Top cop: From taxi driver to senior sergeant
Mandeep Kaur cried a lot in the six years she was separated from her two children.
She had to leave them in India with her parents when she came to New Zealand – “the saddest years of my life”, the 52-year-old police officer recalls.
This month, Kaur became the first India-born woman to reach the rank of senior sergeant in the New Zealand police. A poster child for ethnic and gender diversity in the public service, her children have grown up and she is a proud grandmother of two.
Data from February shows nearly 426,000 migrants in New Zealand, up 18 per cent from 2011.
But many of these journeys started with failure.
Born to a conservative family in Punjab, Kaur is tall for an Indian woman. When she was growing up her mother would say, “You could have joined the police if you were a boy”. But uniformed jobs in India at the time were for men, and women did less adventurous work. “It was my mother who gave me the police dream,” she says.
Kaur was married just before she turned 18, and gave birth to her daughter at 19 when she was in her final year of college. She was breastfeeding when she took her final written paper.
She earned a degree in political science and sociology. It was an arranged marriage and had its ups and downs, so she knew that being independent was important, and a university education was a big part of that.
Her marriage ended in 1992. She moved back to her parents’ home with two young children in tow, and waited for her husband to come back for her. In her culture, broken marriages are often blamed on wives.
He never returned. She was miserable, but it pushed her to pack her bags for an opportunity.
Kaur heard a neighbour was going to Australia, and managed to convince her parents to help her do the same. She kissed her children goodbye without telling them she was going overseas. Amardeep was only 6 and Parneet 8 at the time.
She couldn’t speak much English when she landed in Australia in 1996. For the next six years, she would be a long-distance mother, prevented from bringing her children over by a complicated custody battle with her ex-husband.
Her first job in Australia was a door-to-door saleswoman, getting homeowners to change telephone services.
She also drove a taxi, a job she continued when she came to New Zealand in 1999.
One night she was discussing happiness with a passenger, a psychologist who said that realising a childhood dream can be a source of happiness. That got her thinking about her old police fantasy.
Kaur learned early on that people love to help people who help themselves.
She talks about the late John Pegler, a retired police officer she affectionately calls her Kiwi dad.
Pegler was the night receptionist at the YMCA women’s lodge in Auckland where Mandeep stayed.
When she came in at the end of her taxi shift, Pegler would make her a hot cup of Milo, listen to her and tell her stories of his police officer days.
She told him one night about her dream to join the police. He leaped into action and was the first to bring her a career info pack.
Pegler gave her hope that her dream was possible. Her parents, children, friends, a long list of people in her life including the physical education officers in the police have all helped her along the way, she says.
“If you look around you there are always people who can help. Look for those opportunities and reach out.
The hardest thing she’s done was learn to swim, a requirement for joining the police. She had never been to a pool until then.
She also had to lose 20kg “to be fit”, she says.
“Having to wear a swimsuit and bare my legs in public, that was a huge hurdle.”
In 2002 her teenaged children arrived in New Zealand. Two years later she joined the force.
Kaur’s experiences of failure and hardship inform her police work today.
“It makes you better at understanding people who may be in the same place you were once at.
“It’s not that we can tell people what to do, but because we’ve been there before, we can help them clarify their situations.”
Did she ever struggle with self-doubt? “No. I still felt like I was very capable and should not give up.”
Not long ago, Kaur was a senior constable working with victims of family harm. She loved her work but was frustrated she wasn’t able to get into a decisionmaking role and do more.
“I must have applied for so many positions to be promoted, and so many times I didn’t get it,” she said.
Each time she didn’t meet the mark, she’d say to herself: one more time. One of those times saw her promoted to senior sergeant.
Her new role is at Police National Headquarters in Wellington, working as a senior adviser with the just-launched Iwi and Communities team, tasked with preventing harm across the country’s diverse communities.
“My grandkids are born here, I want to leave this country a better place for them so they don’t face issues as children of migrants.”