Guest post ‘Thematic Review: The Policing of public protests in New Zealand’: A Critical Response

Guest post by Kyle R. Matthews, Social Movement Scholar¹

Introduction

On 18 February the Independent Police Conduct Authority (IPCA) released ‘Thematic Review: The Policing of public protests in New Zealand’ which recommends changes to legislation and policing around public protests in Aotearoa.

This report lands in the context of the police facing what they claim is a more challenging protest policing environment. Globally, this includes the formation of more radical climate activist groups such as Extinction Rebellion, Just Stop Oil, and anti-coal groups who have engaged in disruptive protests at fossil fuel sites, motorways, and city centres (Fernandez & Scholl, 2014; ITV News, 2021; Udell, 2024). These movements have developed local variants, such as Extinction Rebellion Aotearoa New Zealand, Restore Passenger Rail/Climate Liberation Aotearoa, who have brought these disruptive strategies to Aotearoa, joining existing groups such as Greenpeace (Matthews, 2023).

There has also been a growth of far- and alt-right movements who have adopted protest strategies traditionally associated with progressive movements. In Aotearoa this has been felt in terms of anti-Covid protests, especially the occupation of Parliament’s grounds in 2022 (Cunningham et al., 2022; Independent Police Conduct Authority, 2023; O’Brien & Huntington, 2022). These right-wing movements present a range of challenges to the police in terms of policing protests including distrust of and unwillingness to comply with authority, resorting to violence, and a lack of leadership.

Protest movements challenging police and their ability to police protest is not new to Aotearoa however. The Springbok Tour protests, Māori resistance to the theft of land in places like Parihaka, Raglan Golf Course, Takaparawhau (Bastion Point), Ihumātao, and the 1951 Waterfront Dispute all provided significant challenges to the police and protest policing.

Numerous countries have responded by strengthening the laws around protest and the ability of police to intervene. In the United States anti-protest bills have been introduced in 22 states since the start of 2025 (Lakhani, 2025). In the United Kingdom new laws have been used to sentence protesters for up to five years for encouraging individuals to block highways (Berglund, 2024; Berglund et al., 2024; Muncie, 2020; Pickard, 2019). And Australian states have criminalised specific protest tactics such as ‘locking on’ to or disrupting fossil fuel infrastructure (Gulliver et al., 2023; Torre, 2019). Despite these anti-democratic measures criminalising protest the United Kingdom and Australia are identified in the report as countries that we compare ourselves with in terms of how we should police protest.

In this document I summarise the IPCA report and critique some of its recommendations. I suggest that while the report raises valid concerns, it should not be implemented by the government.

Summary of the Report

The IPCA is an independent body set up by Parliament to act as a watchdog on the New Zealand Police. Headed by a judge, its primary role is to investigate and resolve complaints against the police by members of the public. Sometimes it will instigate investigations, either because of an IPCA decision, or after specific incidents such as police-caused serious injury or death. This report is a thematic review, which are broader reports issued by the IPCA to consider issues either arising from incidents leading to multiple complaints which require a ‘big picture’ response, or which raise serious questions about police policies and practices.

This thematic review was instigated to respond to issues relating to the policing of recent protests in Aotearoa: the occupation of Parliament’s grounds by a loose coalition of anti-vaccination groups in February-March 2022, the March 2023 rally and counter-protest around the visit of Kelly Minshull (Posie Parker), and recent protests relating to Gaza. The first two led to the IPCA receiving numerous complaints about the police. The report identifies these protests as highlighting an increasingly challenging protest environment which police are struggling to respond to, including conflict between protesters and counter-protesters, changes in protest strategies and tactics to be more disruptive (eg. Restore Passenger Rail blocking of motorways), and tactics that protesters have adopted to anticipate police actions.

The report identifies the following issues:

1. Current legislation relating to the management of protests is unclear:
   • Currently protest rights are governed by multiple pieces of legislation including the Crimes Act, Summary Offences Act, and the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act).
   • There are limited specific offences and powers designed to manage public gatherings such as protests.
   • Police therefore use a range of different offences (public disorder, trespass, public nuisance, obstruction of a police officer) which sometimes leads to inappropriate outcomes.
   • A lack of clear statutory guidance means that police and councils are making difficult decisions in very specific situations without clear guidance. 
2. Challenges of balancing protest rights with the rights of others and reasonable public order:
   • Some existing council bylaws are inconsistent with the NZBORA 1990.
   • Where they are consistent with the NZBORA 1990 councils have limited resources to enforce them.
   • Police will tend to prioritise safety and order over protesters’ rights when enforcing the law.
   • Without clear statutory guidelines and associated regulations, codes of practice, training manuals, etc, protest policing is applied unevenly across different protests.
   • It is challenging to consistently apply the outcome of this balancing of rights across different policing districts and protest contexts so that it is clear to police and protesters.

