But every so often, a flashpoint comes up ... and I find myself compelled to write about it.
On Wednesday March 9th, just such an emergent event occurred. Four police officers were shot down near Kawerau. Two - at the time of writing - remain hospitalized, one seriously.
The culprit was a man of Maori extraction. A Maori Police Liason was sent in almost twenty two hours after the start of the armed standoff with police to negotiate with the offender. Forty two minutes later, Rhys Warren peacefully handed himself over into custody. Immediately prior to this, members of Warren's family criticized the Police operation for failing to include Tikanga Maori.
By Friday the 11th, the controversy had well and truly percolated out into the commentariat-sphere, with a Maori academic appearing on TVNZ's Breakfast programme and stating that "if a cop knocks on the door, he'd better be Maori or I'm shutting the door and asking for an Iwi liason officer."
The backlash towards this entire sequence of events was predictable. The talkback radio brigade swung into action both out on the airwaves and in their new hunting grounds amongst various media outlets' social networking pages. Twitter expressed a minor flutter of interest. Coming hot on the heels of news stories about members of the NZ Police allegedly racially abusing New Zealanders of African extraction with terms more commonly associated with rogue (or, alternatively, establishment, depending upon your point of view) members of the LAPD ... there was always going to be a conversation about "race", "reverse racism", and relative privilege (or lack thereof) in the enforcement of Her Majesty's laws here.
But these specific spikes of media interest are not what this column is directly going to be about. Instead, they're a springboard, and an invitation for you to re-examine your own perspectives about the issues they've raised. Remember: way back almost a month ago when I kicked this column off, I stated that one of my intents in writing it was going to be to use my own personal experiences in order to broaden minds and help you University students to see things a bit differently.
Odds are that many of you reading this column are from reasonably settled backgrounds. You probably don't regularly associate with criminals, and it's highly unlikely that the majority of you have ever been arrested, let alone seen the inside of a cell for a protracted period of time, or found yourself subject to the confines of the dock down the District Courts.
From that position, it's quite easy to take what you might call a "colourblind" perspective on reality - one that eschews some important nuances and shading in favour of seeing things as nice, neat and black-and-white (or, if we're talking racial issues, everyone-as-white - sort-of).
In practical terms, that perhaps means that when issues of "privilege", or what the Police delicately refer to as their own "subconscious bias" come up ... you might be tempted to roll your eyes and assume that this is just simply what happens when overserious sociology students get loose into the public consciousness. In other words, not to take the charge nor the concept too seriously.
I've lost count of the number of intelligent, caring people I've met over the years who're fine with believing that there's the occasional racist cop (or, more rarely, judge) - but who'll balk completely at believing the justice system all-up actually tends to treat people differently based on their race or class.
I must admit that I went into law school feeling pretty much the same thing: that while there might be some bad apples out there, if you didn't commit the crime, then you weren't going to find yourself subject to the criminal justice system (occasional outliers like Arthur Allan Thomas excepted). Disparities in arrest-rates, conviction rates and incarceration rates along race or class lines looked largely like they might be the result of there simply being more crime to deal with in more marginalized socio-economic areas (with their accompanying different populations).
Being arrested - and suddenly working my way through the criminal justice system myself - changed all that.
All of a sudden, I came up face to face with the differences between how I'd been treated pretty much all my adult life without realizing it ... and how many other citizens of this fair nation experience the long arm of the law on a daily, potentially discriminatory basis.
At every step of the process - from how the cops treated me during my arrest and after through to being out on bail within a few hours, and even my ongoing bail applications not being seriously opposed at court ... I got off easy.
I know I got off easy, because both my first defence lawyer and an array of my more ... nefarious associates all told me so. Based upon their own experiences - on whichever side of the dock and counsel-client relationship - they'd been expecting a much, much harsher degree of treatment for me. In fact, I've been straight-up told by people in a strong position to know that if I'd been, say, a brown kid from Otara rather than who I am ... I'd right now be wearing an anklet at minimum, and quite likely a guest of Her Majesty otherwise.
The reasons for this aren't entirely easy to quantify, and not all of them have exclusively to do with what you might term the 'fixed stars of my birth' (i.e. my "privilege"). Some of my choices (for example cracking up literally every cop I came into contact with with a string of one-liners, and having a positive political discussion with the arresting officers in the back of the cop car all the way to the station) definitely helped. But I wouldn't have been in a position to make those choices in the first place if the cops had, say, decided to treat me like a young hoodlum in the first instance rather than engaging with me as an intelligent, articulate - even eloquent - human being.
Now this isn't me taking half a column to "apologize" for my privilege or condemn other people for being similarly lucky. Because that's not what the concept of "privilege" is for.
Instead, I'm using it as intended - as a tool to try and better understand the world around us and my own experiences within it.
And it's in that spirit of "understanding the world" a bit better that I have some empathy for beleaguered academics saying prima-facie incendiary things about how they'd refuse to speak to cops not of their own ethnic group.
Because I recognize that for many of their people, their experience with the police - and, for that matter, the churning rest of the criminal justice system - hasn't been, and isn't likely to be so positive or even-handed as mine was.
Once you start using the concept of "privilege" to see the world differently - and perhaps come to understand that not everyone experiences our civic institutions in quite the same way you do - it gets a lot harder to simply write off anti-police prejudices or the like as entirely unfounded "reverse racism" or whatever the talkback anti-tumblr brigade's classing attempts at securing equitable treatment under the law as today.
In any case, if we want a better society ... it first falls to us to see what the one we're already in is actually like for ourselves. Empathy allows us to do that. Handily, as applies this scenario, without having to be arrested nor charged first.
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