Systemic racism label ‘lazy’
Police union boss speaks out after Ma¯ ori Party claims
Police don’t have unconscious racial bias — the bias is more overt and systemic racism permeates the whole criminal justice system, the Ma¯ori Party says.
But the Police Association said the party’s claims of systemic racism were lazy and unhelpful, and police were already working hard to better understand possible racial bias.
“What is unconscious bias? Is that being biased while asleep? We want the police to admit that they have systemic racism,” Te Pa¯ti Ma¯ori coleader Rawiri Waititi said yesterday.
“So the sooner police acknowledge there’s systemic racism in the police, then we can address it.”
The Waiariki MP said 55 per cent of the male prison population was Ma¯ori, as were 64 per cent of female inmates.
The Department of Correction’s latest prison statistics report, from March this year, said 53.4 per cent of all inmates were Ma¯ori.
Waititi said youth justice programmes were predominantly Ma¯ ori.
He said systemic racism was prevalent in other criminal justice sectors.
“It’s in everything, it’s in every government agency, and we need to deal with that,” he said.
Waititi said a $562 million Budget allocation over four years to Police and Corrections would not help the problem.
On whether hiring more Ma¯ori police would help, he said: “Browning up the police and the jail [staff] is not going to fix the problems.”
The pre-budget announcement
showed more than $185 million would be used to expand the police Tactical Response Model.
The model ensured police were trained and equipped to the standard of Armed Offenders Squad members.
“More police, a tactical team, what that means is more dead Ma¯ ori on the streets,” Waititi said.
Police Association president Chris Cahill said Waititi’s systemic racism claim was “easy” to make but Te Pa¯ti Ma¯ori could and should do better.
“They should be looking for holistic solutions across society,” he said.
Police were just one part of the criminal justice system and often functioned as an ambulance at the
bottom of the cliff, Cahill said.
He said broader failures in education, health, the economy or society could not be blamed on police.
“The most disappointing thing for me is if people are going to blame police systemic racism for the overrepresentation of Ma¯ori in the justice system, they’re never going to solve the problem.”
He added: “I’m not saying there aren’t issues around unconscious bias . . . I’m not saying police aren’t without fault.”
Cahill said police were working on researching and addressing factors that might lead to such bias.
He also said Ma¯ori were overrepresented as victims of crime.
Cahill said police deployed to help Ma¯ori victims were likely to then encounter Ma¯ori offenders, if it was a predominantly Ma¯ori neighbourhood.
Police had been working with criminal justice advocate and former senior sergeant Sir Kim Workman on research into systemic bias.
Police Minister Poto Williams said police had initiated self-reflective research into unconscious bias.
“So they are owning up to the fact that they want to understand why it is that Ma¯ori are stopped, spoken to and arrested by police in more numbers than others,” she said yesterday.
“I applaud the work that police are doing.”