This Past Year Saw Policing Get 'Back To Basics' - Minister Mark Mitchell

Monday, 6 January 2025, 7:28 pm
Article: RNZ

Finn Blackwell, Reporter

Police Minister Mark Mitchell says officers are not mental health workers as he looks back on 2024, and into the new year.

RNZ sat down with the minister for a year in review across his portfolios.

When it came to policing, Mitchell said there had been a change in direction.

"There was no real science in it," he said. "It was quite simply back to basics, doing their core role properly."

Mitchell said that meant an increase in visibility and reassurance patrols.

He was clear about what he thought had worked well in 2024.

"There's probably been three areas," he said. "One has been safety around the CBDs, that's our main cities and provincial and regional towns as well.

"It has been around the gangs... because a lot of that harm, and a lot of that intergenerational stuff we can actually fix through clamping down on the gangs.

"And the third one has been the violent youth offending around retail crime."

There would be enough police staff to properly keep Aucklanders safe across the region this summer, Mitchell said.

"Policing is where you can never have too many staff really," he said.

Asked if there was a criminal case in 2024 that had affected him the most, Mitchell told RNZ offending against children was something that impacted him.

"We've got a long way to go as a country to deal with that," he said.

"We have completely, totally, unacceptable levels of domestic violence and offending against kids, and we should be doing all that we can to make sure that our kids are safe.

"And that's why you'll see me driving hard against the gangs because, in my own experience, though generations, a gang environment is not a good environment for children to be brought up in."

(RNZ spoke to Mitchell before Senior Sergeant Lyn Fleming was killed after being hit by a vehicle in the early hours of New Year's Day.)

Mitchell said the government had social investment to encourage gang members, especially those with children, to leave.

"We'll get alongside them, and we'll do the best we can to help them get retrained or rejoin society and leave that lifestyle of drugs, and violence, and misery behind."

Looking forward, Mitchell said he wanted police to continue what they were doing.

"We're trying to get our police responding to things that our police should be responding to, and not doing things they shouldn't be doing.

"That's why you're seeing quite a bit of work go in the space around mental health, because our police officers are not mental health workers."

Mitchell said a lot of the jobs officers were called to required a health response rather than a policing response.

"We're trying to get that figured out so that we can get them back on their core role."

Police began cutting back on how long officers spent at emergency departments handing a person over to health workers in November.

They also brought in new guidelines on when officers would transport a patient to hospital, and when they would attend mental health facility call-outs.

In other areas, Mitchell said he did not expect to be given the emergency management portfolio.

"I'd asked the prime minister if I could be considered for both the police and corrections portfolios, because I felt really strongly that, in terms of public safety, those agencies have got such a big role to play," he said.

"When I got emergency management, it's not something I had in opposition, it's not something that I really had a lot of experience with other than the fact with, on a very tactical level obviously, I'd been a police officer for 14 years and had been involved in emergency response."

Mitchell said the country was prepared for more local states of emergency, but that it would need to call on international allies like Australia or the United States if a particular large disaster occurred.

"The way the response happens will dictate, in my view, how the recovery [goes].

"You can be midway through a response, and really you're in recovery as well."

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