The solution to Police pursuits is arming the Police? Wait, what?

I’m sorry, What?

The solution to the deeply flawed and lethal Police pursuit policy is to…..arm the cops?

Would drivers be as likely to flee if NZ police were armed?
Openly-armed policing engenders a tone change – they’re not to be messed with. And most offenders don’t. On this side of the Tasman, there’s an insidiously growing tendency, particularly among feckless young men, to see them as fair game and “have a go.”

…what special level of fuckwittedness is this?

Let’s be clear, if we armed the bloody NZ cops with their alpha personality mutations, I would bloody flee the cops too, and I don’t even drive!

Arming the NZ Police as a means to lower pursuit chases is as stupid as suggesting arming teachers to stop mass shootings at schools.

Our chase policy is insane, it is deeply flawed and it leads to death. Public policy shouldn’t be designed to kill people.

Brian Rudman sets the scene…

Between October 2016 and September last year, seven deaths and 552 crashes were recorded as a result of police chases. This mayhem is not new. There’s a long history of between one in four and one in five of police pursuits ending in a wrecked car, along with ambulance loads of drivers, passengers and bystanders left maimed or dead. Six people have died in police pursuits in the last five months alone.

Often the chase is triggered by something trivial like a minor traffic infringement.

…this is a point often ignored. Trivial traffic infringements shouldn’t end in death yet our ‘respect my authority’ cultural mindset trumps basic public safety.

If we look at the facts we see time and time and time again the Police lie about when they stopped chasing, the Police lie about radio malfunctions, the Police lie about distances travelled. Once the red mist sets in, Police are too excited by the chase to stop…

We don’t need any more reviews. In 2009, then chair of the IPCA, Justice Lowell Goddard delivered a scathing critique, questioning “the value of pursuits that begin over driving offences such as speeding, careless driving or suspected drunk driving without observable, immediate threat to public safety”. She said “there is little benefit to the public in police taking action that is likely to make a potentially dangerous situation worse.”

She noted that in the previous five years, pursuits had resulted in 24 deaths and 91 serious injuries, and that only 47 of the victims were the fleeing driver. Subsequently, the IPCA has continued to criticise the pursuit policy.

…we need a rational debate about Police pursuit policy that can’t be derailed by ‘respect my authority’ as a response.

What this issue most certainly does not require is more guns.