Response to hate crime damaging trust in cops

Some officers feel trust and confidence in the police are decreasing as a result of the organisation’s response to hate crime, a recent report shows.

Members of the public also said during 18 workshops carried out by police that their communities lacked confidence in the process of reporting hate crime. ‘‘What’s the point of reporting, nothing is going to be done anyway,’’ one community member said at a workshop.

‘‘They don’t understand us on the phone. We have nowhere to go to talk. Only the largest [and] busiest stations are open and they don’t have time for us,’’ another said.

That was a view also supported by some police staff surveyed.

‘‘The expectation is that we would make them feel safe, but instead we send them a letter and send them on their way,’’ one police participant said.

‘‘If a victim reported [a historical incident] to 105, we are most likely not going to attend. We’re not going to give the victim the service they want or expect.’’ another said.

The workshops held in Christchurch, Wellington and Auckland with 350 people including staff, partner agencies and the public was used to formulate a report, commissioned by the Evidence Based Policing Centre, to understand the current context of hate crime in New Zealand. They identified 191 opportunities or improvements for police and other agencies.

Deputy Commissioner Wallace Haumaha was unable to provide the exact number of hate crime reports investigated in a timely fashion.

‘‘We do take seriously the recording, the managing of hate crime, and making sure that we are reporting back in a timely fashion to those complainants.

‘‘These are the things that we will be going through with our staff. So I’m pretty sure, at this point in time, nothing has been reported back to me that we’ve missed a lot of events of a serious nature,’’ he said.

Police have launched a fouryear programme – Te Raranga – which will work to improve internal systems, practices and process to provide staff with skills to better identify hate crimes and make it easier for victims to recognise and report hate crime.

It received government funding in July to respond to recommendation 42 from the Royal Commission of Inquiry into the Christchurch terror attacks that called for police to revise the way it trained frontline staff to respond to hate-motivated offending, and improve recording of complaints.

Another strategy, Te Tarai Hou, was under way, Haumaha said, to improve decision-making by frontline staff.

Police staff reported feeling as though hate crime sat in a ‘‘grey area’’. ‘‘Police needs a clear definition in legislation or from the courts describing what meets the ‘hate crime’ threshold, and both New Zealand police and the courts need to understand and apply that definition consistently,’’ the report said.

One of the police participants described the difficulty they faced. ‘‘I thought when I joined police everything would be black and white – good guys and bad guys. But we work in the grey, which is where hate crime sits.’’

Other suggestions by those surveyed stated police needed more visibility and community engagement, particularly related to specialised roles such as ethnic liaison officers. There were calls for a dedicated hate crime unit, similar to the Family Harm unit.

A ‘‘strong theme’’ in feedback from police was that frontline staff had become desensitised to hate incidents and may not be providing enough empathy to the community, the report said.