Rawiri Waititi | Government in Crisis

It’s hard to believe that we are using the words “cover-up” or “Corruption” when it comes to the most senior ranks in the New Zealand Police Force. But here we are. We now know the Deputy Police Commissioner has been convicted of heinous crimes. We now know there was a whistleblower and that, by all accounts, she went through hell to get heard, and as a result, she suffered the most filthy of responses – charged with a breach of the Digital Harm Act. We now have a former Police Commissioner who has been stood down from another CEO role, facing an investigation by the head of the Public Service Commission.

We have a Minister feigning ignorance in so far as he didn’t know, a new Commissioner who looks angry and an Attorney General who saw fit to korero about a duck quacking – trust me, the moment did not require New Zealand’s Attorney General, Judith Collins, to talk about quacking ducks. You cannot get away from the fact this was a coverup – the internal communications say it:

“But you know what’s the worst thing – if you make a mistake … the only worse thing that you can do is then cover it up…You can paint all sorts of nice words of this …but to an outsider looking in, and … I mean even me, this looks like a cover-up.”

Last night I repeated my call for the establishment of a permanent Standing Committee Investigating Corruption, with statutory powers of a Royal Commission – similar to NSW and other States in Australia. An Inspector General is like putting lipstick on a pig and trying to make it pretty – way better way of looking at this than the duck quote the Attorney General used. That was sheer quackery.

And they wonder why Maori have a mistrust of the Police. As the debacle inside the New Zealand Police’s senior leadership team unfolds – we though we would revisit a key question “do you think the NZ Police need to be overhauled?” 13142 of you engaged with the question; 331 of you interacted and more than 200 of you commented – more than 90% said yes so we decided to pull out some recent numbers on trust:

In communities across Aotearoa, wāhine, rangatahi and kaumātua Māori alike are raising their voices: they feel the police don’t keep them safe –  and in some cases, do the opposite. That mistrust isn’t born overnight; it’s rooted in centuries of colonisation, decades of over-representation in the justice system, and recent independent evidence pointing to bias and inequity in policing.

Recent research from the commissioned review Understanding Police Delivery sheds stark light on the scale of disparities: Māori lodged over half of all complaints to the Police about use of force, despite making up around 17 % of the population. In the Whanganui district in 2020, of 173 incidents involving tactical options (firearms, TASERs etc), 123 involved Māori. Being Māori increased the likelihood of prosecution by 11 % compared with Pākehā, when controlling for other variables.

Complaints about cultural sensitivity issues – 81 % of which were from Māori or Māori/European or Māori/Pacific people – point to failure to understand te ao Māori and tikanga in policing. These figures don’t just reflect individual bad experiences – they point to systemic patterns impacting Māori communities.

For many Māori, interactions with the police revive old trauma and distrust. From the 20th-century policing of Māori land protests, to modern-day heavy-handed tactics in whānau homes, the sense is of a system that treats Māori differently. As one Māori respondent said:

Another described a raid where armed officers pointed guns at children aged 4 and 13 – an experience that left lasting traumatised whānau.

Academic commentary reinforces this: as Emmy Rākete observes, Māori have for decades been saying the same story – “From Moana Jackson’s He Whaipaanga Hou report in the 1980s through every decade since … the New Zealand police have been shown … to engage in racist discrimination against Māori.”

This mistrust isn’t abstract – it has real effects: When Māori don’t trust the police, they’re less likely to call for help, less likely to engage with investigations, and more likely to feel unsafe in their own homes and communities. The disproportionality in policing outcomes means Māori continue to be over-represented in every stage of the criminal justice system – creating a vicious cycle of harm and alienation. For the police to fulfil their role of “protecting all communities,” they need legitimacy and trust in Māori communities – and that trust is currently fractured.