Auditing The Government’s Police Numbers Strategy

An audit of 1022 police recruits that went through training between January 2024 and April 2025 reveals 128 did so despite being unable to pass a “basic literacy assessment”, in addition to dozens of other irregularities (the one that got the headline was the 36 that failed psychometric testing but were waived through anyway).

Now, I am a simple man. And it seems to me that this haste on the part of the Government to try and fill 500 pairs of police boots by November is going to cost our state money in the long run – because quite a lot of modern policing is, in fact, comprised of activities for which one needs to be … in a word – “literate”.

Submitting evidence to court? Filing charges? These are things which hinge upon the police officers in question being able to read and write to a decent official standard. It is not hard to find record of cases dismissed significantly because somebody on the Police end of things didn’t get things right in these essential areas.

What does that work out as in practical terms? The very real potential for Justice not just ‘delayed’ but outright ‘denied’. And no doubt a heap of ‘compensatory’ work being carried out ‘behind the scenes’ by Non-Sworn staff working for Police to try and tidy things up that shouldn’t have become ‘loose ends’ in the first place.

It all costs time, money, and most importantly – people’s faith in the institution and our system.

I would additionally proffer another trenchant insight upon matters Blue and Unwieldy (that’s National, not necessarily Policing).

Namely, that we’re in this mess in no small part because our Government refuses to pay our Police a fair amount – leading to a long-running saga of police unable to afford to continue in the job … or, more aptly, often unable to continue in the job on this side of the Tasman.

Hence this piece from a little over a year ago featuring “more than three hundred” NZ police officers applying to patch over to Queensland. Which, for those whose ‘basic numeracy’ may be on par with some of these recruits by the sound of it … is a little over half the target for ‘New Cops’ that our Government is aiming towards by November.

To phrase it bluntly – we are paying the price, quite literally, in terms of needing to massively upscale our recruitment and training of potential new cops (who may or may not actually be of a decent quality – no matter what the government tries to claim contra-wise), because we keep haemorrhaging more experienced police over to Australia in pursuit of livable wages, or simply seeing them exit the vocation entirely.

And – needless to say – those more experienced officers who’ve already been in the job a number of years are worth considerably more than fresh recruits who’re yet to have much in the way of actual, practical experience outside a training environment.

It would seem to me that the way to retain quality officers – who’ve already been painstakingly selected, screened, and then both trained and in receipt of several years’ on-the-job experience – would be to LISTEN TO OUR POLICE ASSOCIATION and sort out the pay for the police officers we’ve already got, rather than attempting to supplement / replace them with cheaper (on paper, and in the very short term) new recruits instead.

I would be very surprised if it turned out that that approach would not be a better use of money than the $226 million which National (and NZ First) have wanted to put toward their apparent preferred approach of recruiting and training more ‘fresh’ officers to try and bolster numbers.