A deep dive into police bias

Ground-breaking work on fairness and equity within New Zealand’s police force has quantified for the first time the gap between Māori and Pākehā when it comes to how they’re treated.
It comes from the world-leading project Understanding Policing Delivery, which granted a research team unrestricted access to police staff and data.
Controlling for all other relevant factors, including previous criminal history, youth and gang affiliation, Māori are still 11 percent more likely to be charged with an offence than a Pākehā person in the same situation.
The project’s independent panel chairperson, Professor Khylee Quince, who is the Dean of Law at AUT, says that’s really concerning.
“Probably not surprising; but we’ve got hard evidence now that there is that form of systemic discrimination that needs to be accounted for and addressed.”
The three-year exercise was prompted by the global spotlight on the legitimacy of policing in the wake of Black Lives Matter protests and other events, including the British investigation of problems within the Metropolitan Police, as well as a couple of instances here that have shaken confidence in policing.
It looked at systems and procedures – rather than individuals – through a lens of fairness and equity.
The project pitted frequent critics of the police with front line officers – a situation that was initially uncomfortable for both sides.
“Me, and most of the other members of the independent panel, we are 15 people from academia, different community advocacy spaces and it’s quite a risk to get involved with it,” says Quince.
“We are all people who’ve been quite critical of the police in the past so a bit of reputational risk … you know, you lose a bit of street cred to be seen to be ‘patched over’ if you like,” she laughs.
“We haven’t been captured by the police!
“It’s been quite an eye-opener for me to take off the necessarily critical lens and be a critical friend to the police.”
Police on the operational advisory group of 30 frontline officers spread all through the country were also wary to start with.
“It was like a river between us,” says the group’s chair Superintendent Scott Gemmell.
“On the one side was the independent panel and the research teams; on the other side was a whole lot of police officers. The scepticism by both sides as to whether we were actually going to be able to pull this off – or even come together – was palpable. But it changed. It was really quite cool to see.
“We found our common purpose, which was to be able to do the best for our community as we possibly could.
“Suddenly the banks of the river started to crumble and we became really united. That didn’t happen straight away – it took time.”
The first tranche of the report released yesterday had 40 recommendations and police have prioritised eight of them.
They include changes to training, collecting better prosecution data – and withdrawing from some mental health incidents.
One of the findings of the report was that people who have difficulty communicating are often seen as ‘non-compliant’ by police, and an analysis of taser data found half of those people tasered had mental health issues. However, police don’t necessarily have that information in the heat of a moment.
Nor are they trained in de-escalation, which is one of the reasons why the study recommends other groups, likely to be from the health rather than the justice sector, are more appropriate to be called to deal with such incidents.
Phase two of the research, with more recommendations, will come out later this year.
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