“I call it ‘walking while Māori’,” Anna* explains, a twist on the phrase ‘walking while black’. “My brother, who is young and Māori, is habitually addressed by police with the greeting ‘where have you come from?’”
“On the other hand, my father, who is Pākehā and old, is always greeted with a more normal greeting, like ‘hello’, or ‘good evening’.” It’s just one small example, she explains, but illustrates the difference she perceives between how her brother and father get treated by police based on their race.
Samantha King’s boyfriend Tao, who is Samoan, has had many similar experiences to Anna’s brother – what, he says, you come to expect as normal when you “grow up brown”.
“When we go shopping, Tao will say to me ‘here, you hold this, they will think I stole something’”, Samantha explains. “At first I thought he was being over-dramatic, but then I started observing people’s behaviour to him and he was telling the truth.”
Photo: Unknown
One weekend in Martinborough, the holiday hotspot known for its vineyards and fine dining, Samantha was sitting in the car while Tao ran into the supermarket to pick up a few things. “He got back into the car and we started driving down the road. About 30 seconds later, on came the police lights,” she recounts.
“It was night time, so we hadn’t realised this cop had been down the road watching Tao this whole time. We pulled the car over, and the officer proceeded the check Tao’s license (full), his warrant and registration (both up-to-date), and even wrote down his licence plate on his hand to run through the system later,” she remembers. “It was at this point he leaned into the car a bit further and saw me. His whole attitude changed immediately: he asked what villas we were staying at, how our dinner was, and so on.”
“It was as if his mind was immediately put at ease, knowing that the Samoan man was with a white woman.”
*
“Walking while Māori” and “growing up brown” have another name: racial profiling. It is the targeting of specific individuals based on their skin colour or cultural background and is rarely overt or articulated. It is also notoriously difficult to prove. Following the recent death of an 18-year-old Africa–American, Mike Brown, who was shot dead by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri; despite being unarmed; racial profiling and the differential treatment of people by police based on their colour has sparked debate, protest and widespread outrage – including in New Zealand.
[The police] come and kicked my door in, called me a fucken n*****, pulled me out of bed, they said “You black c***s are always the same.”
There’s no question that the police in New Zealand have vastly different powers than their United States counterparts. In New Zealand, if police believe they have “reasonable grounds” to believe a person is carrying drugs or weapons, they have the power to do a random search without a warrant. However, police are not required to publish statistics as to who they search, their age, ethnicity or why the police officer suspected they were engaged in illegal activity. This information is only recorded if there is an arrest. For even less formal interactions, such as approaching someone on the street or pulling over a vehicle at random, police have complete discretion.
The sheer numbers of interactions police have with people every day makes it impossible to prove – or disprove – that police racial profiling takes place in New Zealand.
Wallace Haumaha, the New Zealand Police deputy chief executive Māori, firmly believes racial profiling is not an issue for the force. “We don’t use the term ‘racial profiling’ in the New Zealand Police,” he says. “Racial profiling is an out-and-out discriminatory process, and I don’t believe that’s the behaviour of the New Zealand Police.”
Haumaha, who has over 30 years’ experience within the organisation, believes the police have come a long way as an organisation. Back in 1998, the organisation commissioned a study to look at Māori perception of the police. The project involved 10 focus groups, each with eight to 10 participants of different gender, age, class, physical appearance, and experience with the police.
The report was nothing short of damning. All participants were of the opinion that “police often harass Māori under the pretext of criminal suspicion” (page 30), and that police stopped and questioned individuals on the basis of skin colour. The report cited a “general frustration … at what was perceived to be excessive police presence wherever Māori congregate”, and the “stopping and questioning of Māori on the street for no apparent reason”. There was unanimous agreement that, rather than specific individuals within the force acting out of rank, racism is an underlying ethos of the whole institution. One participant recalled (page 33):
My house got raided two weeks ago. They [the police] come and kicked my door in, called me a fucken n*****, pulled me out of bed, they said “You black c***s are always the same.” I said, “Fuck, I’ve been out of this shit for years” they said, “You black c***s will never change, you’re all the same.” I’ve seen the abuse down here for years.
The report pointed out that Māori, in telling these stories, often do not feel like they are believed. One participant said: “It doesn’t matter what we say, you know this stuff here, what we’ve said today and what the other Māori groups say even though it’s done under proper research conditions, this will still be seen as Māori rigging.”
By the time a person tells their story and it’s got to several different families, it’s got to ten-feet tall. I believe it’s inflated in many ways.
Haumaha was in the police back in 1998 when the report was released, and says it was accepted that the relationship with Māori was fractured.
“Off the back of those reports, we realised, sure, that we fell short of the mark in some areas,” he says. “But the reports didn’t sit there gathering dust. We developed infrastructure so we’d develop better capability to introduce cultural practices.”
He cites the introduction of cultural training to Police College courses, an emphasis on professional development, and the appointment of iwi liaison officers as some of the changes that have seen a shift in police culture. “At the end of the day, the intent of the New Zealand Police – from my view as an officer of 30 years' experience – has travelled a long way.”
