Meager JamesPoliceJAMES MEAGER (Chairperson of the Justice Committee): It's a real pleasure to lead off the debate into the annual review of Police for the 2022-23 year. Look the Justice Committee met with Police for two hours in our review—one of three major reviews we did this year and we are very much looking forward to finalising our scrutiny plan and looking into a few of our other entities and departments throughout the end of this year and over the term.I thought the committee worked actually pretty well pretty collegially throughout our annual review process ably led by our Deputy Chair Jamie Arbuckle and Opposition members all I think contributed fairly well and fairly collaboratively to the annual review debate.Now I'm hoping that that collegiality and that spirit of cooperation continues throughout the term. The Justice Committee is an incredibly busy effective hard-working committee with a lot of legislation coming through from a busy busy Government and a busy backbench as well because we've got lots of members who are keen to put their views on justice bills coming through.But in terms of the annual review look we covered a lot of territory for Police and I wanted to just highlight the key items that the committee ended up moving through over the two hours that we had. And can I just say it was a real pleasure to have the commissioner with us. I thought he conducted himself really well in front of some pretty good questioning from all sides of the committee. I think the questions answered were answered in pretty good detail and in pretty good spirit. And where the Police didn't quite have all the answers they committed to come back to us and provide them in writing if we needed anything further. So I just wanted to acknowledge the work of the commissioner and of course of all our police men and women who serve throughout the country and who have done for many many years.And can I just take the opportunity to give a shoutout to my brother's partner who is a police officer who had her baby boy late last month. So just a shout-out to wee Lachlan James. And finally we get another James in the House given that we lost one last week and I'm the last one standing. So just want to acknowledge Stuart and Jackie and the family.We did go through quite a number of topics with the annual review and I just wanted to highlight a few of the key ones there. So one of the big topics that we talked about during the select committee stage was about reducing gang intimidation and violence. The commissioner was very clear that he found dealing with gangs over his time as a police officer incredibly frustrating and challenging. And I think that's why the Minister and the Government have placed a very large focus of their law and order agenda moving forward on controlling gang behaviour and eliminating the response and the presence of gangs in our community.And I wanted to touch on something that happened during that review period and that was what happened down in Timaru in my patch when the local police and local authorities took a pretty hard-line approach to gangs. They decided that they wanted to reject gang presence in our community down in Timaru and also then start looking at replacing what they stand for. So yep they went in and they knocked down the pads and they got rid of the gang presence and they sold out the land from underneath them but now we've also got to work on that underlying problem of what it is in those gang communities that those young men and women are looking for and how we can we replace that. And that's going to be hopefully part of the strategic intentions of the Government moving forward.So we talked a bit about reducing gang intimidation and violence. There was some discussion on the legislation to ban gang patches which hadn't come before the Justice Committee at that point but now we are currently considering it and I think we're doing a very good job on that too.We talked at length around retail crime and around how we were very very concerned at the spike in retail crime over the past few years and what police's response had been to that. And it was actually very pleasing to see that some of the changes in the approaches of police towards the end of the last term of Government have actually led to a bit of a down-tick in some of those ram-raiding offences. And part of me probably suspects that when you take the individuals out of the communities who are doing those crimes they can't do them. They're not there to drive the cars they're not there to do the ram raids. So let's see how we continue to progress with looking at retail crime and supporting victims of retail crime in that space as well.The committee covered off topics around youth offending we looked at increases in cyber-crime and also an interesting stat that came through during the select committee stage was that a good 25 percent of what police deal with now is family harm. And at the same time there's also an increase in cyber-crime. So if you consider how different those two areas of policing are it's going to present a real challenge to Governments going forward about how you resource those effectively. So that's going to take a good amount of leadership from the Government on that too.We spoke also around strengthening Police's relationship with Māori addressing the activities of organised crime. We talked a little bit about recruitment of front-line staff and some of the challenges that are going to be there about making sure you get the right people into our police services because we have high standards for our police and we want to make sure that we have the right men and women going through our police service. So I'm confident that with the recruitment work that the police can do over the next three years that will quite comfortably meet our targets around that. So with that I will resume my seat.