The comment by Howard Broad that firearms will be available in locked secure boxes to frontline staff is a complete waste of time. Yesterdays incident was a routine area enquiry and a tradgy happened. there was a tazer available, but it was in the car, in a secure locked box!! Where the firearm will be held in teh future. It may as well be on the other side of the moon when things go wrong. It is time for the police to wake up and issue firearms to all staff working and be done with it. I also beleive it is time the Police Association took a private prosecution against the Police for failing to provide a safe work enviroment, by not issuing the appropriate tools to keep staff safe. If 9 police officers had been shot in the UK, there would have been sackings on a grand scale, where as nothing has happened here
I left New Zealand for the USA 3 years ago and I can't believe how much more violent NZ has become in that little time. I actually feel safer in the US, so much so, I am seriously considering becoming a cop here! Certainly the NZ police will need more training if they are to be issued with firearms and will probably be safer on "routine" operations. Wasn't the Napier seige last year a routine call? New Zealand needs to look at itself, there's a societal issue not being addressed. The disdain for police in New Zealand is despicable, they're fair game for an ever broad section of society who increasingly seem to have no respect for them. If these people have no respect for law enforcement then they certainly care little for ordinary New Zealanders - take the farmer gunned down on his own property in the Manawatu recently. There's a cultural shift that needs to occur...a transition from "F the Police!" to straight up decent kiwi values which are conspicuously absent from modern NZ society.