Siege mentality Upper Hutt, 2015
Sunday’s fatal police shooting in Tauranga was the 21st in less than five years. What is behind the unwelcome trend? Damian George reports.
People are sadder and angrier than ever before, guns are more readily available than they’ve ever been, and the lethal combination is leading to oftenfatal police standoffs. That’s the opinion of former police negotiator Lance Burdett, who defended the decision by officers to fatally shoot a machete-wielding man in Tauranga on Sunday, but lamented the growing number of such incidents to which police are being called. Sunday’s standoff, in which police said they had no option but to shoot a man who had been holding children hostage for more than 14 hours, marks the 12th time since the start of 2015 that such an incident has resulted in the offender being killed, according to Stuff’s Homicide Report project. In the 11 years before that, there were nine fatal shootings. Burdett, who led the talks with Jan Molenaar during an almost two-day siege in Napier in 2009, was staggered to hear of the growing rate of fatal police shootings in recent years.
‘‘If you didn’t have the figures, I wouldn’t have believed you,’’ he said.
The latest incident
Bay of Plenty police district commander Andy McGregor told media on Sunday that police had no option but to shoot Ethan Kerapa after a standoff in Bellevue, Tauranga, that began shortly after midnight and ended just before 3pm.
‘‘It is sad, but there was no other option,’’ McGregor said.
‘‘We had to get those kids out of that house safely.’’
The armed offenders squad and a negotiating team were initially called in, but officers later received advice that the children being held hostage were suffering from the heat, dehydration, and a lack of food.
‘‘On entry at the address, the offender had a knife at the chest of one of the children.
‘‘He was then shot. He died shortly after.’’
The fatal shooting was the 21st to occur since the start of 2004. It was the first in Tauranga, but the third in the Bay of Plenty region.
The others were in Paeroa in June 2016, and Kawerau in February this year.
But rather than point the finger at officers who decided to pull the trigger, Burdett said their efforts were to be commended.
‘‘Talking with somebody for 13 hours in a hostage situation? That’s pretty damn good in my books.’’
Although police were trained to aim for ‘‘centre mass’’ – the chest – their intention was to incapacitate rather than kill, he said.
‘‘I would like to think police aren’t going to firearms as a first option, only when they absolutely need to.
‘‘The first option is to talk. That’s what we should be doing more of.
‘‘Then they may consider other tools such as batons, pepper spray, Tasers and, finally, firearms.’’
While some people thought officers should be trained to aim for somewhere else on an offender’s body, such as their shoulder or leg, Burdett said that was impractical.
‘‘That’s too difficult a target. ‘‘It’s very hard to hit a target from even three metres away. Even professional shooters, who have time to set up and take aim, are having problems hitting targets.
‘‘You add adrenaline to that situation, and it’s just impossible.’’
He believed a combination of heightened anger levels and easier access to firearms had contributed to the increase in fatal shootings.
‘What we’ve noticed is a big upsurge in angry and sad people,’’ said Burdett, now a consultant and coach at Wellness, Awareness, Resilience and Negotiation (Warn) International.
‘‘People are angrier and sadder than they’ve ever been before in history.
‘‘We have so much information coming into our brains that we’re in a pretty much continuous state of ‘fight or flight’.
‘‘Our default setting in our brain is anger. That’s why people are definitely angrier than ever before.’’
Who is being killed?
Kerapa has one thing in common with most of the other people killed in police shootings – he was male.
That puts him alongside 19 other men involved in the 21
shootings since 2004. Of those 20 men, the average age was 34.
The lone woman was 37-yearold Lee Mettam, who was shot dead by police in Whanga¯ rei in 2008.
In 12 of the shootings, the offender was armed with a gun, and in eight of the other nine, they had a machete, hammer, slasher, or knife.
On one occasion, the victim was an innocent bystander – 17-year-old Halatau Naitoko, who was caught in the crossfire as police chased a drug-fuelled suspect down Auckland’s northwestern motorway in 2009.
Naitoko’s family would later receive $225,000 in compensation.
After that incident, firearms law specialist Nicholas Taylor represented another person who was injured in the chaos, Richard Neville.
Neville was in his flatbed truck when the person police were after, Stephen McDonald, jumped on the back of it. The crossfire caught Neville, who was shot, and still has glass fragments in his body to show for it.
Taylor said he tried to bring about a potential prosecution of the two armed offenders squad (AOS) officers involved, but it was almost three years before he received police documents, which had been heavily redacted.
By that stage it was too late to chase a prosecution, he said.
No charges
In all of the resolved incidents – a handful are still being investigated – no charges were laid against any of the officers involved.
Like the others, the latest killing will be followed by a mandatory homicide investigation and an Independent Police Conduct Authority (IPCA) inquiry.
But Taylor suspected he could probably already predict the outcome. ‘‘When a police officer shoots and kills someone in the line of their duty, that’s no different to when any other person uses a firearm in a situation where they are defending another person or themselves.
‘‘Yet police always do their own investigation, and decide not to prosecute their own officer.
‘‘They find it meets the selfdefence test; other people are almost always prosecuted.
‘‘So there is a massive disconnect there.’’
New Zealand had a far higher rate of fatal shootings than many countries with much higher populations, Taylor said.
‘‘That’s a great concern, and there’s a problem in regards to the way our police use firearms and the culture and training around the use of firearms.’’
Taylor was not aware of all the details of the latest incident, but understood multiple shots were fired.
He said better training was needed for New Zealand police officers. ‘‘In Germany and France, officers fire two rounds out of pistols and rifles every morning. Our officers do that only once or twice a year.
‘‘And there is a propensity for New Zealand police to shoot at the central mass – the heart and the lungs – which will always result in fatalities.’’
Burdett said officers never shot to kill, and many people had survived after being shot in the chest.
Taylor said the IPCA had no power to prosecute officers after firearms incidents, and that needed to change.
Three each of the 21 shootings since 2004 occurred in Auckland and Bay of Plenty, while two each had taken place in Christchurch and Taranaki (New Plymouth and Stratford).