POLICE AND THE PUBLIC.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 19048, 19 December 1923, Page 6

POLICE AND THE PUBLIC.

The statement which , was made by- a police official in Dunedin this week that the police of New Zealand have no sympathy for the members of the Victorian force who recently lost their positions through their participation in a disgraceful strike will be received with very general satisfaction.. It is impossible for any loyal policeman, any more than for any right-thinking citizen, to entertain any opinion other than that the refusal of duty by members of the force in Melbourne was an Utterly unwarrantable proceeding, involving a violation of the strikers’ oaths and betraying on their part an utter lack of conception of their duty to the public. As is frequently found, it itas a small cause of complaint—the institution of a system of supervision which the discovery of a certain amount of laxity on the part of the force had rendered necessary—that originated the mutinous spirit in the service, other alleged grievances being imported as an afterthought, in order to gloss over action for which it was realised too late there could be no possible justification. Again, it was only an insignificant proportion of the members of the force in Melbourne that was violently disgruntled, the other strikers having been dragged by a false sense of comradeship into active association with them in a refusal of duty. r lne policemen who had thus been led astray are the men who are, as one of the speakers said at the gathering of members of the force in Dunedin this week, to be pitied. But as they had not the moral courage to withstand the pressure upon them to be disloyal to their trust, the request that they should be reinstated in the service, after the Melbourne community had suffered the ignominy and the losses due to their defection, was not one that could be advanced without a good deal of hardihood. Fortunately, the Government in Victoria was capable of arriving at a perfectly reasonable judgment on the matter. It adopted firmly the view that those who had failed in a time of crisis could not be relied upon if another crisis should arrive, or at any rate, that citizens would be justified in believing that such men could not be relied upon. It would have been unfair and improper to ask the public to renew risks in order to provide the guilty with an easy way of escape. Society depends—as the Age puts it—for its existence on the stability of certain institutions, the institution which represents law and order above every other.