Le Grice without Grace

 

Is this a joke?

Ridiculing the NZ Police is very close to being the fashionable norm these days.

Those who do it point to, among other things, the perceived lack of action against the illegal gathering of gangs during covid, support for the iwi roadblocks in Northland, and their failure to arrest an escalating rise in all forms of crime.

None of which is the fault of frontline police officers, and I can imagine they are just as frustrated as we are, and perhaps even embarrassed, over the diffidence of those in power who seemingly won’t—at this woke time— allow them to do the job they signed up for.

Personally, I have nothing but respect for those frontline officers. They have a difficult and sometimes dangerous job. Let’s show a bit of appreciation.

And I mean you, Dr Jade Sophia Le Grice.

Here is the story:

On Tuesday, police arrested two young offenders at the Britomart train station. Those offenders were among a group of 12 who allegedly assaulted a security officer outside the station. The two arrested were charged on suspicion of fighting in one case and suspicion of obstruction and assaulting a police officer in the other.

The arrests weren’t made without difficulty, and of course, as is the case these days, they were filmed by a bystander and uploaded to social media.

This brought out the predictable claims of police brutality.

But as predictable as those claims are, Dr Le Grice’s tilt for 15 minutes of fame has left me wondering where academics such as her come from and whether they have the realistic expectation that I will treat them as anything but a joke.

Dr Jade Le Grice, a senior lecturer at Auckland University, tweeted, saying the arrest video showed “vectors of colonial racism [and sexism] ... again brought to bear”.

Really? “Colonial Racism”? Sexism”?

Sorry, but those are, to me, trite terms trotted out when somebody feels the need to be provocative and claim undeserved importance.

They are also dreadfully old-fashioned. And, by the way, at least one of those arrested appears to be pakeha.

And who is Dr Jade Sophia Le Grice? Well, she is a deep thinker. Either that or she makes it up as she goes along. I think the latter. But I’ll leave the following for you to judge for yourself. This is what she says about herself on her University of Auckland page.

 

“My research approach situates mātauranga Māori, the diversity of Māori culture and identity, and the lived experiences of Māori people as legitimate within our local psychology context. It also involves interfacing with key stakeholders and agents of change to maximise opportunities for praxis, social and institutional change.

“One branch of my research programme applies this approach to the context of reproductive decision making, reproductive justice and inter-related domains of abortion, sexuality education, contraception, reproductive health, and maternity. Through this work I have also explored the importance of developing feminism that is historically congruent, and locally derived, to produce decolonizing psychological knowledge.

“A second branch attends to the social and cultural conditions within which rangatahi Māori develop identities, navigate a colonial context, and create agentic pathways. This extends to decolonising sociocultural contexts of meaning making, understanding supportive relational contexts of whanaungatanga, attending to the development of Māori gendered sexual subjectivities, and Māori identities in the context of state care.”