Franks Stephen: Urgent Debates — Police 111 System—Review 
Franks Stephen: Urgent Debates — Police 111 System—Review 
[Volume:625;Page:20464] 
STEPHEN FRANKS (ACT) 
: 
 Usually when an official report is released Opposition members can be expected to get into it and to find tiny fragments scraps or very carefully worded criticisms that are as neutered as the authors can tolerate without losing their integrity. When I took this report from the website at 2 o’clock this afternoon I expected it to be of mild interest; not a cover-up but a technical document full of recommendations for management tinkering. Without any fear of hyperbole this is an utterly devastating document. This would be the worst review of an organisation that I have seen and I went through the 1980s when organisations were collapsing and losing billions of New Zealanders’ dollars. I saw some of those investigatory reports. 
This report is a picture not just of a communications centre in chaos but of an organisation that has lost any sense of its purpose—where people mistrust each other do not know what their roles are and do not know what their leaders value. I imagine that this report has washed the dirty linen of the New Zealand Police internationally in a way that can hardly have been matched. The Toronto Police Service the North Wales Police and the New South Wales Police have been involved in the review and no doubt this would have been workshopped. There is no doubt that this version of the report is mild compared with what it started off as because documents like this are shown in draft to the Minister. 
Perhaps the most telling line of all was “historically high rates of absenteeism for sick leave”. That seems trifling but anyone who knows anything at all about management knows that it is one of the first symptoms of an organisation that has lost its morale and its purpose. People do not feel that they need to turn up. I found it surprising that Dail Jones from New Zealand First did not cite that the panel found clear evidence that available units within districts are either not logging on or are not making themselves available for jobs. Ron Mark tried for months to raise that matter with the Minister of Police. The Minister sat smugly and said that we have the best police force in the world. 
We see “a structure that needs to clarify the different responsibilities for command and control of critical incidents”. What else would the police management have seen as its highest priority? It would be to have a clear line of authority and control. A “lack of buy-in by districts can be detrimental to the progress of the Communications Centres Service Centre”—that is the police do not rely on understand or want to work with the call centre. “There is a lack of understanding throughout the New Zealand Police and disturbingly within call centres on what the purpose and business of the Communications Centres Service Centre is. … The governance is deficient and needs urgent attention from strategic and operational perspectives.” 
Nothing good has been said in this review except that the call centres have the very latest information technology equipment. In this report the reviewers have not managed to find a thing to balance the bad except that the call centres have good information technology—which was probably ordered under the previous Government anyway. [ 
Interruption 
] The Minister of Justice Phil Goff is howling as he usually does. He is winding himself up for his own speech I imagine. 
The report states: “The Panel is very concerned about the potential risks to the safety of the public front-line police and CCSC staff … The Panel believes that unless New Zealand Police makes urgent changes to how the CCSC operates further incidents will occur with the attendant risk of further erosion of public confidence …”. It is easy to wind up on things like this and to lose a sense of perspective. Sometimes in Opposition one feels like crying in frustration at the loss of the integrity and some of the values that New Zealanders once held—the simple belief in ministerial responsibility or in responsibility of any kind. 
I ask members to think how Denis Marshall who resigned because some clod at the lowest level of the Department of Conservation failed to use bolts in the Cave Creek structure must have felt. He resigned. He took responsibility for that matter. What do we see here? We see deaths on a routine scale. 
I refer back to the Maggie Bentley story. I asked the Minister of Police repeatedly over a number of days how he justified his statement that the 111 centre’s response to Maggie Bentley’s panicked call at 6 o’clock in the morning was what the Minister called a “textbook response”. I asked him from which textbook did it come that she should be held on the phone and told—falsely—that the police were there and that they had called her neighbours. Every time after she hung up and tried to call out and talk to her neighbour as soon as she called again she was back on to the same call-centre operator. I asked what kind of textbook led to that kind of account and the Minister simply abused me for casting doubt on the quality of the police. 
This Minister can make a speech and then vanish. He does not even bother to stay and listen to the people who have been warning him and this Government for years—not just months—about the life and death issue that this country has been facing as the police have been corroded. It is all there in bureaucratese. Every warning that has been given and every statement that the responsibility goes right to the top is justified. 
I can pick them on every page: a reluctance of sworn staff to work in the centre the lack of selection criteria and training for staff the short time many sworn staff spend in the Communications Centres Service Centre the lack of a career structure for both sworn and non-sworn staff within the service centre evidence of a blame culture absence of positive reinforcement or a recognition programme frustration and low morale of many senior sworn staff and a general lack of morale. Those issues relate to the service centre. They could operate in a system at the very heart of the police only if the entire police force is infected with them. 
This Minister of Police should have stood up in the House and apologised for the bluster he has thrown across the Chamber. He should have apologised to Iraena Asher’s parents and apologised to Pete and Maggie Bentley for telling them that the police had a “textbook response” to their home invasion. He should have said that the only thing he could say in mitigation is that the Prime Minister and the Minister of Justice were all in this with him and that if he has to go they should go too. The police have been gutted by a culture of lying to themselves and of frustration—the revolving door justice system. 
I stand here and I look at a Minister of Justice who passed a Sentencing Act that states that when a judge passes a sentence of 2 years that means 1 year. There is only one reason for a provision like that in the Sentencing Act. It is so that the judges are obliged to be complicit in the lies of the Minister of Justice. When the Minister of Justice has the courts lying to people to cover up for this Government where will the police be? Where will be the police’s integrity morale or pride in what they are doing if the Minister of Justice passes a law that obliges judges to lie every time they give a sentence of under 2 years? 
The culture of this Government has created what every uniformed force fears most of all. A uniformed force in life-threatening situations has an esprit de corps and a morale that depends on what its members see happening at the top. It depends on confidence that they are supported instead of having a Prime Minister whose first action in relation to the police was to accuse them of racism at Waitara with no evidence. 
We have a police force who cannot be loyal. They were once apolitical. Any member of Parliament could walk into a police station and ask how things were going but this Minister of Police issued an edict 2 years ago that the police were not to talk to MPs. 
John Carter 
: They still do. 
STEPHEN FRANKS 
: Of course they do but now they do it covertly—and what is that doing to the culture of the police? This Government has been a disaster for law and order.