ANALYSIS: He’s brave, principled and loyal to his staff. But how well will Richard Chambers navigate the complex landscape that’s New Zealand now? A landscape crowded with issues like racial inequity in policing, controversial gang insignia laws, and the increasingly pressing question of whether to arm our police. The new police commissioner talks to John Campbell.
Richard Chambers was once chased by a “gentleman with a chainsaw”. The man was “unwell”, he tells me.
Chambers was a sergeant at the time, the most senior police officer there, and he desperately wanted to keep everyone safe. “I was leading the way.” He recalls the details as if in a series of flashbacks. “I had to go into a house.” He says this so matter-of-factly it makes me understand the extent to which he sees policing as an act of duty. A man with a chainsaw. And you go in.
The story is emblematic in so many ways. The sometimes terrible vulnerability and peril of being “unwell”. The inadequate resourcing of our exhausted frontline mental health services. The risks police officers routinely face.
Who’d be a cop, eh?
The country’s new commissioner of police, that’s who.
When he was five, Chambers had the kind of imitation police helmet so beloved by children at the time. When he tells me about wearing it, his face lights up.
His childhood was in that vanilla wine biscuit version of New Zealand. Before the dawn raids, before Bastion Point, before Raglan, before the 1981 Springbok Tour had any meaning for a boy who dreamt of being a policeman his entire young life – and became one.
“The revolution will not be televised”, Gil Scott-Heron sang. But the revolution in policing was. Throughout the police commissioner’s childhood, our police force was repeatedly thrust into a highly visible role as enforcer of contentious government policy.
“It is legal because I wish it,” Louis XIV declared. Rob Muldoon’s New Zealand sometimes felt like that. And the people in blue were sent out to police it.
Looked back on, much of it collapsed under legal reviews, formal court action, changes of government, and the way history is shamed by its own children.
Bastion Point was returned to Ngāti Whātua. The land at Raglan was returned to Tainui Awhiro. The Ardern government formally apologised for the dawn raids. And you’ll now struggle to find many people who’ll persuasively argue that the ’81 tour was anything more noble than a play for provincial voters in a First Past the Post election.
The police were there throughout these formative events. Whacking batons into heads on Molesworth Street. Dragging people off their tribal land at Ōrākei. Removing “overstayers” (nearly always Pacific Islanders, despite there being greater overstayer numbers from Europe and North America) from their beds at five in the morning. Stopping brown people in the streets to demand proof they were New Zealanders.
How well do Māori trust the police?
Forty-something years later, the Understanding Policing Delivery Report, released on November 20, tells us, “some groups including Māori, Pasifika, the disabled community and many young people, have less trust in policing than the general population.”
The UPD research also tells us that, “Māori are more likely to be apprehended by Police, have force used against them, and are more likely to be prosecuted.”
This isn’t anecdotage or woke conjecture. It’s fact. “Being Māori increased the likelihood of prosecution by 11% compared to NZ Europeans when all other variables remain constant.”
I ask Chambers if he’s read the UPD Report.
Not yet.
It’s only been out a week, and he’s been crazy busy, but UPD research offers “the most comprehensive picture we have of Māori and marginalised communities’ experiences of policing.”
It’s the sort of work a commissioner should read and read again.
‘Doing the basics well’
He is, and he’s repeated this throughout the many interviews he’s enthusiastically done since being appointed to the role of commissioner, going to “focus on doing the basics well…
“When we focus on doing the basics well. When we focus on our core functions in policing, we give ourselves the best opportunity to succeed.”
He will not use the phrase made famous – or infamous, depending on your outlook – by his predecessor, Andrew Coster – “policing by consent”. Chambers is, an old police contact told me in tones of grateful admiration, a cop’s cop.
And a Minister’s cop, too.
There are times when his catchwords, aphorisms and ambitions seem interchangeable with a letter Police Minister Mark Mitchell wrote to Andrew Coster last December. “I expect Police to be focused on core policing,” he wrote.
“I have been open,” Mitchell said in his accompanying media release, “about the fact I do not agree with the direction policing has taken under the previous Government and I expect the Police Commissioner to focus on core policing with a back-to-basics approach.”
Core. Basics. Taking to woke with a chainsaw.
