Tolley Anne: Estimates Debate — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeTolley Anne: Estimates Debate — In Committee[Sitting date: 02 July 2014. Volume:700;Page:19168. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Hon ANNE TOLLEY (Minister of Police):I would be very interested if we did indeed ask New Zealanders whether they thought that crime was going down because public trust and confidence in the police is at an all-time high. The reality out on the streets is that New Zealanders do know that things are going extremely well. Crime is at a 35-year low. You do not make up those statistics. You cannot fiddle them. That is the reality. Road fatalities are at a 60-year low—down down. Trust and confidence in the police are up. In fact when you have a look at the engagement survey that the police have an independent company do for them staff engagement is at an all-time high.So the police have never ever been in a better space. They are better resourced they are better focused they are better managed and they have a better Government backing them every inch of the way. They have come through 4 years of massive change. They did it themselves. It was not driven by the Government. They knew that they had to come out of 20th century policing into 21st century policing.A lot of what we are hearing from the Opposition about numbers and about police officers sitting in police stations waiting for people to come and report crime is very last century. The modern police officer is in the right place at the right time with the right tools and the right information. When we talk about them being in the right place we talk about them being out on the streets where people can see them. Foot patrols are up by over 150 percent. We are having police out on the streets 150 times more. They are being seen by people in the right places at the times when crime is happening. The police are now focused on preventing crime rather than responding to crime. That does not mean that if you are in trouble you cannot call the police but they say that policing is more about it being better to prevent crime happening in the first place than to respond to it and try to resolve it afterwards.When we talk about them having the right tools look at the smartphones and look at the iPads that this Government has rolled out. There are 350 extra police officers’ worth of technology that they can use. They are showing us how over the next 5 years to 10 years we are going to see a transformation in the way that evidence is kept and presented. In fact I have seen it already such as using FaceTime to record a drug deal going down. There are amazing things that the police are finding that this new technology will enable them to do.When you talk about equipment now they can start with the most important tool that they have which is their tongues. You watch police go into some very dangerous situations and the first thing they try to do is talk someone down then they have their batons then they have pepper spray then they have Tasers and finally every police car now has access to a Glock and to a Bushmaster rifle.The police know this Government backs them. We are backing their district command centres which allow district commanders to look at where the need is right across a whole district and to move his or her resources around as the public’s need dictates. That is modern policing. That is not 20th century policing; that is modern policing. We are allowing the police to get on and manage themselves so that we have in this country one of the most effective police forces in the world. We are the envy of many other police forces in the world and we should be getting behind our guys instead of trying to criticise these statistics and the work that the police are out there doing. We should be backing them and saying that they are a tremendous group of people who are out there working with victims as the focus and preventing crime before it happens. I am proud to be the Minister of Police.Vote agreed to.