Reflections from Repay the Risk on policing
By Lucy Rogers
I felt a sense of discomfort recently when in the comments section of a Good Oil post I wrote about the police someone referred to the police as a “big blue gang” or words to that effect. C’mon, guys. You know that’s unfair. While there are legitimate criticisms to be made of police tribalism, the police and the Mongrel Mob are not interchangeable institutions. Whatever one’s criticisms of policing, police officers perform essential public functions and often bear significant personal costs in doing so, and describing them as a gang does not recognise that distinction and the human cost of their work.
Over the past three years since my arrest I have made a serious effort to better understand how police see the world. Not being a police officer myself, I’m not sure I’m the best person to explain their perspectives: I think there would be significant value in a police officer writing a series of blog posts expositing that rather than me. However, officers have shared stories of their experiences in anecdotes shared for the Repay The Risk campaign for better police pay over the last few months which I found really interesting and thought were worth resharing.
An officer described how after a few years of being a serving police officer in small town New Zealand, every road junction or landmark accumulated different traumatic associations: fatal road crashes, suicides, homicides. Driving around off-duty meant constantly being triggered by old memories. I’m not sure that’s something a lot of Kiwis can relate to.
Another officer described being called out to investigate a woman’s disappearance at a rural property, only to find her decomposing corpse on the floor from where she had died some weeks earlier. The smell was obscene. There weren’t any cops in the surrounding area because it was rural, so he had to stay there for a few hours while backup arrived. When he was relieved by other officers, he was required to move on to the next job as if nothing had happened.
Other stories for example involve missing birthdays or Christmas dinners, or partners lying awake at night having heard on the radio that an officer was hurt elsewhere in the country, or hypervigilance in an officer’s own kitchen because it was hard to switch from work mode to family mode. One officer described regularly standing outside his front door in silence composing himself after work so that his family would get the best version of him when he came home.
A newbie officer described attending five sudden deaths on his first three days on the job. He went out expecting a routine day of speed training when he came across a car/ truck collision on a bridge. The truck had crushed the entire engine bay of the car into the front seats. The vehicle was hanging halfway off the bridge, one shift away from dropping 15 metres into the river below.
The car driver was dying and the officer could hear the death rattle. Meanwhile, the truck driver was sitting alone with his head in his hands at the end of the bridge. The officer walked over and sat beside him: no notebook, no statement, just presence. The truck driver explained that it was him or the other driver, and he had nowhere to go, and he had a family. Later, his dashcam told the truth: the car driver deliberately committed suicide by crossing the centre line.
Then came the next part: telling the parents of the teen driver. And then, before the shift was even over, he was called out to a suicide via hanging.
My feelings about the police are complicated, but at the end of the day cops are human beings. They pay a high price to play an important social function. I deeply appreciate their mahi (work), and I invite people who hate the police to think about what a society which abolished its police force would actually look like. While I am determined to make complainants’ perspectives known (and that is my priority given the power discrepancy between an organisation with a multi-billion dollar budget and complainants) the cops’ side is worth knowing too.
Having said that, none of this of course is intended for one moment to justify the actions of the likes of dishonest evil bastards like Senior Sergeant Vaughan Perry and Inspector Rākana Cook. The point is not that VP has a difficult life and therefore his decisions have “context”: it’s that describing the police as a “gang” does not recognise the importance of what the police do and the personal cost of doing so. It’s easy to forget that not all cops are like VP.