Waatea News Column: The current debate over fingerprinting and photographing children is wrongly centered
Minister for Police, Chris Hipkens, is dreadfully mistaken if he thinks making the fingerprinting and photographing of children legal will successfully sidestep criticisms made about the legality of the current practise.
Concerns that Māori children were being illegally fingerprinted and photographed were first raised several years ago and a follow up report by the deputy privacy commissioner found that Police taking fingerprints and photographs of children was illegal.
Chris Hipkens has responded by suggesting he would just make it legal so Police can continue doing what they are doing.
Such a move by the Minister seems grotesquely simplistic.
The Minister argues that children giving fingerprinting is a consensual issue and claims children are only fingerprinted when there is consent, but I struggle to see how that operates in the real world.
Are these children and their guardians being told they have no obligation to provide a fingerprint or are they being told that if they don’t supply one they will face arrest?
How is that power dynamic actually playing out on the street?
Children require MORE legal protections than adults. A Police Officer can not compel me to give them my fingerprints unless I am under arrest, and with that arrest comes a whole set of legal protections and obligations.
Why would we allow our children to have less legal rights than we enjoy as adults?
Surely young people require more protections?
In terms of the photographing the issues of consent are even fuzzier. Police are claiming anyone in public is fair game to photograph, including children whom they simply observe, let alone suspect of anything.
We need to foster respectful relationships between our Law enforcement and kids, but that can’t be possible if we allow the Police uncontested power over our kids legal rights.
The Minister needs to appease an angry community frightened by ram raiding teenagers, we all appreciate that, but allowing him to play politics with our children’s legal rights is an unacceptable price to pay for shop owner security.
First published on Waatea News.
“Police are claiming anyone in public is fair game to photograph, including children whom they simply observe, let alone suspect of anything.”
And to think the ‘freedom’ nutters were criticizing masks.
#WearASkiMaskDaily
“whom they simply observe, let alone suspect of anything”.. This would be the main sticking point in this situation. The police can detain and question anyone they suspect is connected to incidents.. They can only fingerprint them legally once they have been arrested. Getting “consent” from children who don’t know the laws, and/or are intimidated by just being held in custody would be relatively easy to extract, so that condition has no basis by which it can be forgiven… If the minister thinks this behavior is acceptable. then maybe he needs to be given an easier job, and a set of training wheels.. And he should stop calling himself a labour man, because he’s just another spotty tory by the sound of his “statements”..
Absolutely 100% agree that kids should not be able to consent to fingerprinting and photographing. (unless arrested for a crime that is serious). Making it legal is not OK.
I’ve wondered why Chris Hipkins got such good marks. He seems to have been merely the sprout that grew fastest. Most of the others seemed to have been caught by cases of damping off – disastrous for future development.
Greywarbler. Apparently he’s ok to work with; he defused the ‘ cancel Shakespeare’ debacle, which is more than the Arts Council ignorami deserved, and the S performance competition gives kids the opportunity to develop the sort of skills useful in handling these sort of situations. Finger printing mightn’t be that big a deal to them, they start doing it making cards and other stuff with finger paint at primary school and maybe pre-school.
There are reasons for a minimum age of sexual consent, especially so when there is a significant power mismatch. You’d have thought woke-Labour could apply the reasons laterally given such an obvious power dynamic.