In New Zealand, Police Work and Social Work Can Go Together
A Māori-led program in South Auckland brings law enforcement together with tribal elders, nonprofits and social agencies to assist in family violence cases.
Matua Mawene Birch is considered a kaumatua, a respected elder with a deep knowledge of Māori language and tradition. He’s now working with New Zealand police in a collaborative program aimed at addressing South Aukland’s stubborn family violence problem.
Photo: Serena Solomon/Bloomberg CityLab
A call for help from domestic or family violence is made on average every four minutes in New Zealand, whose high statistics regularly top global lists. And South Auckland is the country’s ground zero, where 23,000 calls come in yearly for family violence.
The area also has a large Māori and Pacific Islander population, but New Zealand’s police force is mostly white. Encounters between residents and officers summoned to respond to family disputes have often ended with arrests made and children funneled into emergency state care, where a bewildering bureaucracy of government agencies and community organizations await. Families regularly fall through cracks between services that compete for funding. Often, when help comes, it arrives too late, or doesn’t reflect the culture of perpetrators and victims.