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<TITLE>FW: Colonial Dispossession: Maori opinion of police plummets after raids, says poll</TITLE>
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<a href="http://www.nzherald.co.nz/section/1/story.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10478759">http://www.nzherald.co.nz/section/1/story.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10478759</a> <a href="http://www.nzherald.co.nz/section/1/story.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10478759"><http://www.nzherald.co.nz/section/1/story.cfm?c_id=1&amp;objectid=10478759></a> <BR>
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5:00AM Wednesday November 28, 2007 By Simon Collins<BR>
<BR>
Anti-terror raids<BR>
<BR>
<B><I>* Police raids evidence posted online * Papers sent 'please explain' by <BR>
Solicitor General<BR>
</I></B><BR>
Nineteen years of painstaking police work to build links with Maoridom have <BR>
been dashed by the recent treatment of Tuhoe in the search for "terrorists", <BR>
a new poll says.<BR>
<BR>
Wellington law researcher Moana Jackson has repeated a poll he did of 2000 <BR>
Maori people in 1988 which found that Maori ranked the police 20th out of 20 <BR>
occupations, and found that earlier this year the police had climbed to 11th <BR>
out of 20.<BR>
<BR>
But he went back to this year's sample again 10 days ago - after the police <BR>
search for terrorism suspects in the Ruatoki area - and found that police <BR>
were back down to 20th out of 20 again.<BR>
<BR>
"What that shows is the fragility of the relationship between Maori people <BR>
and the institutions charged with justice in this country," he said.<BR>
<BR>
Mr Jackson, an outspoken critic of the police arrests of 17 people including <BR>
Maori sovereignty campaigners on terrorism and other charges, was invited to <BR>
give a keynote speech at a youth offending conference in Wellington <BR>
yesterday.<BR>
<BR>
His 1988 report for the Ministry of Justice was disowned by the Government <BR>
at the time because it advocated a separate Maori justice system.<BR>
<BR>
He told the conference that very little had changed for Maori in the <BR>
intervening 19 years.<BR>
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For an updated report, due to be published next June, researchers had <BR>
retraced 1347 of the original 2000 Maori people polled in 1988.<BR>
<BR>
The other 653 had died, left the country or could not be traced for other <BR>
reasons.<BR>
<BR>
A new sample of a further 2000 Maori people had also been interviewed.<BR>
<BR>
Both groups were asked to rank police, lawyers and judges in a list of 20 <BR>
occupations, where they were allowed to choose which other occupations to <BR>
include.<BR>
<BR>
In the initial re-run earlier this year, police were ranked 11th, lawyers <BR>
18th, real estate agents 19th and "a new group identified by our people, of <BR>
television celebrities", who were ranked 20th.<BR>
<BR>
"The shift in the police position is a result of work done by a large number <BR>
of people culminating in the establishment of a Responsiveness to Maori <BR>
initiative within the police," Mr Jackson said.<BR>
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But those gains were lost after the Ruatoki exercise.<BR>
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Mr Jackson restated his 1988 analysis that high Maori crime rates could not <BR>
be blamed solely on immediate factors such as poverty or dysfunctional <BR>
families, but could be traced back to 167 years of dispossession and <BR>
marginalisation.<BR>
<BR>
<FONT COLOR="#0000FF"><I>"If you are dispossessed, if your land is taken, if your power is denied, if <BR>
your right to say things in your own way and to make sense of the world in <BR>
ways that are unique to you and your history are taken away," he said, "then <BR>
you are oppressed."<BR>
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