Government’s 100 day plan and cost cutting part of cause
Papers show the police’s intelligence systems essential to frontline crime fighting are in bad shape, but Government priorities have delayed a massive overhaul of them.
Police have known for years the ageing systems are “slow and errorprone while the demands on the Taclnt [ tactical intelligence] analyst are for rapid collection of information and derivation of intelligence”, and that the way they are set up creates “a huge intelligence gap”.
But they only recently realised they must do a much bigger overhaul than expected, not just of their National Intelligence Application (NIA) but of Core Policing Services as a whole.
Yet they have now run into delays to that, due, says an internal paper, to the Government’s 100-day plan and having to cut spending.
The Government has stated its public sector savings moves would not affect the police front line.
Yet the internal papers secured under the OIA show police bosses were told in February: “The initial plan for completion of the Core Policing Services (CPS) Indicative Business Case (IBC) by 30 June [20]23 has been impacted by:
● Current management focus on ensuring delivery of the Government’s 100-day priorities and aligning to expectations
● Police’s financial situation and needing to reduce programme expenditure
● (A third reason is blanked out in the OIA)
The Government told RNZ on Sunday this was “an operational matter”, though it had asked police to find “efficiencies” and “programmes that don’t align with the Government’s priorities”.
Police’s deep-rooted intelligence problems, and calls to fix them, have been repeatedly laid out in internal reviews in 2011, 2015, 2018 and 2020, across more than 170 pages obtained by RNZ earlier.
An earlier assessment of the National Intelligence Application warned it was so “clumsy” and fragmented that searches routinely missed vital attachments in files — it contains more than 10 million files.
“This creates a huge intelligence gap.”
It said police must overcome the technical barriers to getting a full picture of crimes and threats “to prevent a 9/11 moment”.
But the police’s latest annual report warned: “Increased calls for service have created unsustainable demand on frontline staff, who are not enabled