Anti-smacking law amended

[Curious_AJ]

i believe the anti-smacking thing is bull... anti-beating would be better... but theres nothing wrong with a little smack every now and again...it showed ME what was right from wrong, but never hurt me in any way...

[kro]

Oh hurray, not only do the police have to do the policing, but now they have to decide what actually constitutes a criminal act. Way to palm off the responsibility to someone else Labour govt.

This won't end well.

[Squeak the Rat]

It's going to come down to caselaw sadly. Basically the Police will have to "test the waters". Its a crap way of doing it and its basically shafting the Police to take the wrap. Great more negative publicity. Well i aint locking up any mothers smacking their defiant children. Sue Bradford and Helen Clark can come to it themselves!

I just feel sorry for the "test" cases that will go before the Courts. What a crock.

The Govt should of been fairer and given clearer direction to the Police.

I couldn't agree more. And I feel sorry for the first cop who uses his discretion to not prosecute some one who smacked their child, to later find out real abuse had been happening behind the scenes.

[Grahameeboy]

i believe the anti-smacking thing is bull... anti-beating would be better... but theres nothing wrong with a little smack every now and again...it showed ME what was right from wrong, but never hurt me in any way...

Agree, the name sucks and has probably caused a lot more issues than if it had been called 'Child Abuse Act' or something....however, the point of the Act is to avoid abusive parents getting around the Law.

Okay, the Police may have teething problems, however, the intent of the Act is a positive step and there is enough cop bashing that I am surprised that some here are saying "well what if they are wrong".

I am sure that if the Police do not take action and get it wrong the first time, they will not the second time which is still not late.....I know the Police feel shafted, however, I am sure they feel the same when they prosecute a 'real abuse' case under the current Law and the parents get away with it so at least now they have a better chance to do their job and protect abused kids.

There is always a shiney side to a coin.

[Grahameeboy]

I couldn't agree more. And I feel sorry for the first cop who uses his discretion to not prosecute some one who smacked their child, to later find out real abuse had been happening behind the scenes.

And I feel sorry for cops now who prosecute under current Law only to see Parents get out of it.............

[Grahameeboy]

The idea of police role, function, purpose, or mission in society requires us to think beyond the technical and operational aspects of police work, and consider, if you will, the philosophy of policing, and/or more generally, the place of legitimate authority in society, as well as a number of larger issues which may seem like only of academic interest. However, such insights have important value. Glaeser (2000), for example, makes the case that policing is essentially a spatial practice (control of space), thus fulfilling the first of Max Weber's (1930) operational characteristics of a state: territoriality, legitimacy, and monopolization on the use of force. Policing is also one of those few lines of work, like teaching and medicine, which have intimate connections with social life, social progress, and social change. Too narrow a view of the police role is bad, and care must also be taken to avoid too broad a view. Scholars therefore, sometimes use the words "role" and "function" interchangeably. Let's begin with an ideal set of police functions which were identified by Goldstein (1977) a long time ago:

To prevent and control conduct widely recognized as threatening to life and property

To aid individuals who are in danger of physical harm, such as the victims of violent attack

To facilitate the movement of people and vehicles

To assist those who cannot care for themselves, the intoxicated, the addicted, the mentally ill, the physically disables, the old, and the young

To resolve conflict, whether it be between individuals, groups or individuals, or individuals and their government

To identify problems that have the potential for becoming more serious problems

To create and maintain a feeling of security in communities

However, in order to understand the ideals, one must understand how they are analyzed. Here are some basic analytical terms used by academics, sociologists mostly, when analyzing the role of police in society:

Role -- this is a sociological term that allows us to talk about the characteristics of various people and things without reference to the actual people involved. An example of a role is the wheel that spins in the mouse cage. A status is the mouse. It doesn't matter what kind of mouse you put in the cage; the fact it has a wheel means that spinning is the kind of behavior we would expect in that role. Police have accumulated several roles ("wheels") over the years that they cannot shed or have extreme difficulty shedding. It's hard to exit a role. Here are two instances involving commonly agreed-upon roles for police in society:

(1) Unquestionable Use of Force - this role was first suggested by the criminal justice scholar Egon Bittner. It means somebody in society has to play the role of "bully" you can't talk back to - it's unquestionable or indisputable authority. Police don't have to give you any explanation or take any guff off you when they're using force or pretty much engaged in getting down to business.

