This article presents the findings of a 'first cut' study on the size of New Zealand's private security industry, its continued growth over the past 30 years and its increasingly significant role in the policing of New Zealand society. The article documents the increasing private and public sector reliance on private security and demonstrates that, in common with Europe, North America and Australia, the public police are no longer monopoly providers of policing services. The article identifies and discusses significant drivers of that growth in the New Zealand context and concludes by drawing attention to arrange of normative and practical issues associated with the growth of private security including the limitations and inaccuracies of the official data, the lack of a strategic relationship between the police and the various industry associations, inadequate and outmoded regulation and the potential development of inequitable access to policing and security services.

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The government of Aotearoa/New Zealand has been widely praised for decisive actions during the COVID-19 pandemic. The official 'lockdown' (entailing closed borders, emergency powers and instructions for everyone to 'stay at home') was introduced before any community transmission of the virus. In early June 2020, there had been 22 deaths from COVID-19 in NZ and, at 8th June 2020, there were no 'active' cases in the country. Life is returning to 'normal', notwithstanding stringent border controls. Running alongside the praise, however, has been a raft of criticisms about how authorities have circumvented usual standards of protection to embed controls and expand state power in detrimental ways. In the criminal justice sphere, the pandemic has given rise to the hurried escalation of remote Court technologies that challenge due process, alongside burgeoning remand populations and long prison lockdowns with women at Auckland Women's Prison being kept to their cells for up to 29 hours at a time (Espiner, 2020; Lynch and Tinsley, 2020). More broadly, there has been a backlash about the scale of intrusions from new legislation. For example, the COVID-19 Public Health Response Act was rushed through under urgency, without any Māori consultation, in May 2020 as the country's COVID-19 cases were declining (Aikman, 2020a). The Act gives extraordinary powers for entry to premises, such that 'An enforcement officer may enter, without a warrant, any land, building, craft, vehicle, place, or thing' on 'reasonable grounds' (s.20(1)). It will sit on the statute books for 2 years but will require renewal every 90 days. In this settler state, in which controls and punishments are differentially targeted on racialised grounds, Māori inevitably bear the brunt of increased controls, surveillance, incarceration or the removal of rights within the pandemic. In this respect, COVID-19 shifts are contextualised by a system in which Māori are over-policed, over-sentenced and over-punished (Whaipooti, 2020).

Contrary to much political and media discourse, quantitative and qualitative results of a research study suggest that the New Zealand public does not regard crime and disorder as escalating or serious problems in local neighbourhoods. Across a range of different areas, the study found that a majority of respondents did not regard crime in their local community as a serious problem compared with other districts; neither did they report that it was an escalating problem. In contrast, respondents were much more likely to report that crime problems were serious and increasing across the nation as a whole. This discrepancy might be explained by the reliance of the public on media coverage of crime for information on national crime trends and patterns. Analysis of qualitative 'crime talk' in local communities showed that respondents had highly-nuanced perspectives on crime patterns in the neighbourhood and often regarded problems as relatively unproblematic nuisance behaviour that often was not a significant concern in wider terms. The article concludes that key components of populist politics, apparently based on meeting widespread concerns about law and order, assume public fear, concern and intolerance of crime and anti-social behaviour that is often not actually apparent in public discussion.