commissioner Bush listed above are so critical. The more police see themselves as an extension of the public, not of the state the more successful they are in fighting crime and maintaining public order.

Peter Hitchens describes this reality (with respect to Britain):

The liberal state has redefined crime in such a way that many actions that used to be seen as common sense are now dangerous breaches of the law.  Teachers who smack or even restrain children, householders who catch vandals smashing their fences and frogmarch them to their parents for punishment, citizens who put up barbed wire to defend their homes against thieves, shopkeepers who try to fight off violent robbers with forces, all find that the police are likely to view them as offenders.  The new law believes that the family is itself a seething nest of abuse from which battered wives and molested children may at any time need to be rescued. . . .

This enthusiasm for pursuing allegations against authority figures widens the gulf between the police and citizens who once saw themselves as being on the side of the law.  Actions that would at one time have been seen as helpful to the police are now prosecuted and punished.  Faced with such actions--defence of homes, citizens' arrests of street robbers and so forth--police chiefs complain about citizens "taking the law into their own hands".  This is an interesting use of language.  The law, as it has existed for centuries, is in the hands of the English people and is shared by them with a police force who are supposed to be citizens in uniform. [ Peter Hitchens, The Abolition of Liberty: the Decline of Order and Justice in England (London: Atlantic Books, 2003),   p. 44f.]

We get the impression that Hitchens's description, once very accurate with respect to New Zealand as well, is now less the case here.   But the more police get involved with communities and the more they enlist community help in policing, the more effective their policing will become, and the less a "don't get involved, leave it to us" attitude will prevail.

There is a long way to go--and given the inevitable eventual return of a more liberal, left-wing government to power, there is nothing to say that progress will continue to be made.  We may well get a reversal to the stupid, "leave it to the experts" mentality--which is implicitly statist.

If as a police officer, or police force, one presumes that the vast majority of citizens cannot be trusted to be responsible when it comes to joining the fight against crime, the inevitable implication is that there is no way crime can be successfully contained.  The suppressed premise of such a benighted and ignorant view is that the majority of citizens are themselves quasi-criminal types.  Ironically, when a police force comes to believe that, crime will explode--not because the majority of the population is indeed criminal, but because "police only" policing rapidly degenerates into ineffectual incompetence.