New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern on Sunday issued a formal apology to the peoples of the Pacific for the historic racist police.
The apology concerned the Dawn Raids, a government initiative to deport people for immigration offenses during the 1970s. Ardern drew attention to how the Dawn raids involved the physical elimination of the people targeted by raids and verbal abuse.
The police have disproportionately targeted the peoples of the Pacific. In 1986, the country’s Race Relations Conciliator investigated the dawn raids. The conciliator found that 86 percent of dawn raiding prosecutions pursued Pacific peoples, while Pacific peoples made up only about 33 percent of those whose permits had expired.
Ardern noted, “[t]here, no raids were reported on the homes of people who were not from the Pacific; no raid or random stop was imposed on Europeans.
Ardern acknowledged that the Dawn Raids were not just immigration law enforcement. She admitted that they “went way beyond that”. They were discriminatory, they involved significant racial profiling and they did “[w]hole communities felt targeted and [terrorized]. “
In the apology, Ardern noted New Zealand’s expectation that human rights are respected. However, she said that in the case of Dawn Raids, those expectations weren’t met. The country’s current laws explicitly prohibit discrimination, including under the 1993 Human Rights Act.
The impact of the dawn raids on Pacific communities included a deep cultural trauma that continued over decades. The government had not apologized to the people of the Pacific until Sunday’s apology.
Ardern said:
The government expresses its sadness, remorse and regret that the dawn raids and random police checks took place and that these actions were never considered appropriate. … We have also [apologize] for the impact these events had on other peoples, such as Maori and other ethnic communities, who were unfairly targeted and affected by the random police checks of the time.
In addition to the apology, Ardern announced that the government will provide millions of scholarships to communities across the Pacific. The government will also provide schools with educational resources on the dawn raids and work with artists and historians from the Pacific to put together a historical account of the dawn raids.