3. Whether protest activity should be better regulated by requiring protest organisers to notify councils and the police about protests:
   • Currently practice and protester behaviour varies between different jurisdictions.
   • The need to roster on additional police staff on in short time frames is very expensive because of the collective agreement with police officers.
4. What powers the police should have to limit protester actions in advance of protests and on the day. 
5. What additional powers should police have to regulate protest activities, particularly new legislation and criminal offences.

The report recommends:

1. That Parliament legislates a “Peaceful Assembly Act” which would govern the rights and responsibilities of protesters and responsibilities and powers of police in relation to protest. Some comparable jurisdictions have similar specific legislation (the United Kingdom, several Australian states) but others don’t. The Act would:
   • Encourage protesters to notify councils and the police of protest events by protecting protesters from some current offences (disorderly behaviour, breach of the peace, obstructing a police officer) if they comply with pre-protest requirements prepared by police, and reasonable instructions of the Senior Police Officer at the protest.
   • If protest organisers or individual protesters breach these requirements or instructions they would be subject to arrest and being charged for a new crime. The exact nature of this crime and the amount of punishment that would be applied to it isn’t outlined.
   • Add two new crimes relating to protests against critical infrastructure and the picketing of private residences.
2. That police receive additional training on the balancing of rights, risk assessments, and crowd dynamics. Suggest that many police have either a limited understanding, or overreach in their application of various crimes which enable them to control protests and protesters.
3. That protest groups be given more responsibility for the financial costs that police face when protests are notified in short time frames, or not notified at all. It does not explore this idea in more depth, indicate what sort of costs protest groups might face, or discuss how this might discourage protests.

Assessment of the Report

I highlight four key problems with the report: it serves the police rather than protesters, further limits freedom of expression and assembly, provides a legislative opportunity for the expansion of police powers, and increases reliance on police discretion.

1. It Relies on and Serves the Police Rather than Protesters

The IPCA, in theory, acts for the public as a watchdog on the police to make sure that their powers are used appropriately and within the law. It does, as part of that work, make recommendations to the police and the government. But it is supposed to be ‘our’ organisation, not ‘theirs’. It is therefore concerning that the report seems to largely rely on police opinions and serve the needs of the police rather than protesters.

Who you work with and talk to helps determine your conclusions. The report has been written after consultation with government departments, police officers, and academic and policing experts from a range of jurisdictions. In particular, the Police in had a significant role in determining the direction of the report. The report was “discussed and agreed with Police from an early stage, and some components of the review have been conducted jointly with Police” (p. 4). The report writers did not consult with state and non-state agencies which might provide valuable perspectives on protest rights. This would include civil society organisations such as the New Zealand Council for Civil Liberties, the Human Rights Commission, Iwi Chairs, and a range of activist groups who are subject to protest policing.

The report’s recommendations largely respond to and serve the needs of police. The report identifies the challenges faced by police when managing protests (cost, having sufficient staff, training, implementation) as the problem to be solved. There is value in understanding police perspectives on protest and how police might better engage with protesters (Earl & Soule, 2006). Police culture and the hierarchical nature of the police as an institution incentives the adoption of behaviours which avoid certain types of trouble, particularly coming to the attention of senior police officers or oversight bodies (Waddington, 1999, 2012). Police are therefore incentivised to deal with protesters in ways which resolve issues while avoiding public or hierarchical attention on their actions. This can often involve restricting protesters’ rights in small ways in order to end protests.

The report nods towards upholding the rights of protesters and improving their ability to protest, but it takes a police perspective on what that looks like. There is no analysis of protesters’ perspectives on protest policing, nor what changes they would like to see made. If the report’s writers paid more attention to protester understandings of protest policing, they might, for example, have understood that police officers do not apply the law equally, instead sometimes targeting protesters in ways which skirt around the law but help the police achieve their goals. The question of what improving protest policing from the perspective of protesters might have formed part of the report.

