Researcher and award winning blogger Jarrod Gilbert lit a fire under the police this morning:
Dr Jarrod Gilbert: The police have deemed me unfit to undertake crime research because I know criminals
Sitting in front of me is a 20-page document. It’s my police file. It doesn’t say much, because 17 of those pages are completely blacked out.
I requested my file because I’ve been deemed by the police to be unfit to conduct research – I’ve been banned from accessing basic and uncontroversial police data. As an academic who studies crime, this is rather crippling. It’s also a staggering abuse of power.
The police have deemed me unfit because of my “association with gangs”. This association won’t surprise many people: I did New Zealand’s largest ever study of gangs. It was long, exhausting and sometimes dangerous work, but it was worth it. The research culminated in an award-winning book, and academic publications all around the world. …
Researcher on gangs censored by the police because of – an association with gangs. That is ludicrous.
Gilbert has embarrassed the government before and is no stranger to being attacked. He was the victim of a dirty politics hit from David Farrar. But the attack on Gilbert is part of a bigger picture, as quickly became clear in follow-up coverage from David Fisher:
Revealed: The police contracts ‘shutting down debate’
The contract which police make academics sign to access research data contains conditions which are increasingly found across the public service, says the union for the tertiary education sector.
NZ Tertiary Education Union president Dr Sandra Grey said she believed the conditions, which were attached to academics accessing publicly-owned data, were being created because of the potential for political discomfort.
“Government departments are very sensitive to what headlines look like – as are ministers. It’s shutting down debate,” Dr Grey said.
…
The Herald revealed this morning that a police contract governing the access of data used for academic research was conditional on police having a “veto” power over the outcome.The contract also forced academics to give police a draft of the final research in case of “negative results” and to then work with researchers to “improve its outcomes”.
The full document is include in The Herald piece, some highlights in tweets below. There has been widespread condemnation of this contract and police conduct (including, to his credit for a change, from David Farrar). Well done to Dr Gilbert and The Herald for bringing it all to light.
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