Police target relies on trust
‘‘Perception is so important, and public perception of the police has never been positive across the board.’’
An entertaining police recruitment video released last year, in an attempt to raise numbers, and the diversity of New Zealand’s police force, finished with an interesting tagline: ‘‘Do you care enough to be a cop?’’
It’s a slogan that might more readily be associated with two other high-volume public sector occupations, nursing and teaching.
Though a case can undoubtedly be made that it’s a central thrust now, especially when one considers the diversity of jobs recruits can go on to beyond their initial couple of years in a blue uniform, ‘‘care’’ is probably not a word that has traditionally been associated with police work. At least not to the extent that it forms an obvious part of the brief for the other two occupations.
In one sense, that may have been the most important part of the $350,000 video, as entertaining and as obviously focused on fostering greater diversity within the force as it was. ‘‘Those who care about others and their communities,’’ one of the ‘‘recruits’’ in the video declares, are being sought for the force.
Perception is so important, and public perception of the police has never been positive across the board. Fair or not, in the eyes of women and minorities, episodes like the rape complaints made by Louise Nicholas, and complaints of racial profiling brought by people like Green Party coleader Marama Davidson, have widely coloured public perceptions.
So in trying to increase diversity within the ranks, police have to address those negative perceptions, and the word that really should be an enduring feature of the relationship between the police and the public: trust.
In that context, it’s hardly surprising that recruitment efforts targeted at bringing the representation of minority groups within the force in line with the overall population by 2021 are currently lagging a little. It would be surprising if trust in the police among those minority groups and women was not lower than for Pa¯ keha¯ men.
That said, the numbers reported at the weekend are generally encouraging, with more than two years until the target date. The target falls under an overarching drive to bring in another 1800 cops overall. If trust becomes an increasing commodity in the relationships between those groups and police, that should result in further increases in recruitment from those groups.
In the latest intake of 345 recruits, for example, 10.1 per cent were Asian, taking the total percentage of Asians in the force to 4.9 per cent, when it was just 2.5 in figures reported in 2015. It still lags well behind the 11.8 per cent of the population reported in the 2013 census, but it’s improving. As is the case with Pacific Islanders, who now make up 6.4 per cent of the force and 7.4 per cent of the population. Women made up 35.7 per cent of the group, so the goal of them making up half of all recruits by 2021 is challenging.
In the end, meeting the target will rest on a growing level of trust, and if perceptions like that of transgender activist Lexie Matheson after the 2018 Auckland Pride Parade, that ‘‘booted and uniformed officers’’ had been replaced by a range of ‘‘informally presented ‘people like us’ ’’, then they may be on course.