New Zealand’s police commissioner says he understands the potential impact the country’s criminal deportees have on smaller Pacific Island nations.
Commissioner Richard Chambers’ comments on RNZ Pacific Waves come as the region’s police bosses gathered for the annual Pacific Islands Chiefs of Police conference in Waitangi.
The meeting, which is closed to media, began yesterday.
Chambers said a range of issues were on the agenda, including transnational organised crime and the training of police forces.
Across the Pacific, the prevalence of methamphetamine and its role in driving social, criminal and health crises have thrust the problem of organised crime into the spotlight.
Commissioner Chambers said New Zealand had offered support to its fellow Pacific nations to combat transnational organised crime, in particular around the narcotics trade.
Deportation policies
However, the country’s own transnational crime advisory group also identified the country’s deportation policies as a “significant contributor to the rise of organised crime in the Pacific”.
In 2022, a research report showed that New Zealand returned 400 criminal deportees to Pacific nations between 2013 and 2018.
The report from the Lowy Institute also said criminal deportees from New Zealand, as well as Australia and the US, were a significant contributor to transnational crime in the Pacific.
When Chambers was asked about the issue and whether New Zealand’s criminal deportation policy undermined work against organised crime across the region, he said it had not been raised with him directly.
“The criminal networks that we are dealing with, in particular those such as the cartels out of South America, the CJNG [cartels] and Sinaloa cartels, who really do control a lot of the cocaine and also methamphetamine trades, also parts of Asia with the Triads,” Commissioner Chambers said.
“I know that the Pacific commissioners that I work with are very, very focused on what we can do to combat and disrupt a lot of that activity at source, in both Asia and South America.
“So that’s where our focus has been, and that’s what the commissioners have been asking me for in terms of support.”
Pacific nation difficulties
He said he understood the difficulties law enforcement in Pacific nations faced regarding criminal deportees, as New Zealand faced similar challenges under Australia’s deportation policy.
In New Zealand, the country’s returned nationals from Australia are known as 501 deportations, named after the section of the Australian Migration Act which permits their deportation due to criminal convictions.
These individuals have often spent the majority of their lives in Australia and have no family or ties to New Zealand but are forced to return due to Australia’s immigration laws.
New Zealand’s authorities have tracked how these deportees — who number in the hundreds — have contributed significantly to the country’s increasingly sophisticated and established organised crime networks over the past decade.
Chambers said that because police dealt with the real impacts of Australia’s 501 law, he could relate to what his Pacific counterparts faced.
“I understand from the New Zealand perspective [which is] the impact that New Zealand nationals returning to our country have on New Zealand, and the reality is, they’re offending, they’re re-offending.
“I suspect it’s no different from our Pacific colleagues in their own countries. And it may be something that we can talk about.”
This week’s conference was scheduled to finish tomorrow. Speakers due to appear included Interpol Secretary-General Valdecy Urquiza and Pacific Islands Forum Secretary-General Baron Waqa.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.