Minister Mitchell wrote of a “decline of public confidence” in police. A decline his own party had arguably helped fuel while in opposition. The first casualty of politics is the numbers. There has been significant public concern about a growth in violent crime. But the government’s own data, reported in the New Zealand Crime and Victims Survey, tells us the “proportion of victims reporting to Police has remained steady since the survey began in 2018.”
As recently as this week, RNZ’s Craig McCulloch, under the headline, “Is the government playing ‘fast and loose’ with gang numbers?”, reported that the Prime Minister’s choice of figures appeared selective and convenient rather than rigorous and full.
So we find ourselves in that part of the political cycle when the police are required to turn moral panic into basics and reassurance.
Chambers sure is the man for that job. His CV is extraordinary.
How much cocaine?
Chambers’ recent work at INTERPOL has been widely cited in the coverage of his appointment. But the facts of one major operation are so real-life preposterous they warrant repeating. By the end of it, they had seized 56 tonnes of cocaine, fifteen planes and a submarine.
And even those headline-grabbing details don’t do justice to the scale of if all.
“The value of drugs seized in this two-month operation is higher than the GDP of some countries,” INTERPOL’s Secretary General Jürgen Stock said. “Which clearly shows the scale of the problem facing law enforcement.”
Yip.
So, Chambers returns to New Zealand with his reputation soaring, a global network of high-level contacts, and with the roughly 15,000 people who work for New Zealand Police appearing delighted to have him as their boss.
Not that his appointment was a surprise. As long ago as January, Jared Savage wrote in the Herald, when “Police Minister Mark Mitchell was slow to express confidence in the incumbent Police Commissioner, Andrew Coster, the Wellington rumour mill was quick to anoint Chambers as his replacement”.
Ah, yes, the Wellington rumour mill. Self-fulfilling since ages ago.
So, the man who was anointed duly got the job. Still, the extent to which the minister and the commissioner appear almost declaratory about being in sync is both striking and informative.
On Monday, announcing the new central Auckland police station, Prime Minister Christopher Luxon and Police Minister Mitchell stood so closely to their new commissioner that he looked like the filling in a sandwich.
I tell him this, and he beams.
I ask him about independence. Separation of church and state. Separation of cop and state. “That’s for me as the police commissioner to deal with… There’s a good understanding, on all sides, of the independence that we must have to do our job.”
Still, when he talks about policing the Government’s new gang insignia ban under the Gangs Act, he speaks with apparent relish.
I ask him if he thinks the law is a good one.
“Absolutely it is. Absolutely it is.”
Is it?
In public opinion terms, overwhelmingly. Political catnip. Mum-and-Dad-white-picket-fence territory. Votes for jam.
But as law?
As Alice Neville reported in The Spinoff, a late amendment enabling police to arrest a person for having gang insignia in their home (if it were that person’s “third strike” with insignia), introduced after the Select Committee process had ended, was against the advice of Ministry of Justice officials and the New Zealand Law Society.
The Law Society appeared to view it as serious overreach. “The attempt to regulate speech in a private residence is significant, and not rationally connected to the stated purpose of the gang insignia ban,” vice president David Campbell wrote in a letter to Justice Minister Paul Goldsmith.
“The residential ban could extend to insignia never intended to be displayed in public – such as a gang member having their father or grandfather’s patch as a memento… Taken literally the definition could be taken to include printed reproductions of gang insignia – making it a criminal offence to possess a newspaper with a gang symbol in it, or certain books.”
The Law Society continues. “This risks infringing the right to be free from unreasonable search and seizure under section 21 of the Bill of Rights…. The Law Society also has concerns about the impact of the proposals on the rights of families, whānau and those residing with an individual subject to a gang insignia prohibition order.”
This will be of little concern to many people. Gangs, eh? But the commissioner finds himself, as commissioners in his childhood found themselves, enforcing a law that, while popular with many, may not fully survive testing – and time.
And again, as with the commissioners of his childhood, the people most likely to be subjected to this policing are Māori and Pasifika.
Do police need guns?
Successful policing is about keeping up. At INTERPOL, Chambers also worked in cybercrime and cybersecurity. This is all so new that cybersecurity didn’t even exist as a term until 1989.
