We're stepping in: Police double down on unlawful officer training

Crisis. There's no other word for it.

We try our best to avoid sensationalising what we report to you.

Even though hyperbole might get eyeballs on screens, we know we’ll lose your trust in the long run if we overplay our hand. This means we don’t make claims that we can’t back up.

The trouble is, we’re facing a crisis. So, we’re going to call it what it is. And we need our fellow Kiwis to get involved.

The NZ Police have reneged on a promise the Police Commissioner at the time, Andrew Coster, personally made to the Free Speech Union last year that Police would cease their Non-Criminal Hate Incident (NCHI) training program.

But they haven't.

Tomorrow, we're meeting with the Assistant Commissioner of Police to lay down the law because apparently, they don’t know what it is. We're going to give them one last chance, but we're not holding our breath.

(If you haven’t seen what this training material looks like, check it out here.)

Police have doubled down. So, the FSU is going to have to saddle up. We’re now threatening legal action against NZ Police.

For context, NZ Police want to record any language whatsoever that may be ‘perceived’ to be ‘motivated by hate’.

They offer no clear or objective threshold. They are operating outside of the law.

Parliament has not granted them permission. And the Minister for Police Mark Mitchell has apparently washed his hands of it, calling it an ‘operational matter for Police’.

We’re just as baffled as you are.

Ahead of our meeting with the Assistant Commissioner tomorrow, would you add your name to our public letter, calling on the Commissioner to stop conducting this unlawful training? 

You’re probably wondering how they dreamed this insanity up. Well, most of the language and concepts in the NZ Police training program are taken almost verbatim from laws and policies in the United Kingdom.

To give you some context, 12,000 people per year are facing arrest by UK police for the non-crime of writing something online that others claim is offensive. If that is not draconian enough, things are taking a turn for the worse.

The United Kingdom - birthplace of Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Churchill – is about to sacrifice fundamental rights of freedom of expression, freedom of assembly, freedom of movement and freedom to protest.

The Crime and Policing Bill, legislation currently before committee in the British House of Commons, will introduce draconian measures that make their 'hate speech' laws pale in comparison.

An order can be issued without notice, indefinite in duration, and if breached, would incur an unlimited fine or two years in prison.

Andrew Tettenborn, a British professor of law, writes that the bill “poses a formidable threat to free speech in the UK.” He explains “police, local authorities, and a number of other bodies will be empowered to ask courts for ‘respect orders’ than can either prohibit someone from doing or require them to do anything described in the order.”

This move is of global significance and will without a doubt, despite our geographical distance, impact the free speech fight here in NZ. Policy scribes in Wellington have a long tradition of copying and pasting large tracts from laws and policies in Westminster, Ottawa and Canberra.

For nearly a thousand years, Britain has withstood foreign conquest. Unbowed by the Spanish Armada, the Napoleonic fleet, and the German Luftwaffe, that modest yet stubborn little island has defined itself as much by its language and principles as its military and empire.

The English, in particular, with their stubborn insistence on personal freedoms, imbued their laws, letters, poems and plays with concepts which came to inspire the liberation of those they colonised. The first verbal shots fired by the American revolutionaries in 1776 are due in no small part to the texts of Magna Carta in 1215 and the Bill of Rights 1688.

Yet with this new bill, the UK’s liberal democracy may be sounding its own death knell by condemning dissenters to silence.

Without significant resistance here in NZ, our current trajectory will take us the same direction as the UK.

We cannot emphasis enough how serious these moves will be for liberal democracies in the English-speaking West. Despite the valiant efforts of our friends at the FSU UK, we are growing more and more concerned at the mounting challenge they’re facing.

But we do believe here in NZ we’ve still got a chance.

Your previous support has made it possible to successfully defend individual Kiwis like Lucy Rogers and Paul Burns in outrageous cases where Police blatantly abused their powers. We successfully pushed back on proposed 'hate speech' legislation.

We want to be an example to the world of what it takes to successfully defend free speech.

Your support is the only reason any of this is possible.

Once again, thank you. 

Jonathan Ayling | Chief Executive

PS. We're meeting with the Assistant Commissioner tomorrow to get answers: Why have the Police not followed through and stopped training their officers unlawfully? We need you to back us, though. Add your name to our public letter now.