THE PRESS MONDAY, MARCH 21, 1983. Place for public inquiries

Press, 21 March 1983, Page 20

THE PRESS MONDAY, MARCH 21, 1983. Place for public inquiries

When a policeman uses a gun in self-defence, and someone is killed, no ready answer can be given to the questions of how far the policeman should be called to account for his actions, or whether an inquiry into the circumstances should be held in private or in public. Such incidents are rare in New Zealand where the police are seldom armed. The public continues to expect, quite correctly, that violence will be the last resort of the police in enforcing the law or in making an arrest. Trust in the restraint of the police is almost always justified.

An incident such as that in Lower Hutt late last year, when a man resisting arrest was shot and killed by a policeman, is bound to arouse disquiet. The police have held their own inquiry and have been able to satisfy the SolicitorGeneral and the Minister of Police that no further action should be taken against the policeman who fired the fatal shot. Others, including the Labour Party’s spokesmen on justice and on the police, have suggested that the policeman who fired the shot should appear in court.

Closed inquiries held within a State department can easily leave a residue of public uncertainty, even though the findings, in this instance, have been considered by members of the Cabinet. On the other hand, to charge a policeman with a serious offence such as manslaughter, as a means of demonstrating through a public hearing that his actions were reasonable, seems an excessively formal approach. When a policeman has to resort to firearms there is seldom time to weigh carefully all the implications of the action. If the police come to feel that serious charges may follow, almost as a matter of course, they will be tempted to hesitate. Yet one of the first duties of policemen and policewomen must be to protect their own lives. They have, too, a requirement, to protect members of the public. They should

not be placed under even greater strain than at present when attempting to decide whether to use force, and what force is reasonable, in rapidly changing situations. Perhaps an answer can be found by devising a middle way for inquiries into serious matters such as that at Lower Hutt —

something more than the privacy of a departmental inquiry, but an inquiry that still stops short of the formality of a court. Where life has been lost as the result of a police action, or where an internal inquiry shows uncertainty about whether police have acted correctly, a public inquiry before an independent tribunal would help to clarify matters and set the public’s mind at rest. Such an inquiry would, in effect, become a kind of lower court hearing to decide whether a charge should be laid. On many occasions a public inquiry would probably find no charge was justified. The community would, at least, have a better idea of how an event such as a fatal shooting came about.

A decision on whether such a public inquiry should be held would still have to be made after an internal inquiry. That decision would probably have to rest with the SolicitorGeneral. He, and the police, would have a strong incentive to hold a public inquiry whenever it appeared that secrecy would damage the reputation of the police, however unjustified that damage might be. As it is now, from time to time a decision is made after an internal inquiry to prosecute a member of the police in the courts. Prosecutions for traffic offences and assaults, for instance, have been laid in recent times. Sometimes they have succeeded. For these relatively minor matters the present arrangements are probably adequate. For serious matters, especially when a life has been lost, an independent and public inquiry — something more than a departmental inquiry, but less than a prosecution — has much to commend it.