President's Column - It's all about balance
“While there are some disadvantages to having all sworn police enter the organisation at the same level, it does ensure that despite the size of the organisation, there exists a consistency of understanding of what ‘business as usual’ means.”
It’s all about balance
New Zealand Police, because we are a national force, is a big organisation compared to the rest of the Western world’s Police forces.
Most Police forces in countries we compare ourselves to, are state, county or municipal forces - so generally smaller.
Because we are big, and national, it is very difficult to maintain lines of communication and understanding between the administration component and those carrying out the actual frontline interaction with the public – our victims, witnesses, and offenders.
The problem can be mitigated to a certain degree by ensuring the administration and specialist skills needed to keep the organisation running are balanced with an understanding of the essential nature of Police work.
While there are some disadvantages to having all sworn police enter the organisation at the same level, it does ensure that despite the size of the organisation, there exists a consistency of understanding of what ‘business as usual’ means.
In our highly politicised world, where elections are won and lost on ‘fear of crime’ levels, demands are often made for politicians to focus on one part of the business, inevitably the one that is high focus in the media at any one time.
The job of Police leaders is to balance those demands with what they know are the less high profile but still essential parts of our ‘business’.
The problems with child abuse files are a case in point. While political pressure in the first half of the last decade was all about volume crime and performance targets reflected that pressure down to station level, the business as usual stuff, especially child abuse investigations, suffered.
Resource was prioritised to volume crime. We now have an Independent Police Conduct Authority (IPCA) investigation and we will no doubt wear criticism as an organisation, which will impact on us all.
Did those in the hierarchy, at the time, who were regularly berating District Commanders over their volume crime statistics really understand how much resource needed to go into ‘business as usual’ policing? I think not, and once again, the folly of allowing policing to be broken down into silos where a broad organisational understanding is lacking was shown.
Conversely, I am very optimistic that the way the extra resources are being deployed in Counties-Manukau will have spectacular results for everyone.
The reason why is that it seems to be all about enhancing our basic tasks of attending jobs and investigating crime, historically and proactively.
There don’t seem to be too many of those CV-enhancing ‘special projects’, which continually suck people from frontline duties.
It appears political and policing needs may have aligned on this one. It takes a wide variety of skills to keep police effective: it also takes an understanding of the nature of the business. The trick is to get the balance right!
