Armed cops: The new normal?
Police believe they should be routinely armed. Academics and others disagree. Rob Mitchell examines the arguments.
Four to six weeks. According to Police Association boss Chris Cahill and international evidence, that’s how long frontline officers need to be armed after a mass shooting.
‘‘Clearly it is appropriate that everyone is armed,’’ he says. ‘‘There’s a heightened risk of another offender or a copycat.’’
That threat level was dropped from high to medium yesterday, prompting police bosses to end officers’ routine carrying of arms. And an insight into what an armed force might look like.
That’s something the association has been seeking since 2009.
Cahill accepts now is not the time for change – we need more clarity about what happened in Christchurch, and how the new gun laws will work.
But he is pleased to see how well the public has reacted to officers in the street carrying intimidating weapons.
‘‘What has come out of this is that the public have seen that, just because police are armed, doesn’t mean they can’t approach them,’’ he says.
‘‘I saw many coming up to police officers expressing their thanks for the work done, but also sharing their grief and their stories, and that shows that just because an officer has a firearm doesn’t mean they aren’t human, someone that the public can’t talk to.’’
Cahill and others are talking to the Government about the new gun laws – how best to remove dangerous military-style semi-automatics from the wrong hands, and creating a firearms register, so police know more about who has what, how many and where.
But the drumbeat for general arming remains.
That’s what association members voted to support in 2009, a year after sergeants Derek Wootton and Don
Wilkinson were killed in the line of duty, and the same year Senior Constable Leonard Snee was shot dead by Jan Molenaar in the Napier siege.
Twenty-nine police officers have been killed while on duty since 1890, 21 by gunshot.
A survey of association members in 2017 found 67 per cent supported general arming; that was up 6 per cent on 2015 and 18 per cent on 2008.
Public support has been static: 55 per cent were in favour in 2018, the same number as in 2008.
But the dial was turned up once more, in Christchurch, just a few weeks before the mosque shootings in the same city.
Canterbury police were armed for a week after a man was shot and an associate went on the run. He was arrested with an imitation firearm on March 3.
At the time, Cahill claimed permanent general arming was justified; he cited anecdotal evidence of an increase in violence towards officers and a greater presence of firearms.
But a day later, in response to media inquiries, Commissioner Mike Bush said the arming of police in Canterbury was a local, tactical response and there was no intention to push for general arming.
Wellington academics Hera Cook and Marie Russell remain sceptical. They too have heard the drumbeat, but believe the rhythm is out of sync with the numbers put forward by the Police Association and the wishes of the general public. And they believe they have the research to back that up.
Cook and Russell say the association is ‘‘ramping up’’ irrational fears about crime to drive through its agenda. They don’t believe the organisation has the data to justify its stance. Cahill concedes there is some truth to that.
The reality is that frontline police already have access to firearms, and regular training on how to use them.
New Zealand Police says firearms are carried in lockboxes inside
‘‘... The public have seen that, just because police are armed, doesn’t mean they can’t approach them.’’
Police Association president Chris Cahill
patrol cars, but it won’t say how many.
It says officers receive regular training, including ‘‘live firing, marksmanship, scenario-based training, simulator training and tactical awareness’’.
‘‘Our officers have access to firearms if they consider they have an operational need for them.
‘‘Officers are enabled to make a decision on the best tactical option based on their risk assessment at the time, and ongoing reassessment for the purposes of keeping themselves and the community safe.’’
Access to firearms is not the issue, say Cook and Russell, from the University of Otago in Wellington.
Cook is a historian, Russell a public health researcher. They interviewed dozens of people and conducted a summer health seminar involving firearms groups and other key players to get an overall picture of what is happening in relation to firearms control and the use of guns.
Their findings are due out later this year.
An early reading of the research supports the work of the armed offenders squad (AOS) in response to specific incidents.
‘‘The AOS is trained in a whole range of things: mediation, trained to de-escalate; they have far more effective firearms training,’’ says Cook.
But most respondents in their study, including senior police officers, appear to stop short of endorsing general arming.
‘‘So we’re going from what seems to have been a very trustworthy, very effective means of dealing with incidents involving guns to a semi-trained force shooting to kill,’’ she says.
Both were also dismissive of the association’s argument about the risk of firearms to officers and the public. ‘‘There is a genuine fear; people in the community have a genuine fear of crime,’’ says Russell. ‘‘What’s on TV, it’s enough to alarm you.’’
