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Known to all as ‘Jug’, Whangaparaoa’s Community Constable Ian Price is a familiar sight strolling through the mall, visiting schools and giving talks to community groups. Jug has spent more than 30 years in the police, most of which involved shift work, so his more or less regular nine-to-five, five days a week job as a Community Constable provides welcome balance, giving him more time for his family and the occasional game of golf. A career policeman, Jug likes what he calls ‘old school policing’, including walking the beat and getting to know the community.
I joined the police as a fresh-faced farm boy from Banks Peninsula, when I was 19 years old. Becoming a police officer was my childhood ambition – my grandfather was in the police in the late 1920s and 30s, and I wanted to follow in his footsteps. For a time, in the 1980s, I served in Lyttleton, in the same station where he had once worked. I was sworn in as a police officer on January 19, 1976 –a group of us who graduated from police college (in the old army barracks at Trentham) at the same time are having our first reunion in March next year in Christchurch. My first job as a constable was on the beat in Christchurch, then I progressed on to Incident Cars, and spent three years in Lyttelton station. Because of the port there, the pubs were pretty lively with seamen of lots of different nationalities, fuelled with a bit of Dutch courage.
My brother and I grew up on Gebbies Pass, at the foot of Lyttelton Harbour, so Lyttleton was home turf for me. My father was a radio technician and there was a big manual radio transmitter on the site where we lived. There were five houses for married technicians and quarters for single men. They would crank up the transmitter by hand in the morning and maintain it and keep it running – until all that became automated. I went to boarding school at Christchurch Boys and loved it, although I was by no means an academic. I loved sport and was in the first XV and rowing eight. Our rugby team competed overseas in Britain and France, which was a great experience and one of the few times I’ve actually travelled outside New Zealand. When I left school I worked on a farm for 12 months, just biding my time until I was old enough to join the police.
Police work has been even better than I expected it would be. I still enjoy coming to work – although that’s not to say I don’t have bad days and even bad weeks. One thing I find frustrating is political correctness, both inside and outside the police – it makes people frightened to say what they really think. I like to call a spade a spade, and believe in getting angry, then getting over it in preference to letting things bottle up inside. Years of police work have not soured my view of human nature one bit. You have to remember that police only deal with around one or two percent of the population made up of criminals or wayward youth; that means that 99 percent of the community are law-abiding citizens.
My wife, who was a non-sworn member of the police, got a job in Greymouth and I worked there too for a couple of years doing general duties, but after that I was appointed to a job as sole-charge policeman at Whataroa and that is where I ended up spending a large chunk of my career – around 14 years. Whataroa is a remote saw milling township, 30km north of Franz Josef in South Westland. The nearest police station to mine was 75km away to the north and there was another one 180km to the south, so I had to be resourceful and do a bit of everything. As well as police duties, I was registrar of a courthouse that was one of the most remote in New Zealand, outside the Chatham Islands, and sat once every three months. I was also the bailiff, and the clerk for the coroner, who was a local farmer. Working in a community like this meant being available 24/7; I couldn’t get away or even divert the phone (which, even though it was the 1980s, had a crank handle and was the only one in the district that wasn’t on a party line). There was a lot of search and rescue work – 95 percent of which were rescues, rather than searches. I was officer in charge of around 250 rescues, including helicopter and plane crashes, people drowned in rivers or things like sprained ankles or other injuries that happened in the bush. There were some dramatic rescue and recovery missions, including the time I was lowered by helicopter to the side of a mountain, 7000 feet up, to recover a body. The Westland National Park has a large number of huts and a diverse range of people using it from mountaineers to people walking tracks in jandals. The climate was another factor in the mix, and it was pretty wild – the year I left we had 18 feet of rain.
My wife was born in that district and it was a great place to bring up our children. When our family – three boys and a girl –attended the local school, 11 of the 40 kids on the roll were their cousins. When I moved to Culverden in North Canterbury to work on a two-man station, it was a huge change just having one week on and one week off call duty. There was a police station every 30km and a lot of police working together, and plenty of back up. The environment was totally different (down to 26 inches of rain per year) and the population was mainly dairy and high country sheep farmers. This was also my first time doing traffic, after the merger with the Ministry of Transport. The first two cars I pulled up for speeding were both women and when they cried, I couldn’t write out the ticket! I think the road toll alone was a clear indication that the police needed to get involved in traffic. The results of the merger have not been perfect, but police have a real focus on reducing trauma on the road, and the associated huge social cost.
After eight years in Culverden I had a marriage collapse. I applied to spend six weeks on Americas Cup campaign duty at the viaduct basin in Auckland, in 2001. This was a real case of “country boy comes to the city” – a big culture shock to say the least. There was no way I wanted to live in the city, but while I was in the viaduct I met my wife Joanne, who is from the Hibiscus Coast. If you’d told me then that I would end up working 40km north of Auckland I would never have believed it. We had a long distance relationship for three years or so, then got married six years ago. I still can’t spell ‘latte’, but I’ve got used to city life now. I transferred from Culverden to the Highway Patrol, based in Orewa, and then found a vacancy for this Community Constable’s job four years ago.
It’s a good community here, and as a bonus I get to have most weekends off. Day to day police work involves neighbourhood issues, graffiti and other forms of vandalism as well as talking to schools and community groups – everyone from the scouts to Probus. Graffiti is a bugbear for me, and I think one of the problems with it is lack of parental responsibility, but again it’s only one percent of the population involved in this type of crime. Communication is key to solving crime. In a caring community, apathy does not exist. If everyone turns a blind eye, crimes such as graffiti will continue, because if a parent or caregiver finds a marker pen or spray can in a young person’s possession and doesn’t do anything about it, they become part of the problem. The same can be said about a person who sees a crime happen outside their home and doesn’t call the police. Everyone wants safer communities, but we have to do it together. The Whangaparaoa station, where I’m based, is an enquiry base, so we enquire into thefts, burglaries and assaults and the guys here work hard to solve them. Conflict resolution is a major part of the job, and can be extremely challenging, because often police find themselves the meat in the sandwich – there are always two sides to every argument, and sometimes even more. It can be hard to solve crime and come to resolutions that are satisfactory for all concerned. Of course this is intertwined with the judicial process and, in this politically correct day and age, everyone has rights. It has taken me a while to find a niche here, but what works for me is following ‘old fashioned’ policing values. This includes being seen on the beat around the peninsula and doing a lot of other preventative work. Prevention is where policing is headed these days, and it is certainly a lot easier than cure.