2. It Further Limits Freedom of Expression and Assembly

The recommendations limit existing rights to freedom of expression and assembly in four ways. First, the report suggests expanding police powers to manage protests by increasing the administration requirements for protesters. These requirements include notifying councils and the police about protests and imposing costs on protesters for traffic management plans. As part of the notification process the police would be empowered to create and enforce a set of expectations about appropriate protester behaviour.

If protesters comply and operate under the protest plans that this notification system creates they will be safe from the charges of disorderly behaviour, breach of the peace, and obstructing a police officer, but only if the police agree that they are complying with the plan set by police. This follows a trend in protest policing for police to encourage (through a system of ‘sticks’ and ‘carrots’) protesters to self-manage themselves in dialogue or liaison with the police (Gilmore et al., 2019; Gorringe & Rosie, 2008, 2013; Gorringe et al., 2012; Holgersson & Knutsson, 2011). Protection from these charges is the carrot to encourage compliance with the notification system. If protesters do not notify the police about the protest or receive a protest plan from the police and then fail to follow it, they face a new – undefined in the report – charge. This charge is the stick to enforce compliance with the notification system. This requirement increases the requirements on protesters when organising protests, and limits the ability to hold spontaneous protests.

Second, this system of notifying the police about protests and agreeing to a protest plan enables the management of more radical forms of protest by empowering the police to define, without reference to a specific crime, what protest behaviour is acceptable. Outside of general statements about human rights, these definitions are not outlined in the report. This change would encourage police to manage difficult protest behaviour by indicating that it falls outside the acceptable behaviours as agreed to, rather than manage it by responding to protester actions with warnings, arrests, charges, etc.

Third, the system is built on the assumption of compliance with the state, behaviour that is often contrary to the very nature of protest. Several protest groups have valid reasons for not wanting to engage with or comply with the police. They may have concerns about the police as an institution which targets minorities. They may be protesting police powers and actions. The new system forces them to engage with the institution that they have concerns about.

And fourth, the report suggests creating two new offences relating to specific protest targets – critical infrastructure and private residences. These new charges are not justified in the report beyond ‘these activities should not be allowed’. These crimes will increase the consequences of protest action which targets infrastructure (such as fossil fuel infrastructure) or private homes. They limit protest activity by defining acceptable protest targets. There are potential reasons which may justify these new charges. One could imagine, for example, a politician’s family being harassed by protesters regularly. However, this justification is not provided for in the report.

3. It Provides a Further Legislative Opportunity for the Reduction of Protest Rights

One of the tendencies of modern legislation is that it tends to expand the power of the state and diminish human and civil rights through ‘legislative creep’ – a series of small legislative changes which, in isolation, appear minor, but together, substantially amend rights. Legislative creep fundamentally transforms social environments like the ways that protests are policed in fundamental ways over time without drawing attention to that fundamental change. Opponents of the fundamental change are less likely to oppose every small change.

In recent decades protest rights in Aotearoa have been reduced by search and surveillance, counter-terrorism, and foreign influence laws, laws governing state agencies such as the Government Communication and Security Bureau and the Security Intelligence Service, and laws for specific events, such as the proposed APEC 2021 bill. Each legislative change is justified in itself as a ‘minor change’, to ‘clarify’ existing law, or to respond to ‘modern threats’ and a ‘changing environment’.

With the benefit of a long view this collection of laws has fundamentally reshaped protest rights in various contexts and transformed elements of how protests are policed. I suggest therefore that each individual law should be viewed as part of a bigger picture that forms a trend of restricting protest rights and responded to along those lines.

4. It Increases Reliance on Police Discretion

Police discretion is a fundamental component of our justice system. Police officers and their superiors make frequent decisions about how to respond to incidents, whether to arrest individuals or take alternative actions, whether to charge those individuals, and what to charge them with. These decisions can have negative impacts on minority communities, such as racial minorities. In Aotearoa, for example, Māori are 11 percent more likely to be charged than Pākehā for similar actions (Brettkelly, 2024).

The report empowers police officer discretion in relation to protest policing by giving police officers, both before and during protests, the ability to define appropriate protester behaviour. Protesters would face the risk of arrest if they were to step outside those boundaries. While protest policing consistency between jurisdictions would be welcome, this reliance on police discretion raises two risks. The first is police applying different standards of appropriate protester behaviour between groups. The second is responding to ‘difficult’ protest groups by limiting their actions during protests. An alternative approach would be to improve police education about existing laws, rights to protest, and appropriate strategies to respond to protest.

