Kerre Woodham: The police have earned the right to bear arms

I wanted to start today with a landmark study from Monash University. It's found that a routine arming of police officers does not lead to a spike in trigger happy coppers. In fact, after Aussie coppers were armed in the early 1990s, there was a downward trend in shooting rates. The research, which investigated 50 years of officer-involved shootings in Australia between 1970 and 2020, challenges the prevailing assumption that increased firearm availability among police inevitably results in higher rates of lethal force. And I think that assumption exists here.

John MacDonald: How I feel about armed cops after this week's shootings

When I first heard about the police shooting and killing someone they had actually gone to help, like most people, I wondered how the hell that could happen.

This is the shooting in Bryndwr in Christchurch overnight on Wednesday, which left a woman dead and a man critically injured.

Ross Meurant: Gangs and Guns

Commissioner Coster’s recent explanation for the exponential and highly visible increase in firearms “incidents”, particularly in West and South Auckland, as being collateral COVID lockdown stress, is in my opinion, “staggering”.

I have previously posted support for Commissioner Coster.  In my view, he was the handbrake police needed on what I discerned as an emerging “Gung Ho” approach to firearm use by police under former Commissioner Mike Bush. (1)

Unequivocally, I stand by my demand that police who shoot people, must have their actions reviewed before a proper court of law and not the IPCA which I have often labelled as being akin to “a boys club” of “back-room justice”, being as it is, completely out of public sight. (2)

However!

Ross Meurant: Time To Arm All Police 24/7

As a former AOS members I had some exposure to armed bandits.

Later in my police career when as a front-line commissioned officer, I was armed 24/7 with a .38 Smith & Wesson, on two occasions I confronted bandits armed with sawn off shotguns.

In the first instance, the bandit discharged his weapon from the shade of a tree some 20 meters from where I and 2 constables were alighting from a patrol car.  He missed? Later he was charged with attempted murder of me.

The second occasion happened as I was driving along Hight Street, Auckland CBD when a bank robber bandit stumble in front of my patrol car, dropping $20,000 in notes in the process.

Dave Witherow: Crime and Punishment

New Zealand, by international standards, has always had a very low crime-rate. We rank as the second-safest country in the world, according to the Global Peace Index, and for the last twenty years or more our crime-rate has been trending generally downward. Criminal offenses involving firearms are especially rare, amounting  to less than one percent.

Our Police, in keeping with this relatively benign environment, have traditionally been unarmed, and throughout the twentieth century they themselves have argued that the routine carrying of weapons, rather than affording protection, might well provoke the criminals to respond in kind. A glance at the U.S. statistics strongly reinforces this conclusion.