Click here to submit on this Bill. Submissions close 1:59pm on Wednesday 22nd April.

Below is our guide to make a submission on the Policing Amendment Bill 2026. We also have a general guide to making submissions here. At the bottom we have included our draft submission on this Bill.

In 2020, it was revealed that police all over the country were stopping rangatahi Māori in the street and photographing them for no reason. Tens of thousands of photos were added to police databases, over 50% of them of Māori. The Supreme Court, IPCA and Privacy Commission all said this was illegal.

Now the government is changing the law to make these practices legal. Police will be able to photograph you and your kids, anytime and anywhere, and keep those photos forever. We strongly encourage everyone to make their own submission on this Bill. Here are some things you could include in your submission:

What the Bill does and why it concerns you

The Bill gives police extremely broad powers to photograph and record anyone in public, for almost any reason, with no requirement to suspect you of anything specific.
The only “safeguard” is that a police officer has to think the information “may” be useful — this is so vague that it covers almost anything.
The Bill says nothing about how long police can keep your photos, who can access them, or when they have to be deleted.
Police are not even required to tell you they are recording you.

Impact on Māori

Over half the photos police had collected were of Māori. These new powers will be used the same way.
Māori are already more likely to come into contact with police. Expanding police powers without safeguards will make this worse.
The Bill was developed with almost no consultation with Māori.
If you are Māori and/or have experienced being stopped or photographed by police, please share your experience with the committee.

Impact on children and young people

This Bill exists because police were illegally photographing rangatahi Māori on the street. But the Bill includes no protections at all for children and young people.
Young people are unlikely to know they can refuse when a police officer asks them for information. The Bill puts the burden on children to know and exercise their rights with police.
If you are a parent, caregiver, teacher, youth worker, or anyone else who works with young people, you could talk about what it might mean for the young people in your life to be photographed and entered into a police database.

Privacy and data

The Bill has no rules on storing, accessing, or deleting the photos and information police collect. Once your image is in their system, there is no mechanism to get it out.
Police already use AI and facial recognition tools on their databases. More photos of Māori in the system means more biased results from these tools. The Bill does nothing to regulate this.

Te Tiriti o Waitangi

The Bill authorises the collection of images of tā moko and moko kauae without consent or Māori oversight. These are taonga.
There was no partnership, or even consultation, with Māori before the Bill was introduced.
The Bill entrenches discriminatory policing practices that treat Māori more harshly than Pākehā.

The rule of law

The Supreme Court, the Privacy Commissioner, and the IPCA all found police photography practices to be illegal. The government’s response is to change the law rather than change police behaviour.
This sends a message that police can act illegally and the law will be rewritten to cover for them.

What you can ask for

That the committee reject the Bill.
That police be required to comply with the Privacy Commissioner’s existing order to delete illegally collected photos before any new powers are considered.
That any future legislation include clear rules on how long police can keep data, who can access it, and when it must be deleted.
That any future legislation include specific protections for children and young people.
That the use of AI and facial recognition on police databases be regulated and subject to independent oversight.
That Māori be genuinely consulted on any legislation that affects them, as required by Te Tiriti.

Your own experience

If you or someone you know has been stopped and photographed by police without good reason, the committee needs to hear about it.
If you are from a community that is already heavily policed, you can describe what more surveillance would mean for your day-to-day life.
You don’t need to be an expert. A few sentences about why this matters to you personally is a valid and useful submission.

Our draft submission is below, if you want to read in detail or see any of the evidence that we draw on.

DRAFT Submission to the Justice Committee on the Policing Amendment Bill 2026

People Against Prisons Aotearoa (PAPA) is a prison abolitionist organisation working for a fairer, safer, and more just Aotearoa. Established in 2015, PAPA advocates for people in prison to ensure their human rights are met. We also push for changes to the Aotearoa New Zealand criminal justice system to create more just outcomes.

People Against Prisons Aotearoa is submitting in strong opposition to the Policing Amendment Bill (“the Bill”) in its entirety. We recommend that the committee reject this Bill and that the government pursue approaches that protect and uphold the rights and freedoms of people in Aotearoa New Zealand.

This submission was prepared on behalf of People Against Prisons Aotearoa by Tom.

Introduction

Our submission focuses on Part 1 of the Policing Amendment Bill only. While Part 2 is a troubling expansion of Police’s power to direct and detain people, it is Part 1 that poses a significantly greater concern. Part 1 of the Bill inserts provisions to the Policing Act that authorise police to collect information from members of the public in ways that have been found to be unlawful by the Supreme Court, IPCA and the Privacy Commissioner. Rather than ensuring that police officers are held to a higher standard, the government is changing the law to authorise these practices that violate basic rights to privacy and freedom from discrimination or unreasonable search. Rather than the onus being on police officers to respect these rights, the Bill creates a reverse onus on members of the public to know their rights and refuse to cooperate with police unless they are compelled to by law.

