New Zealand media don’t want you to notice who are the people committing crimes in New Zealand.
This is the obvious takeaway from a “review” of Police Ten 7 that accuses the show of “racism” and “bias”.
A report released today has found that the producers of Police Ten 7 and staff at TVNZ that handle the popular show need training in racism, bias and the Treaty of Waitangi.
In his excellent book Taboo, (black) American academic Wilfred Reilly discusses “10 Facts You Can’t Talk about”. First and foremost, Reilly discusses the absolute refusal of almost all media and most academics to discuss a simple fact: “that Black Americans currently have a higher crime rate than white Americans”. There’s a good reason, though, that no one wants to talk about black crime rates: that simple fact is the keystone that brings down the entire edifice of Black Lives Matter. The narrative of “cops hunting black men” dissolves under the harsh light of black crime rates.
There can be no meaningful discussion of alleged “bias” on a policing reality-TV show without admitting a simple if uncomfortable fact: Maori and Pasifika commit the majority of crimes in New Zealand. This is true both in absolute numbers (52.8%) and relative rates of offending (1.5 times more).
So is it “bias” for television, which is, after all, supposed to be “real”, to show a particular group committing crime more often, when that group does in fact commit crime more often?
Certainly, some people seem to have an axe to grind.
Auckland City ward councillor Efeso Collins, one of the leading critics, made a series of well-publicised statements on the long-running ratings winner.
“I think it’s high time that a chewing gum show like Police Ten 7 was spat out of the New Zealand TV vernacular, because there’s absolutely no need for it any more,” Collins said.
But what did the review actually find?
The review released today was commissioned by TVNZ, in partnership with producers Screentime NZ, and was conducted by Senior Content Consultant Karen Bieleski and Khylee Quince, the Dean of Law at AUT.
It looked at episodes across Police Ten 7‘s nearly 20-year run and sought to establish whether Maori, Pasifika and all other ethnic groups were portrayed fairly by the show.
The review found that in general, the Maori and Pacific individuals who were featured in the show were fairly portrayed, but that the show did little to discourage negative stereotypes.
Ah. Now we get to the real issue. It’s not that the show is presenting a “reality” that doesn’t exist – it’s just that it’s not lying in the way certain people would prefer.
The critics of Police Ten 7 don’t really want to eliminate bias at all: they just want the show to be biased in the direction they would like. They want the right kind of racism: bias against white people.
Auckland University of Technology Communications lecturer Richard Pamatatau agreed, saying the show typically focused on low-level crime instead of white-collar offending.
NZ Herald
The racist assumption here is that white-collar crime is a “white people” thing.
Is that true, though? Unfortunately, available statistics only break down crime and ethnicity by total offences. More granular data on types of offenders and ethnicity doesn’t seem to be available.
But, harking back to Wilfred Reilly and his taboo facts, such data are readily available from the US. US data show that non-whites in fact dominate white-collar crime. Of course, the applicability of US data to New Zealand is questionable – but it shows that the assumption that white-collar crime is a “white people” thing is racist and false.
In any case, white-collar crimes like fraud makes up just 2% of all crimes.
Finally, white-collar crime doesn’t make good television. After all, what would you rather watch? Coppers running down some bloke on the run, or a forensic accountant poring over a bunch of spreadsheets?
Ok, so, yes that is a bias of sorts, but it’s not “racist”, it’s the hard reality of television: viewers want visual excitement.
On the other hand, they certainly don’t want to be subjected to yet another finger-wagging lecture about how “racist” they are. Especially when they can work out the facts for themselves.
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