Guest Post: The IPCA’s proposed reforms would not have prevented me or Daniel Maxwell from being arrested, but here’s what would

A guest post by Lucy Rogers:

As some readers will be aware, the IPCA released a report in February claiming that the law of protest in New Zealand is not fit for purpose. Among the alleged problems with it is that the law is vague about police powers. For example, the exact parameters of breach of the peace are (supposedly) vague, and furthermore the police are misinformed about what breach of the peace means in any event.

Although I agree with aspects of the above (specifically, that police are woefully misinformed about what breach of the peace is) I must agree in the end with the FSU’s criticism that for the IPCA to focus on perceived deficiencies and vagaries of the law in response to the cases covered in the report was misplaced in emphasis. It creates the misleading impression that police misconduct was attributable primarily to good faith mistakes about the law.

In fact, what we need are reforms aimed at preventing police from going on a power trip and at preventing ideological policing, because that is what really happened in the cases in question. The IPCA’s proposed reforms would not have prevented what happened on the day of my arrest because the police were not acting in good faith. Here are some proposals I think would make a real difference:

• All police should be required to wear mandatory body cameras while on duty so that they cannot lie about the circumstances leading to a person’s arrest. Please sign the petition: https://www.change.org/p/justiceforsam-demand-accountability-for-police-actions-and-mandatory-police-bodycams

• The Police Professional Conduct Unit should be abolished and resources transferred to the IPCA. At present the IPCA is only nominally in charge of reviewing complaints into police misconduct. In fact the vast majority of complaints about police misconduct are investigated by other police officers. The IPCA is so chronically under-resourced it does not even have a branch in Auckland at the moment and staff have to fly up from Wellington to interview people.

• Failing the abolition of the PPCU, the introduction of IPCA audits into the PPCU’s investigations of police officers would help, but I suspect it is more cost effective to transfer everything to the IPCA.

• The IPCA should have the powers to order rather than to merely recommend prosecutions and employment investigations. These powers should not lie with people who have a conflict of interest i.e. police.

• A law change should be effected whereby if an arrest is so lacking in merit that on that balance of probabilities a judge believes that it was not in good faith, then the police officers who made the arrest should be required to pay financial compensation to the individual in question out of their own pocket. This has the advantage of not costing the taxpayer anything, and would have a much greater deterrent effect than the police paying compensation as an institution.

I do think that some of the IPCA’s proposals could be implemented with tweaking to the benefit of this country, but I shall cover that in a separate post.