It was inevitable during our interview that O’Connor would reach for the wise old saw that he has twanged many times in his editorial in the police PR organ, Police News: ‘You don’t look at the pedigree of the bull, you look at the pedigree of the man selling it to you.’ This was by way of dismissing criticism of armchair commentators, and trusting the opinion of the police. O’Connor put a lot of faith in that.
Did he agree that New Zealand police were suffering their annus horribilus? ‘I think what’s happened is we’re seeing the result of the police-traffic merger.’ I interrupted him, and gave as an example the sex-crime trials of Rickards, Shipton and Schollum as having nothing whatsoever to do with the police taking over the formerly separate responsibilities of traffic cops. He said, ‘No, but it’s all in context. Nothing happens in isolation.’ Then he sold his version of history.
‘New Zealand police for many years enjoyed a unique relationship with the public. The first cracks started to appear during the Springbok tour; the current opinion-makers and leaders of New Zealand society, particularly this Labour Party caucus, generally were people whose politics were formed in the tour. People who are in their fifties now. And that really got police offside with the future leadership of New Zealand, the intelligentsia if you like, academia, the arts, and generally the fourth estate as well.
‘We still had intact our relationship with ordinary New Zealand, rugby-club New Zealand. The Kiwi bloke was pretty unaffected. Because we didn’t police the roads: most people only saw police when they were in trouble. We were the good guys. The old MoT [Ministry of Transport] were the bad guys. What’s happened since then is that the police have used up a lot of the goodwill. And that then created the environment of the huge criticisms we’ve had to face in the past four or five years.
‘The Rickards thing came in the middle of it. Bain is another one. And now, potentially, what’s his name, Mark Lundy, and down in the Sounds, Scott Watson, are other ones. All these things, these are all doubts that have been cast, it’s the environment in which they’re all fertile ground, and they’re all absolute rubbish. David Bain – I mean, Joe Karam very expertly, I think brilliantly, has tilled that fertile field. And he’s got his crop.’
But the defence of David Bain is absolute rubbish? Once again, he backed the police. ‘Oh, of course it is,’ he said. Scott Watson’s innocence – absolute rubbish? He backed the police. ‘Yes.’ The Steven Wallace case? He backed the police. ‘Absolutely.’
Wallace was shot and killed in April 2000 by a Waitara constable, who claimed self-defence. O’Connor said he welcomed the upcoming report from the coroner. ‘Look, that was a justified shoot. It was a privilege to be involved in that. It’s not often in life you get to be absolutely one hundred percent on the side of the angels. And in that case we were.
‘That officer was as innocent as you can get. He was as justified as you can get. This man crawled out of bed in the middle of the night, and he’s never been able to sleep in his own bed ever since. It was just wrong, wrong, wrong.’
The defence of Wallace, Watson, Bain, Lundy; the Bazley report; criticism of police recruiting – ‘all absolute rubbish’. Only doing his job? It’s a position that O’Connor has tenaciously held on to since his 1995 election. The quiet office, the six-figure salary, the power and sense of purpose: ‘I like to think that I can influence the direction of things for law and order better than I could if I was still a senior sergeant or detective somewhere. You only leave a job to do something better, and I just don’t see anything better.’
O’Connor has mostly stood unopposed as association president. In 1997 he was up against Gary Orr, who was unhappy with O’Connor’s leadership style, saying that the messenger sometimes got in the way of the message. O’Connor said he didn’t know what that meant.
The next election is October. Oh yes, said O’Connor, he’ll definitely have another crack. I asked him whether he thought twelve years as association president was excessive. Well, he said, he knew of a counterpart in Texas who had only just resigned after twenty-four.
[July 22]
8 Steve Crow
Battle of Wounded Knee
Steve Crow said, ‘It’s very stiff at the moment.’ We sat in his office on a wet dreary winter afternoon in Auckland. A courier wearing a turban stood at the counter waiting to pick up a stack of DVDs entitled Desperate Housewhores. There was the deathly hush and clock-ticking boredom of all offices. The bathroom door was open; the seat had been left up, and a supply of budget toilet paper lay on the floor. With his shaved head and wide chest and his line of business, Crow might be mistaken for a brute, but he had such gentle manners. His son David fetched two cups of coffee from the kitchen. ‘Thanks, buddy,’ Crow said. His cellphone rang. ‘Hi baby,’ he said. It was wife. ‘Love you,’ he said.
The stiffness was a complaint: he had surgery on his right knee last week, and was given a set of crutches. He will model them in public on Sunday when he launches a new political party. Crow, fifty, is running for the Auckland mayoralty. The party is called 1auckland.com. He said, ‘When it’s on the electoral register, because it starts with a “1”, it’ll be at the top. It’s also an advert for our website, because our website is our name. So that’s all there.’
What was all there? I asked about the party’s candidates. He fished up the name of someone called Julie Chambers. Who? He said, ‘To be honest … Let me think about