(2) Information Gathering - this role was envisioned and implemented by J. Edgar Hoover, head of the FBI. Although society has its national security agencies, nobody is better positioned in society, with the technology, with the know-how, and with the experience, to start collecting domestic intelligence information, if they wanted to. Police cannot help collecting more information on citizens than they have a right to know. Information gathering has just been a natural part of their role. Read "New Insights into J. Edgar Hoover's Role" for more about the police role in counterespionage, e.g.



Function -- This is another sociological term that refers to something that has survival value for society or an organization. Police have two kinds of functions: intended and unintended. The unintended functions may resemble roles and, in fact, may be the cause of them, but it's the intended functions (that police may not admit, but are only slightly aware of) that concern us. Here's a list of police functions:

(1) Morals Enforcement - the oldest function in police history, one shared with religion since a lot of law enforcement is about morality or as Manning (2003) argues, is about communication of morals, or as Rabbi Friedman (2005) goes further in saying police are the priests of secular religion.

(2) Class Control - it's been said that outside of Alcoholics Anonymous, there's no better enforcer of American middle class values than the police. They're all about giving their best service to the upwardly mobile middle class. The rich don't need them; they have their own security. And, the police have never been useful in fighting poverty or uplifting the poor in any society. No, police are a middle class institution, and they preserve the class lines very well.

(3) Riot Control - everybody knows that you don't use military force against your own citizens, that's what the police are for.

(4) Order Maintenance - this is the "Woodsy the Owl" idea of "policing" your picnic area before you leave. It's the "order" part of "law & order". It refers to the nonarrest things police do, like give advice, warnings, or assist with graffiti and litter removal. The police function here is to "beautify" society, if you will. It's the basis of the modern community policing movement.

(5) Safety - this is the "green cross" job of making sure that accidents don't happen. The police would love nothing better than to farm out their traffic safety duties to some other agency, but we can't seem to get those meter maids and crossing guards organized into a profession. It's only an historical accident, anyway, that the police took over traffic safety in 1911 because they came up with the idea of street lights.

(6) Service - "Who ya gonna call?" Who else besides the police are there 24/7 to answer every emergency or assist you with directions if you get hungry in the middle of the night. The invention of 911 in 1968 in Haleyville, Alabama of all places is something that many police regret ever happened.

(7) Crime Fighting - Don your costumes, super heros, it's up, up & away. This function is so closely tied up with image and ideology that it's hard to even have a serious discussion about it, but it's supposed to be neutral.



Mandate -- Despite what many in policing believe is the meaning of this term, which can be strictly interpreted as mission objectives or required tasks to be carried out, this is also a term that combines the idea of what the law requires the police to do with a vision of the future, as police help to bring about that future. Probably the most important mandate for law enforcement in general is to uphold their honor and dignity, no matter what else they are tasked to do.



Style -- This is a term that gets at how well a person or agency copes under stress. Later on, we learn all about individual styles, but more important is the notion of departmental styles, and how we can classify police agencies by the secrets they reveal under stress. Style is also established by the demographic characteristics of the population a police agency serves. Hence, we can easily say that federal policing has no "watchman" or community policing style since federal agencies serve too broad a demographic population. Cities tend to get the police style they deserve.



Issue -- This is a term for anything trans-jurisdictional. There's no such thing as a local issue. All issues are at least national in scope. C. Wright Mills in The Sociological Imagination said that an issue is a threat to mores. I'm not a sociologist of mores, but I'd say something becomes a police issue when it involves ethics.



Problem -- I'll defer to the field of sociology for a definition of this term, and my understanding is that a social problem is something that people believe needs to be changed. C. Wright Mills in The Sociological Imagination said that a social problem is a threat to values. I'm not a sociologist of values, but I'd say that a police problem exists when the police think it's right to do one thing, and the public thinks it's right to do another thing.



Image & Ideology -- The word "image" is the public relations spin that an agency puts out. It's pretty much synonymous with words like "mystique" or "aura." The word "ideology" refers to a belief in something as true when it's actually false, or at the base of it, false. Ideologies are created by putting a positive spin on something negative. Ideologies also always rest on a lie. It's the opposite of the word "institution" because anything that reaches the level of social institution must rest on a kernel of truth, at least according to the great sociologist, Durkheim.



