Te Pae Oranga: Restorative community initiative starts in Sth Taranaki
12 Mar, 2021 04:00 PM
3 minutes to read
Police and iwi partnership Te Pae Oranga, launched at Okaiawa, intends to help lower crime rates across the Taranaki region.
Police and iwi partnership Te Pae Oranga, launched at Okaiawa, intends to help lower crime rates across the Taranaki region.
Liz Wylie is a reporter for the Whanganui Chronicleliz.wylie@whanganuichronicle.co.nzWhangaChron
A new crime prevention initiative launched in South Taranaki this week has already proven its effectiveness in other parts of New Zealand.
Police Commissioner Andrew Coster said instead of sending people to court, they face an Te Pae Oranga Iwi Community Panel which acts as a jump start to help them make positive changes in their lives.
Te Pae Oranga programme expands to include Taranaki livenews.co.nz - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from livenews.co.nz Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Police Commissioner Andrew Coster and Howie Tamati.
Photo: RNZ / Robin Martin
Coster was at Aotearoa Marae in Okaiawa today to mark the expansion into Taranaki of Te Pae Oranga - a programme that aims to keep low-level offenders out of the courts.
The province is the 16th region in the country to establish a Te Pae Oranga Panel which has been credited with reducing reoffending by 22 percent elsewhere. There is no use of police photos for facial recognition unless it is someone who is an unidentified suspect for an offence. So, that technology is used for identifying suspects of offences, it is not used randomly on young people.
Police Commissioner Andrew Coster.
Photo: RNZ / Samuel Rillstone
Coster wrote in the
On one side, they were panned for only learning of threats to mosques posted to a website used by extremists and white supremacists after a member of the public told them.
And on the other, there are reports of police approaching innocent young Māori, photographing them, collecting their personal details and sending it to a national database.
Coster writes these both speak to the question about what trade-offs to privacy the community is prepared to make in the interests of safety.
Criminologist Emilie Rākete said this was a ridiculous, false comparison.