Specifically, we oppose the Bill on the following grounds, to be covered in detail by our submission:

The surveillance and intelligence-gathering powers given to Police are overly broad, lack meaningful safeguards, and are inconsistent with a variety of rights guaranteed in other legislation;
The Bill will entrench and intensify the racist targeting of Māori by Police;
Children and young people, particularly rangatahi Māori, are put at risk;
The Bill allows for the mass collection of biometric data with no safeguards on how that data is to be stored, retained or used;
The Bill breaches Te Tiriti o Waitangi in a range of ways;
The Bill undermines the constitutional role of the courts in acting as a check on state overreach, and other similar safeguards in the form of the Privacy Commission and IPCA.

Overly broad and inadequately safeguarded powers

The powers created by this Bill are extraordinarily broad. In section 45A the Bill allows for the collection of information for any “lawful purpose connected with a function, or an activity, of the Police.” Given the breadth of policing functions under the Policing Act 2008, this effectively justifies the collection of information about anyone, at any time, for almost any reason. Section 45B makes explicit that this information can include photos and video or audio recordings.

Section 45A also specifies that information may be collected for any “intelligence purpose connected with a function, or an activity, of the Police.” However, the Bill does not meaningfully define or constrain “intelligence purposes.” Instead, the Bill (in section 45D) merely requires that information “will or may support” a function or activity of the Police.

Section 45D is therefore a wholly inadequate safeguard. It is entirely subjective and sets no meaningful threshold that must be met. Any police officer could satisfy section 45D merely by claiming that information “may” be useful at some unspecified point in the future. Thus, almost any conceivable information gathering is enabled by this Bill simply because (as was noted by the Supreme Court in Tamiefuna v R [2025] NZSC 40) an officer decides it may be useful “in anticipation of the possibility of future offending.”

Of great concern to us among these new powers is that the Bill includes no provisions relating to the retention, access, use, or deletion of information collected. It includes no requirements for auditing or oversight, and no time limits imposed on the retention of information. We return to this point throughout the rest of this submission.

The racist policing enabled by this Bill

This Bill should not be read or understood without considering the systemic racism of the New Zealand Police. The police’s own commissioned research has confirmed deep-seated institutional racism within the organisation.

In particular, the evidence of systemic Police bias against Māori is damning. Māori are five times as likely as Pākehā to come into contact with Police. Māori are subject to police violence at a rate seven times higher than Pākehā.

This bias is often dismissed as a product of higher offending rates among Māori rather than a result of racist policing, but that is not the case. For example, Māori are six times as likely to come into contact with police for no reason, and are subject to warrantless search at a rate four times higher than Pākehā. For the same offending, Māori are more likely to be apprehended, charged, convicted, and given custodial sentences.

Compounding racist police practices and biased court outcomes are structural and legal biases. The law and the justice system treat some kinds of offending far more seriously than others, out of proportion to the harm that is caused by that offending.

These implicit and structural biases amplify at every step of the justice process. They result in the disproportionate policing of Māori communities and the drastic over-incarceration of Māori.

The police practice that gave rise to this Bill, which the Bill seeks to legalise, was overwhelmingly directed at Māori. Officers were photographing innocent young people, collecting their personal details, and uploading this information to a national intelligence database. More than half of these photos were of Māori, many of them rangatahi.

This practice was routine among police around the country. It can only be assumed that these photos were gathered in anticipation of future offending, a disgustingly discriminatory practice that this Bill now seeks to legalise.

If police are given these vague and broadly-defined powers it will intensify an existing cycle. Already, disproportionate policing of Māori leads to over-representation in police databases, leading to higher crime detection rates among Māori, which leads to disproportionate numbers of arrests and prosecutions, which in turn feeds further disproportionate police attention.

This Bill accelerates that cycle by enabling the widespread collection of photos and personal information from Māori. In essence, it legalises an additional infrastructure for the surveillance of Māori communities.

Lack of protections for children and rangatahi Māori

One of our greatest concerns with this Bill is the complete lack of protections for young people, particularly rangatahi Māori. The Bill offers no protections for young people in the face of the expanded police powers that it enables.

Children and young people rightly have special protections in New Zealand law, as well as in international treaties to which New Zealand is a signatory – like the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. However, tamariki and rangatahi Māori were the primary targets of the previously discussed unlawful information gathering practices that this Bill enables. The Bill is therefore a reprehensible step away from a broad national (and international) consensus that children deserve special protections in the law. In practical terms, the Bill creates a pipeline of young Māori people into the cycles of disproportionate surveillance and consequent attention from the criminal justice system, as discussed in [14].

For these reasons alone, this Bill is a desperate moral failure on the part of the legislators progressing it. However there remain a variety of other concerns about the Bill, as we set out in following sections.

Algorithmic and AI processing of biased data

As we alluded to in [6], this Bill imposes no limits on, and makes no provisions for, the retention, storage, access, use, or deletion of the information gathered under the police powers it expands. This is a violation of privacy and data sovereignty rights, particularly under Te Tiriti o Waitangi – a point we return to later. However, the lack of limits or provisions is particularly troubling because of the rapidly developing technologies that can be deployed on databases, the likes of which this Bill enables. These technologies dramatically amplify the reach and impact of such databases.