Conclusion

In the context of increased global criminalisation of protest it is not surprising that Aotearoa is facing calls to take similar steps. What was surprising was that it was the IPCA – an independent watchdog of the police – that recommended increasing police powers, a recommendation that it made in consultation with the police rather than the organisations which will face those powers on the street.

This report makes several recommendations which empower police and impinge on the rights of protesters in several ways. A proposed system of protest notifications and agreed protest plans forces compliance with the ways that police want to see protests occur, and new offences provide police with the power to enforce that compliance. The new system comes with potential costs and risks for protest groups, some of whom have valid reasons not to engage with the police.

There is valid work to be done in how protests are policed, and protest rights upheld. The report highlights that police find the current system confusing and therefore implement it unevenly. That is unhelpful. However, the solution should be to create clarity through clear definitions, education, and rights-based approaches. There is 35 years of jurisprudence, including significant court cases such as Begg, Oosterman, Morse, and Moncreff-Spittle which have set clear guidelines for the police about how to apply NZBORA. 

This report highlights that there are a range of understandings of how protests are and should be policed. An appropriate response to that issue would be to clarify rather than strengthen police powers around protest policing. This report does not do that, but instead uses this lack of clarity to limit freedom of expression and assembly. It should not be implemented.

References

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Berglund, O., Franco Brotto, T., Pantazis, C., Rossdale, C., & Pessoa Cavalcanti, R. (2024). Criminalisation and Repression of Climate and Environmental Protest. University of Bristol. 

Brettkelly, S. (2024, 22 August). A Deep Dive Into Police Bias. Newsroom. https://newsroom.co.nz/2024/08/22/a-deep-dive-into-police-bias/

Cunningham, M., La Rooij, M., & Spoonley, P. (Eds.). (2022). Histories of Hate: The radical right in Aotearoa New Zealand. Otago University Press. 

Earl, J., & Soule, S. A. (2006). Seeing Blue: A police-centered explanation of protest policing. Mobilization: An International Journal, 11(2), 145-164. https://doi.org/10.17813/maiq.11.2.u1wj8w41n301627u 

Fernandez, L. A., & Scholl, C. (2014). The Criminalization of Global Protest: The Application of Counter-Insurgency. In V. Eick & B. Briken (Eds.), Urban (In)Security: Policing the Neoliberal Crisis (pp. 275-297). Red Quill Books. 

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Gorringe, H., Stott, C., & Rosie, M. (2012). Dialogue Police, Decision Making, and the Management of Public Order During Protest Crowd Events. Journal of Investigative Psychology and Offender Profiling, 9(2), 111-125. https://doi.org/10.1002/jip.1359 

Gulliver, R. E., Banks, R., Fielding, K. S., & Louis, W. R. (2023). The Criminalization of Climate Change Protest. Contention: the Multidisciplinary Journal of Social Protest, 11(1), 24-54. https://doi.org/10.3167/cont.2023.110103 

Holgersson, S., & Knutsson, J. (2011). Dialogue Policing: A Means for Less Collective Violence? In T. Madensen & J. Knutsson (Eds.), Preventing Crowd Violence (pp. 191-215). Lynne Rienner. 

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Lakhani, N. (2025, 9 April). US Intensifies Crackdown on Peaceful Protest Under Trump. Tjhe Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/apr/09/anti-protest-bills-trump

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Pickard, S. (2019). Excessive Force, Coercive Policing and Criminalisation of Dissent. Repressing young people’s protest in twenty-first century Britain. Revista de Psicologia Social, 77(4), e139. https://doi.org/10.3989/ris.2019.77.4.19.002 

Torre, G. (2019). Australian State Proposes Two-year Prison Sentence for Possession of Extinction Rebellion ‘human lock’. The Telegraph. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/10/10/australian-state-proposes-two-year-prison-sentence-possession/amp/

Udell, J. (2024). Throwing Tomato Soup at a Van Gogh: How Climate Activists Leveraged Legal Theory, Criminal Law, and Moral Outrage to Conduct a Radical Protest Campaign in the World’s Most Famous Museums. Villanova Environmental Law Journal, 35(1), 63-93. 

Waddington, P. A. J. (1999). Police (Canteen) Subculture: An Appreciation. British Journal of Criminology, 39, 287. Waddington, P. A. J. (2012). Cop Culture. In R. Reiner, T. Newburn, & J. Peay (Eds.), Policing : politics, culture and control : essays in honour of Robert Reiner (pp. 89-110). Hart Publishing.

1. While I currently work at Te Herenga Waka, this document is a personal piece of work drawing on my doctoral research. ↩︎