14/05/2026
Today I wrote to Hon Mark Mitchell, the Minister of Police, and copied in Police Commissioner Richard Chambers.
Honestly, after seven weeks riding around the North Island on Hope Ride, talking to police workers, families and ordinary New Zealanders, I came home thinking about this constantly.
You hear the same themes over and over.
People understand policing is hard.
They understand police workers see things most people never will.
What they struggle to understand is why, when police workers are mentally injured doing that job, the systems around them can feel so difficult, frightening and disconnected.
The Blue Hope Foundation keeps seeing police workers with PTSD trying to navigate processes they no longer trust while already exhausted, overwhelmed or clinically unwell.
And families are often carrying huge amounts of that risk quietly at home.
Spouses trying to hold things together.
Parents terrified.
Kids watching someone they love disappear into trauma.
This is not really about politics.
And it is not about attacking the police.
It is about whether the system is actually safe for people when they are at their lowest.
New Zealand already has ACC.
We already have the frameworks, clinicians, rehabilitation principles and public systems that should allow us to lead the world in police PTSD rehabilitation and su***de prevention.
That is the frustrating part.
The tools already exist.
But too often the lived experience for injured police workers feels very different from the public messaging.
PTSD is not weakness.
It is an occupational injury.
And when someone is mentally injured, process matters.
Communication matters.
Trust matters.
Feeling safe matters.
In the next piece I want to talk about something most people outside PTSD probably do not realise:
how ordinary administrative processes can become psychologically dangerous when someone is already mentally injured.
