Rural thin blue line getting thinner
Thin on the ground police are struggling to combat rural crime, Andrew McGiven says.
The thin blue line is transparent, especially in the rural areas.
Lately I’ve been hearing cries for help from many in our rural communities. It is when a crime or offence has been committed, sometimes against them or their family, and they have been unable to get any sort of firm police response.
Just recently I was at a farm where the owner has taken it upon himself to fortify his gateways by placing loads of metal and hay bales to keep burglars and thieves out. They have been brazenly entering his property and stealing machinery and tools.
This had been happening even when he was on the farm, but when the emergency call centre was contacted he was informed that there were insufficient staff to attend a ‘‘burglars on’’ call.
It seemed to him they were only focused on collecting the statistics. As a former police officer who served in the early 1990s, I find this pretty disturbing. Back when I was in uniform the byword was ‘‘proactive policing’’.
But it sounds like the current administration is struggling to keep up even with the reactive incidents.
Surely the police and law and order must be a cornerstone of any government, and for all the mudslinging and promises being made in Parliament it seems to me that we have a woefully inadequate police service which is incapable of dealing with many day-to-day reactive situations.
Every crime becomes historical when you are simply driving from scene to scene filling out offence reports. However, please don’t take this as a slight against the frontline staff as there are some fantastic people working there.
Rather, consistent underfunding has enabled a culture of budget cutting and over-stressed staff. The thin blue line is transparent, especially in the rural areas. With the centralisation of many rural stations, police are thin on the ground.
There is hardly ever time for foot patrols in the towns as officers are constantly racing around in the cars to various incidents. So the public don’t get a chance to build up a rapport with their local staff, who can often be based from another town or area anyway.
This in turn must affect the ability to gather local intelligence and knowledge of the community and hence the resolution rates of rural crime. And if you know that you can’t do your job to the best of your ability then that must affect morale. Criminals will always look for the easy targets, and if they know that their chances of encountering any law enforcement presence in the country is remote then that’s where they will operate.
The proliferation of farm cottages cooking ‘P’ (methamphetamine) is an example of this. I don’t think that this is a management issue per se, but more of a governance issue and although this new government has promised 1800 more police by 2020 I would urge them to also prioritise the rural areas as well.
Even though we may have won some recognition in the Beehive recently of the level and harm of stock thefts, we still have a long way to go. I would loathe to see a farmer who felt that they had to protect property or family in a direct confrontation because they thought that they couldn’t rely on a timely police response.
Because if that happens, we all lose. ❚ Andrew McGiven is president of Waikato Federated Farmers.