Coster brings strength, not ‘wokeness’
It’s hardly rare to see comments by a politician that make you roll your eyes. But recent ones by former National leader Simon Bridges on the Commissioner of Police went far beyond that.
Bridges called Andy Coster the ‘‘wokester’’ commissioner. He then refused to answer journalists’ questions about examples of the supposed wokeness of New Zealand’s top policeman, allowing instead for the puerile and derogatory phrase to be red meat for all of those who associate wokeness with everything wrong in the world. For those people it will mean things like pandering to fringe groups and abandoning ‘‘common sense’’ in favour of empty ‘‘virtue signalling’’.
In this instance, it says more about Bridges than it does Coster.
But the most baffling thing is this: it came off the back of the police – on Coster’s instruction – launching an operation to take guns out of the underworld. It is an operation that could easily have come straight out of a National-controlled government.
This isn’t the first time Bridges has misfired his own political gun, of course; it’s why he is no longer National’s leader.
It will fail on this occasion in the same way it did before. Throwing stones at a public servant who can’t throw stones back is an underhanded and frankly cowardly way to present yourself. New Zealanders, I feel certain, still abide by the idea of playing the ball and not the man.
Indeed, when Coster was appointed he was widely, nearly universally, seen within police and beyond as a good choice for a new era.
Coster is without question fiercely smart. Sources in the police have told me he sat so many detective exams in one day the people running them made him stop. He was studying in the car park, sitting one, going back to the car to study another and then sitting that.
He then left the police to train as a lawyer, got a Masters, became a Crown prosecutor, and then returned to the police to swiftly become the youngest commissioner in its history.
Given his smarts, Coster sees things as nuanced. Smart people do, because the world is a complicated place. And when you realise that, you realise things aren’t black and white. This has traditionally been a difficulty in the police, where an overabundance of black and white thinking has often led to problems. Given this, what Coster brings to the police is not weakness, it is strength.
He has signalled he will police hard when required, but has also signalled a need to police by consent. Remarkably, the latter is something Bridges, too, has a problem with; as if somehow consideration of community consent isn’t a good idea.
Recall the 2007 Tu¯ hoe Urewera raids, for example, and the disaster that was for Ma¯ ori and the police. Yet at the organised crime conference in Wellington late last year, when the chief executive of the
Tu¯ hoe Tribal Authority, Kirsti Luke, said ‘‘Tu¯ hoe see police as a friend’’, I damn near fell off my seat. Anybody who sees that remarkable comeback by police as somehow a failing or a weakness simply hasn’t been paying attention.
The commissioner is right to seek help from the community, to ensure trust and confidence in the police is high. In all communities, but particularly Ma¯ ori. The overrepresentation of New Zealand’s indigenous population in crime and imprisonment statistics is a wrong that we ought to seek to right.
And the commissioner’s strategies are working in with a whole of justice sector approach to attempt to use best evidence ways to achieve that. Will he succeed? Let’s hope so. But he will absolutely have failures along the way; it’s a difficult road.
I haven’t always spoken fondly of commissioners of the New Zealand Police. I once had a rather big and public stoush with the last commissioner, but when he did well I was quick to praise him. And the same applies here in reverse. Just last week I wrote about terrible issues with police gang data.
If Coster does things that I think are poor, I will be the first to say so. That’s also the job of Opposition MPs, but certainly the latter should be done with specifics and not with petty insults.
Because here’s the rub: Andy Coster isn’t ‘‘woke’’. He’s proven himself to be intelligent and principled. Two qualities Simon Bridges is doing his best to expunge himself of.