Tamatha Paul Was Right: Police Don't Mean Safety for Everyone
Imagine a world where someone in crisis is met with care, not cuffs. We can build that world together.
The kid had her face slammed into the pavement. Six large men shoving her to the ground, knees in back, strong hands, loud voices, young body jammed harder and harder against the concrete floor.
I watched as the men who had been called to help, did more harm.
The police had come that evening because they had received a call that a young person was in mental distress. She was unwell and needed immediate care. She was traumatized and a risk to her own safety.
And yet when the Police arrived, she was treated like a criminal, man-handled, yelled at, physically forced to submit to their will. If anyone wearing any other colour, had acted in that way, used that level of force, within that context, we would have called it assault.
But these men wore blue.
The Police were called that evening because as a society we do not value our health system, we have chosen to pour money into investing in the Police, while ignoring the critical social infrastructure we need to care for and support people who are unwell and in need of immediate and urgent care and support.
The Police were there that evening because they are the only 24/7 crisis and emergency response service that is available to our community with the resources to respond in urgent and critical need.
Recently, Green MP, Tamatha Paul, made the comments that some people don’t feel safe seeing a lot of Police walking around the city.
Perhaps the most surprising thing about Tamatha’s comments was the political reaction to them. Her comments were called stupid by the Labour Leader, Chris Hipkins, and she was accused of being in “LaLa Land” and “on a completely different planet” by the Prime Minister, Christopher Luxon, while NZ First’s Winston Peter’s accused her and the Greens of being “for anarchy” and Act’s David Seymour accused her of being “just weird”. And yet, it is simply a fact that some people and communities have different experiences of the Police than others. Experiences that, for some, make them feel less safe.
The reality is, for a lot of people, the police as an institution, does not represent safety! For many of our rangatahi, our tamariki, our whānau experiencing homelessness, for many māori, pasfika, and other communities outside of mainstream Pākehā society, the police represent violence, discrimination, abuse, and harassment.
I know for many in my community in central Auckland, the presence of police in uniform patrolling the streets does not make a lot of us feel safer. Rather, it can create a sense of fear, heightening tension, and triggering trauma for people just trying to live their lives.
To acknowledge this isn't to say all police officers are inherently bad people. I know a lot of people within the Police who care a lot for our community and are doing what they can to serve and care for our communities.
This can be true, and equally, it can be true that the Police as an institution has - and does often - fail some of those in our society who we have chosen to structurally marginalize through the way we have built and set up our systems and structures.
Another truth, that the Police themselves acknowledge, is that the Police are not the best people to be responding to people who are unwell. The Police are not specialists in supporting people to heal, they are not experts in responding to traumatized and unwell people in a trauma informed manner, the Police are not mental health professionals.
The Government itself is currently talking about how they are wanting the Police to pull back from mental health call outs due to concerns that they are taking too much of the Police’s resources and time away from their primary job of “fighting crime”. And yet, as a society we have chosen not to fund the sorts of community led solutions which would enable us to respond to the needs of our own people when they are in crisis, leaving a huge gap for people in critical urgent need.
Tamatha Paul is correct to point towards alternatives to Police in response to the complex needs within our communities. We need to start questioning the inherited logic that having Police and privately owned security guards walking up and down our streets is the solution to building communities where we are all empowered and enabled to fully participate within society. We need to take a microscope to this definition of “community safety” which features so prominently in the debate currently, examining why current notions of safety appear to be so limited to people who run businesses and those who come into our city centre’s to spend and consume, yet at the same time have so little regard for the safety of vulnerable children who are starving and malnourished, and elders who are cold and unhoused.
Instead of notions of individual safety and security, we need to begin talking about what it means for all of us to participate freely in our communities, and how we can build communities where we are all able to belong and thrive together.