Socialization & Personality -- Socialization is the internalization of norms, when an employee takes on all the attitudes, beliefs, and values of the organization, also known as the Great American buy-in. There are two approaches to the study of police personality: (1) the predispositional approach - before coming to police work, the employee has strong core elements at the center of his/her personality, like a cabbage; (2) the socialization approach - once coming into police work, the employee loses whatever center they had, and whatever was at their core is replaced by reflections or layers of organizational norms, attitudes, beliefs, and values, like an onion.



There are many other terms you'll run into with the academic study of policing. It's one of the most over-analyzed professions on the planet. Perhaps the best that one can do when embarking for the first time into the serious, scholarly study of policing is to keep an open mind, and to think broadly about policing. It's a whole lot more than simply taking phone calls and rushing to the scene of a crime:

[MisterD]

1 This is not a Labour Bill and as such they have no control over Bradford's accepatnce or rejection of any ammendement.

Of course it's a fucking Labour bill, last time it was mooted it was Maharey that was pushing it - SB is just the dumb prop running the ball up for them (in John Tamihere's words) cos she only has to pander to the lunatic 5% that vote green.

3 The ammendment in reality is a non issue as the Police already have powers of discreation to prosecute or not.

The police disagree on that point, as was fairly well publicised. When it comes to domestic violence, they have no discretion they must make an arrest and prosecute.

This cook-up changes nothing, parents who smack are still criminalised. Police will err on the side of prosecution because a) it's an easy "win" and makes their results look good a b) they'll be scared shitless that they might not prosecute and then have another Kahui on their hands..

[MisterD]

Brilliant post......and does it matter if it is a vote winner if it helps deal with abuse of kids...............geeze is it only the few who see the bigger picture

Yeah, right. This bill will prevent child abuse in exactly the same way as the dog-chipping legislation prevented the recent dog attacks.

It's just increasing the regulation and compliance costs on the already law-abiding members of society. It'll do diddly-squat to affect those who beat kids to within and inch of their lives and beyond.

[Finn]

geeze is it only the few who see the bigger picture

Or could it be that the majority just think you're a fool?

[jeremysprite]

Did anyone go to the rally/event on Wednesday? I liked what a couple of the guys said - Sue Bradford promised to withdraw her bill if there was ever an amendment made to it, (or something along those lines, basically the thing that Clarke + Key just did). They challenged her to do so. I wonder if she'll stick to her word....

[Deviant Esq]

The other problem is a kid who crys "wolf". There was a documentary on just that not so long ago, where a problem child (with a history of outrageous lies) under the care of foster parents claimed that the foster Father had beaten him with golf clubs, and all sorts of other wild accusations. CYF, assisted by the police, took the matter very seriously, as they should, but ultimately believed the problem child's word over the foster parents. The foster parents were black listed as such, forbidden from ever looking after foster children again, the children they were looking after removed from their care.

The documentary showed them as ordinary decent parents. The kid had a violence problem and was starting to get into vandalism, and the parents tried their best to keep him in line. So yeah he was smacked and told off, but I doubt he was ever beaten the way he accused them. Under the new bill the foster Father would be arrested and possibly jailed.

[Squeak the Rat]

The documentary showed them as ordinary decent parents. The kid had a violence problem and was starting to get into vandalism, and the parents tried their best to keep him in line. So yeah he was smacked and told off, but I doubt he was ever beaten the way he accused them. Under the new bill the foster Father would be arrested and possibly jailed.

Proponents of the new law do not believe these children exist, and if they do they are the result of bad parenting and that they can be reasoned with using methods like timeout and rationalisation. Therefore maybe the parents should go to jail.

I might do a pamphlet drop at the local primary school urging kids to dial 111 if their parents smack them. That might stir things up a bit......

[Ixion]

,,

There is always a shiney side to a coin.

No there's not. On what do you base that? I just checked 5 coins at random. One had two shiney sides, the other four had no shiney sie. The nature of the treatment of coins, rubbing in pockets, purses etc would seem to direct that wear or abrasion, which will remove the "shine" will occur equally on both sides. One would expect coins to be either unshiney, unworn, on both sides, or worn and dull on both sides.

[Finn]

Do you realise that it's illegal to perform fellatio in Tasmania? I'm sure it still goes on... behind closed doors.

[silverado]

1 This is not a Labour Bill and as such they have no control over Bradford's accepatnce or rejection of any ammendement.

It was originally Steve Maharey's bill but once Labour knew it wasn't going to be popular they found the stupid Greens' to promote it.

They whole lot of them are useless.