Haumaha points to numerous documents and reports that focus on the over-representation of Māori in the criminal justice system, most recently the Turning of The Tide strategy. However, since 1998, none have looked specifically at the issue of Māori perception of the police, the targeting of Māori, or issues of racial profiling.
Haumaha is somewhat sceptical of anecdotes like that of Anna’s brother or Tao’s treatment taking place in 2014. “In communities, storytelling is one of the greatest things,” he says. “By the time a person tells their story and it’s got to several different families, it’s got to 10 feet tall. I believe it’s inflated in many ways.”
*
Kiritapu Allan, a Wellington-based lawyer, is four years into a five year research project looking at the impacts of the criminal justice process on one of the largest iwi in the country, Ngāti Kahungunu. Working with the iwi authority, she has met with around 150 Māori from communities across the Ngati Kahungunu region, which spans across three policing districts and covers most of the Hawke’s Bay and Wairarapa. The project focusses broadly on Māori interactions with the criminal justice process – be that police, the courts, or the Department of Corrections.
Allan and her team broke the tribe into six regions and held hui throughout those areas, ranging anywhere from 20 to 60 participants. “I asked them ‘what has been the engagement between you and your whanau with the criminal justice process? What do you perceive the effects of that as being? What do you think works well, what do you think sucks?’”
Photo: Unknown
“Sitting in on them, I didn’t necessarily think there was a consistent theme across the regions,” Allen says. “But once I started to compress the data, the one theme that came through consistently and really strongly – which I didn’t really think about in the hui – was racial profiling.”
Now at the point of analysing and writing up her findings, Allan can see it was the common response when she asked what wasn’t working within the criminal justice process. “‘Well, the cops seem to pick on my kids heaps’. ‘We’re picked on because of the way we look, we’re big and brown’”.
“I was completely shocked just how strong that theme came through – every single region, every single workshop we did. Whether it was young or old.”
Allan’s research also highlighted concerning treatment of young Māori offenders, with reports of Māori youth as young as 11 being arrested as adults. “I had one story from a mum. She was talking about her two kids. They were 14 and 11. She was talking about how many times these kids had been picked and charged as adults. Despite telling the police that they are children, they were being treated as adults. The police’s excuse was: ‘Well, they look big’.”
Allan, who recently presented parts of her findings at World Indigenous Leaders’ Conference in Brisbane, is no stranger to the issue of police profiling herself. “Growing up, whenever I saw the cop car, I got scared. And I was scared because they felt like they were going to do something,” she recounts.
These ‘young buck cops’ have the broadest discretion out of any anyone in the judicial system, and they’re the least trained to deal with the exercise of that discretion.
One of her stories almost exactly mirrors that of one of the women in the 1998 study. “I had a nice car. I had a Toyota Corolla,” Allan laughs. “But I was young, I was Māori and I had dreadlocks. The amount of times I would get pulled over in rural areas just for driving my car, it was ridiculous,” she says.
Allan, like Haumaha, acknowledges things may have improved since she was a teen over a decade ago. However, she believes the police have a long way to go in the way in which they interact with Māori. Allan believes the police’s broad discretion, paired with a lack of oversight and the weakness of the Independent Police Conduct Authority (IPCA), breeds an environment ripe for injustice.
“These young buck cops have the broadest discretion out of any anyone in the judicial system, and they’re the least trained to deal with the exercise of that discretion. Once it goes through to the judicial system, although discretion is still exercised, it’s far more scrutinised and far more contained. But at the street level, it’s uncontrolled.”
“There’s no-one watching over your shoulder. There’s no media traipsing around with the cops every time they want to exercise discretion. It’s broad ranging; there’re just no parameters and there’s no way of controlling it. That, to me, is one of the greatest failures of the criminal justice process. I hate it.”
*
Haumaha maintains that neither overt nor unconscious racial profiling occurs within his ranks, and he can only act if these anecdotes translate into police complaints. “Unless I hear those stories, [I can’t] bring them to the attention of those district commanders in those areas,” Haurama points out. “What I do know is that we have 12 dedicated district commanders who want to work in this space; who want to understand the issues; who want to know what may be driving some of the behaviour of our staff; and fix that perception, that problem.”
Overall, Haumaha believes New Zealanders are satisfied with the police as an organisation. “Our trust and confidence is sitting around 79 per cent, it was around 80–81 per cent,” Haumaha points out. “In the Māori community, we’re sitting around 68–69 per cent and we’ve given an undertaking to improve that position.”
I ask Haumaha what he thinks accounts for the 10–11 per cent difference in the trust and confidence of the general population and that of the Māori population. “I don’t quite have my finger on the pulse on why that is,” he says.
Police Minister Anne Tolley was not available for comment on this story despite repeated requests.
* Declined to be named to protect her identity and family members mentioned.
Correction: An earlier version of this story spelled the names of New Zealand Police deputy chief executive Maori Wallace Haumaha and Kiritapu Allan incorrectly. The errors are regretted.
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