Māori are already overrepresented in police databases, in part because of the biases discussed in [8] – [10] above. This Bill will greatly expand the data entering these databases. The Bill will make police databases more biased against Māori.

These databases are processed by algorithms and AI technologies with very little transparency around how they function, and significant concerns around bias. Police have shown very little desire to be transparent or accountable around their use of these rapidly evolving technologies, but recent reporting suggests that they include BriefCam, SearchX, Cellebrite, and ABIS 2.

The individual concerns about each of these technologies are numerous and beyond the scope of this submission to cover. However, the general concern with any AI or algorithmic processing is that it produces biased results. When deployed on already-biased data, such reproduce and amplify bias. In criminal justice terms, the most concerning bias is disproportionate false-positives for minority groups – particularly from facial recognition technology.

These problems are well-documented and pervasive. A Police-commissioned report concluded that “[d]isproportionate effect on Māori and accuracy and bias issues resulting from the over-representation of Māori in police data are considered a high risk in any considerations of use or future use” of technologies like facial recognition.

There is no legal framework or oversight of the use of AI by Police. The Bill does nothing to address this gap, while authorising the mass collection of biased data that can be fed into these systems. The result is a growing structural racism in core police practices, for which there is no accountability or oversight.

Breaches of Te Tiriti o Waitangi

As a result of all the points raised thus far, this Bill is in significant breach of Te Tiriti o Waitangi.

By ignoring expanded Police powers that are already disproportionately targeted at Māori, the Bill fails to meet the standards of good governance in Article 1 of Te Tiriti. The Bill’s own disclosure statement notes that “time pressures” meant that there was little or no consultation with Māori or consideration of Te Tiriti. This is a serious omission under any consideration, but is particularly glaring given that it was Māori who first called attention to the issue of unlawful information gathering by police.

By authorising the broad collection of photographs and personal information from Māori, the bill violates tino rangatiratanga guaranteed by Article 2. Of particular concern here are images of tā moko and moko kauae, which are taonga protected under Te Tiriti. Further, the Bill was developed without any partnership with Māori.

By entrenching racist policing practices, and expanding the powers of an institution that disproportionately targets Māori, the Bill fails to uphold Article 3 of Te Tiriti. This Bill does not offer Māori equal protections or rights.

More broadly, this Bill represents a step backwards in the process of decolonisation and restoring to Māori the rights that existed prior to Te Tiriti o Waitangi, and which were guaranteed by Te Tiriti. Instead, it further extends the colonial state apparatus over Māori communities through intensified surveillance, and ensuing punishment, dispossession, and violence.

Overriding the courts and other checks on state power

The final point that we wish to raise relates to the way this Bill overrides decisions of the Supreme Court, IPCA and Privacy Commissioner. All three function as flawed – yet important – checks on the power of the state over the public.

The unlawful police practice that this Bill seeks to legitimise was first reported on in 2020. Police were first ordered to delete the data they had gathered unlawfully in 2021 – nearly five years ago. Rather than complying with this deadline (and repeated subsequent deadlines), Police have disregarded an important check on their power. Instead, to have lobbied for a law change to remove those important protections for peoples’ rights.

By enabling this behaviour by police and changing the law to authorise further police violations of rights, this Bill undermines the rule of law. It signals to Police, and other government agencies, that unlawful behaviour will be retroactively legislated for if it proves to be operationally convenient.

Finally, while many of the people most affected by this Bill will already have little trust in the Police, the Bill will further erode public trust in our institutions. In order to protect important rights to privacy, the Bill creates the situation in which members of the public cannot rely on police officers to act in their best interest.

As we discussed in [22] – [23], there are significant risks involved in appearing in police databases. If this Bill passes, the onus will be on members of the public to know in what situations they can – and should – refuse to comply with police officers’ requests for information. Very few people know this, especially the young people and rangatahi Māori who were (and will be) a disproportionate target of police data collection.

Alternatives

The problem identified by the Supreme Court in Tamiefuna v R, and by the IPCA and Privacy Commissioner in their joint report, was not that police lacked sufficient powers. The problem was that officers were exercising existing powers unlawfully and in a racist way. The solution is better training and more oversight and accountability, not the retroactive enabling of those racist practices.

Further, as we have argued in other submissions, the most effective way to improve public safety is not through the increasing encroachment of a private and state surveillance apparatus in public spaces. Police and (increasingly) private businesses continue to abuse the lack of rights to privacy that people have in public spaces – something that this Bill also exploits. This abuse of privacy rights is evident in the practices of data gathering that this Bill enables, as well as in the inescapable surveillance by private networks of CCTV cameras connected to databases like Auror.

Instead of intensified surveillance and abuse of privacy rights, we continue to call for public safety measures that address the root causes of social harm. These root causes include poverty and inequality, alienation, homelessness, and poor access to healthcare or education. For Māori, these drivers are coextensive with ongoing processes of colonisation.

Recommendations

We strongly recommend that:

The committee reject this Bill in its entirety;
The government ensures that Police comply with the notice first issued by the Privacy Commissioner in 2021 to delete all unlawfully collected photographs.