‘Safer communities … together’? Plural policing and COVID-19 public health interventions in Aotearoa New Zealand

ABSTRACT

International media have praised Aotearoa New Zealand for its response to the coronavirus pandemic. While New Zealand Police played a fundamental role in enforcing pandemic control measures, the policing landscape remained plural. This article employs Loader [2000. Plural policing and democratic governance. Social and legal studies, 9 (3), 323–345] model of plural policing to understand responses to public health emergencies. It identifies two forms of policing which were evident in Aotearoa during the COVID-19 lockdown that should be added to Loader’s model. First, we argue that contexts with colonial history require that the model not only includes by-government and below-government policing but also next-to-government policing by Indigenous peoples – such as the ‘community checkpoints’ run by Māori. Second, and further developing Loader’s model, we argue that the category of below-government policing be expanded to include ‘peer-to-peer policing’ in which government responsibilizes members of the public to subject each other to large-scale surveillance and social control. Since plural forms of policing affect each other’s functionality and legitimacy, we argue that what happens at the synapses between policing nodes has profound implications for the process of community building. Because community building is essential to fighting pandemics, we conclude that the policing of pandemic intervention measures may require an expanded understanding and practice of plural policing to support an optimal public health strategy.

KEYWORDS:

• COVID-19
• next-to-government policing
• plural policing
• Indigenous rights

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 Frequently referred to as ‘social distancing’ in press and literature.

2 A bubble is an exclusive social network within which people were confined during the lockdown. At Level 4 it was typically a single household, although there were several exemptions. For full discussion, see Long et al. (2020).

3 People of European descent in New Zealand.

4 Iwi at the East Coast of the North Island

5 Nation states where European colonisers remain present and constitute the majority population are often referred to as a ‘settler-colonial’ states but in accordance with Jackson (2016) we reject the use of this term because it minimizes the violent nature of the European invasions.

6 Iwi in and around the Auckland region

7 guardian

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Auckland University of Technology, New Zealand.