But statistics show that crime is down, and has been falling for the past 30 years, including offences involving firearms.
NZ Police figures show there were 76 murders or deaths by manslaughter involving guns between 2008 and 2017.
Figures show offences and injuries involving firearms were either static or falling during that time.
And New Zealand’s rate of gun violence (1.87 deaths per million in 2016) is one of the lowest in the world. (It is 194 in Brazil and 106 in the United States.)
In fact, the majority of deaths by firearm in New Zealand are suicides. They make up about three-quarters of the deaths; the number of people who kill themselves with a gun each year is about the same as the number killed at the Christchurch mosques.
Both academics also take issue with Cahill’s contention that carrying firearms will improve safety for officers.
‘‘From research we’ve done with these knowledgeable informants, they seem to be saying that arming the police is not going to make everybody, including the police, safer,’’ says Russell.
That is backed up by international research.
The University of Cambridge studied the use of Tasers and
other tactical responses by London police officers.
Researchers found officers carrying such weapons were almost 50 per cent more likely to use force. It also found they were more likely to be assaulted.
‘‘The very presence of the weapon led to increased hostility between the police and public,’’ said lead researcher Barak Ariel.
The year-long study in 2016-17 highlighted the ‘‘weapons effect’’, involving the escalation of an incident when a weapon is sighted.
Cahill is sceptical about the research, but admits that the association’s push for routine arming is based on anecdotal evidence. ‘‘We don’t have good data,’’ he says. ‘‘That has been one of the challenges.
‘‘Scientific level of data or statistical data that would stand scrutiny at that level is difficult because we only get reports that our members send to us.’’
That doesn’t stop the association relying on anecdotes to push the arming of all frontline officers. ‘‘Five officers were shot at in a three-week period during the past five weeks,’’ he says. ‘‘I’m not aware of where we would ever have had five officers shot at in three weeks.’’
Cahill is also sceptical of NZ Police statistics, including the claim of just four incidents involving firearms in 2017 where officers were shot at.
Although, again, he has no real numbers to counter that claim. ‘‘We won’t go out and say there’s been a 20 per cent increase in this, or a 10 per cent decrease in that, because it’s too inconsistent based on who is supplying the information.’’
Police admit their figures are not providing a full picture.
In a report published by the association, Police Strategy Group manager Catherine Petrey says they are investigating the disparity between reporting and recording of officers’ interactions with firearms.
‘‘Other than the anecdotal reports from our frontline police, we don’t know the level of risk to the public, let alone all frontline workers,’’ she says. ‘‘Nor do we know if the risk is increasing or decreasing.’’
Ross Hendy carried a weapon for some of his near-13 years as a police officer in New Zealand, and he has investigated their use in other countries in his new
role as an academic.
Like Hera and Cook, he says the issue is not about access to arms. But unlike his academic counterparts, he’s comfortable with officers carrying guns.
It’s not about the weapons, he says, it’s about the policy that supports the way, the when and where they are used.
Hendy, now a lecturer in criminology at Monash University in Melbourne, studied how officers used firearms in Norway, where they are not routinely armed, and Sweden, where they are.
Interestingly, Norway’s police were armed for about 18 months in response to terrorist threats.
‘‘The overwhelming response to it was that, by being armed, that was one less thing to worry about when being dispatched to a difficult or dangerous job,’’ he says, ‘‘and as a result they felt they were able to make safer and more detailed tactical plans.’’
But longer-term figures, between 1996 and 2006, show that the routinely unarmed Norwegians were almost 10 times more likely to threaten the use of firearms than their armed Swedish counterparts.
The use of firearms, even as a threat, had nothing to do with whether a force was armed or not.
He saw a similar correlation between New Zealand police and their armed counterparts in South Australia. ‘‘There was no difference in the way conflict was being resolved,’’ he says of the 300 incidents he attended here and across the Tasman.
‘‘The encounters that I observed in South Australia were all resolved either with verbal communication or physical use of handcuffing or pepper spray; there was no interaction with firearms whatsoever.’’
It’s not about the firepower, it’s about the policy, says Hendy.
‘‘The question of whether they are armed or not is not as significant as what are the policies that dictate use of firearms; for instance, warning shots versus not doing warning shots.
‘‘Whether the threshold for using firearms is lower or higher – that has a greater modifying effect on an officer to use them rather than whether they have them or not.’’
And on whether we will continue to feel comfortable around officers carrying firearms in the future.