How do police adapt?
In this country, an increasingly pressing question is how does an historically unarmed police force keep up with the growing number of weapons being held by criminals?
Police Association vice-president Steve Watt told RNZ’s Morning Report on 21 November that a recent survey found, “68 percent of all police staff supported general arming”. Just over two thirds.
Does the police commissioner support it?
“I’ve said quite openly that I hope that I live in a country and that I lead an organisation where we never have to routinely arm our staff. Who really would want that? But we need to be open to the discussion because policing is not getting any easier. It’s complex, it’s volatile, it can be very aggressive. And if we need to have a wider debate about whether we should shift to that position, then we will.”
A response that could feel slightly like the rumour mill in Wellington: an outcome in search of an announcement date.
And here, too, we may be a country with a sense of ourselves that flatters to deceive.
RNZ’s Licence to Kill investigation found that New Zealand police kill at 11 times the rate of police in England and Wales.
Eleven times.
I asked Chambers, why?
“John, it’s a complex issue. And I’m not about to sit here and say I’ve got the answers to why.”
Last week, the Independent Police Conduct Authority (IPCA) released a report stating the force used in the 2022 fatal shooting of Taranaki man, Kaoss Price, was “excessive” and “unjustified”.
The 22-year-old’s own grandmother told me Price was a “little shit”, and he had a growing list of criminal convictions. But he was unarmed when he was shot, and the police officer who fatally shot him from three metres away was also carrying a Taser. The IPCA found that he was “operating well within the optimum operating distance for a Taser”.
There will be no prosecution and no internal police disciplinary action.
‘My job is to back my staff’
I asked Chambers about this balancing act. Keeping police safe, keeping the public safe, keeping unarmed “little shits” safe.
Chambers replied: “My staff will make good decisions about when it is appropriate…”
I interrupted him. Was the assertion that his staff will “make good decisions” predeterminative? Will they always make good decisions? Isn’t one of the variables of being human that we sometimes get it wrong?
“My job is to back my staff,” he replied. “And I will do that through my commissionership.”
You can see why he’s a cop’s cop, the new commissioner. “My job is to back my staff.” How reassuring that must be for those staff.
And the commissioner is entirely right, policing isn’t getting any easier. And he does acknowledge, police do sometimes get it wrong.
But the UPD report explicitly states: “This research confirms a finding of inequity and bias in current policing in New Zealand.”
The report continues: “Inequity and unfair treatment are evident across different levels; structural, systemic, institutional and interpersonal”.
Of the five men fatally shot by police in Taranaki so far this century, four or them have been Māori. If routinely arming police is, indeed, a “wider debate” we’re about to have, will inequity be part of it?
Again, RNZ’s Licence to Kill investigation is revealing: “The majority of those shot by police are Māori… Māori men aged 17-40 are just 3 percent of New Zealand’s population but make up 34 percent of use of force incidents by police.”
If, as the UPD report states, “Māori are more likely to be apprehended by Police, have force used against them, and are more likely to be prosecuted,” will we also discuss the fact that they’re more likely to be shot?
This is complex – Chambers is right about that.
‘A reluctance by police to prosecute police’
But in April of last year, Newsroom’s Emma Hatton quoted the outgoing chair of the IPCA, Judge Colin Doherty, saying the time had come for a serious discussion about who should be prosecuting police when they get it wrong.
“The issue really is that over the period I’ve been here, I’ve seen from time to time a reluctance by police to prosecute police officers where if it had been an ordinary member of the public, I’ve got no doubt that a prosecution would have been made,” he said.
Chambers says his job is to back his staff. And it is. And policing is a stressful, high-risk, difficult and critical occupation. Our police officers do invaluable work, day after day after day.
Our new commissioner is clearly a remarkable cop. What a career. What striking admiration from his colleagues. What support and encouragement from the minister.
The little boy in the policeman’s hat grew up to realise his dream, becoming not just a cop, but the most powerful cop in the land. But that land and its people have changed. Changed drastically. Questions of racial inequity will no longer go unanswered. If our police force becomes armed, statistics indicate that more young Māori men will die. There’s a lot at stake for New Zealand and it’s complex. It’s messy. It’s anything but basic.