One such model Kick Back (the youth homelessness service I lead) is working on building alongside our community is the Pink Hoodz, a grassroots project which is focused on organizing our local community in Auckland Central to provide a community led alternative to Police and security patrols. A lot of the crime that has dominated the conversation are crimes fuelled by poverty and inequality and exacerbated by a resource starved health system. Imagine having the capacity in our community to respond to people in distress with love, empathy and manaaki, imagine a community equipped to respond swiftly when someone is identified in distress, connecting that person to healthcare, kai, shelter, or whatever resources or support they need. The Pink Hoodz are about community care, they’re about recognizing that for us all to thrive together, we must begin to awaken to our collective responsibility for and to one another.
We can build communities where aroha and manaaki for one another are at the centre, where Love is The Way we respond to people that are in crisis and in need, where we are organised to support and care for each other, where instead of police officers turning up to respond to people who are unwell and in mental distress, we have the appropriate services in the appropriate places, to provide people with the support and care they require.
The way this conversation has gone within Parliament only highlights how disconnected many of our political leaders are from the lived reality of a significant percentage of our community. The response from these leaders has been disappointing, demonstrating an utter disregard for the concerns and lived realities of many of our people! The reaction from across the political spectrum simply highlights that the concerns, experiences, and lived realities of those represented thru Tam's kōrero do not matter to these political leaders.
If anything, this should serve as a reminder for us. No one is coming to save us, if we want a world where we all truly can thrive together, a world where safety is not defined by force, but by community, aroha, manaakitanga, and our collective love for one another, then we must be prepared to build this world ourselves.
We cannot get confused or disillusioned. We cannot give up hope. The power for change, for transformation, is not truly in Wellington. The Power is and has always been The People.
It is us, as we come together, organize, refuse to Accept the Unacceptable in our society, and join together in order to imagine and build the new in the shell and husks of all these old systems that do not serve us!
We are the change e te whānau. Our Love for one another is far more powerful than we know!
#LoveIsTheWay #KickBackMakeChange
P.S if you want to learn more about the Pink Hoodz or become part of the team consider joining us Tuesday 29th April, find out more here.
A.J. Hendry is a Youth Development Worker and rangatahi advocate, working in the Youth Housing and Homelessness space. He leads and co-founded Kick Back, a youth development organizations responding to youth homelessness and is also an advocate working collectively to end youth homelessness in Aotearoa. He is also the curator and creator of When Lambs Are Silent.
Sitting below all of this issue is a pervasive racism that mires our society. It's a deep cancerous growth we pretend doesn't exist. It also applies to those living in poverty or with mental health issues or any one outside our growth orientated greed focused norm. I see it constantly reflected in policy, Acts Treaty bill and the insane drug policies that target young Maori. I hear it in casual comments made about Maori having special privileges. As if having most of your land stolen is a special privilege. Imagine how crazy it is when our leaders say they want a more equal society therefore we need to change the Treaty because we are all one. Our politicians will never see this because they live in an alternative world a bubble way outside the lived reality of so many people. So your comments are as always prophetic AJ and you are right love is the only way naive as that may sound. Naivety is a good thing because it means you still have hope. At 71 I am struggling a little with the hope bit.
Well said. I was just thinking the other day that without an easily accessible end to end wellness to crisis support mental health system, we expect too much of the Police. But managing transition to something else, does mean something else needs to be in place. That will mean social infrastructure investment and systemic planning of it>>what's in the NZ Infrastructure Pipeline for social infrastructure? Applaud your vision and practical getting on with doing it approach-- but its also an indicator of government failure that people in the community feel they need too organise for the obvious deficit. It startled me that so many of the politicians couldn't hold the 2 thoughts at the same time that Police are trying to do a good job and that some New Zealanders feel worse in their presence also being true. I agree with your analysis, that most politicians didn't seem to see the possibility of another perspective, and that is truly disappointing of leaders who are clearly only working for a limited group. NZ did vote for what we got, which is why you articulating an alternative vision for caring within community and public systems is so important to remind us of....we can choose to do differently.