The show-makers got that wide-eyed cultural sensitivity and the strict adherence to the rules (to the point of absurdity). They got the cops' desperate efforts to keep any useful information away from the general public, and they got the fact that they're just a bit fucking useless sometimes.
The police comms team deal with a lot of shit, and often have to handle ongoing stressful situations where information is constantly in a state of flux, and has to be absolutely verified before sharing with the public.
But they are still sometimes completely fucking useless, and it's been getting worse for quite some time. And sometimes they just seem determined to make things difficult for themselves. They don't need anybody's help to look like a dickhead.
There is an ongoing issue with the police sending out painfully thin statements, which often don't feature essential information like What, Where and When (the Why and How can wait for later). Comms teams have told newsrooms that they often don't have the information to share, but putting out the briefest of information just sends everyone in the country scurrying for more, and the only thing you can expect from putting out a statement like that is that every bloody newsroom in the country is going to be clogging your phone line, all desperate for something – anything – more to the story. It's just making more work for themselves.
And sometimes, the force's desperate desire to keep any information to itself manages to just create another shit-show, and they did exactly that last week.
They obviously weren't ready for the backlash when Canterbury police casually mentioned that they would be walking around town with firearms now, and would be for the indefinite future, a timeframe that was just vague enough to be super-fucking-alarming.
New Zealanders pride themselves on the fact that we're not Americans, and we're mostly grateful as fuck that we don't share our Trans-Pacific's cousins' desperate hard-on for guns. For such a rural-driven society, we just don't have a gun culture, and don't really want one.
And we're just a little bit proud that the local cops are on the beat without having to get totally tooled up. We might not be able to leave everything unlocked anymore, but we also don't need the police blasting away on our city streets.
Somehow, it took the local police in Christchurch a day to realise that there was a big goddamn difference between “indefinite” and “until we catch this particular guy we're after”, because they forgot to mention that latter fact in the first place. It might not have been quite so alarming if they'd bothered to share all the facts with the public.
And now it's started the usual interminable debate about arming our police, and you can expect some deeply serious arguments about the possibility for months to come.
Maybe that was the cops' goal all along, to get us talking like this, but it really feels like they just forgot to bring all the information they should have, and are now waving us away from the bonfire of debate they've igniting, and failing to assure us all that there is nothing to see here.
- Margaret Tempest
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