91 Police perceptions of Māori Research conducted on police perceptions of Māori, found the police have an “occupational culture” of discriminatory language and behaviour (James, 2000, pp. 8–9). This research report from 1998, found that racist language was common in the police (Maxwell and Smith, 1998, p. vi), as well as stereotypical views of Māori. As some respondents shared in that study (Maxwell and Smith, 1998, p. 11): • Many long-serving Caucasian police officers have little time for juvenile Māori, or Polynesians, they talk down to them. • Police are racist and have no tolerance for lowerclass ethnic groups. They don’t think they deserve to be treated like upper-class offenders. • The darker races are all treated as second class citizens. The assumption of guilt is worse for Māori. • There seems to be a stereotyped attitude. If one Māori offends then all are judged as ‘typical Māori’ or ‘what are they claiming now?’ Policing stage Statistics on Māori imprisonment show: • In the year ending December 2018, 58.2 percent of males in prison were Māori tane, 4203 of a total of 7224 men. More than 66.2 percent of women in prison were Māori wāhine, 540 of a total of 816. Māori also comprised 67.7 percent of inmates in youth prisons, 189 of 279 youths (Statistics NZ, 2022). • In the year ending March 2021, the number of Māori imprisoned decreased, but the percentage of Māori in prison increased, 59.7 per cent of the total prison population was Māori, 2979 Māori men of a total of 4983 men. The number of Māori wāhine in prison was 327, which was 73.2 percent (327 wāhine of a total of 447 women). In the youth prison there were 42 Māori youth or 63.6 percent (Statistics NZ, 2022). Human Rights Commission Māori are also six times as likely to encounter the police, and are also “more likely to have been handcuffed or pepper-sprayed” (Te Uepū Hāpai i te Ora, 2019b: 45). These staggering imprisonment figures reflect racism and colonisation considering that in 2021, Māori made up just 17 percent of the population: The young Māori man or woman in a prison cell cannot be isolated from the historic profiling of their bodies as inherently or potentially criminal, and the system which incarcerates them cannot be isolated from the space the colonisers have created to define their power to control those who threaten their law and order (Jackson, 2017, p. 11). The court phase The racial inequities also play out in the court system where Māori are: • 4-5 times more likely to be apprehended, prosecuted, and convicted. • 7.5 times more likely to be given a custodial sentence. • 11 times more likely to be remanded in custody awaiting trial. • 3 times more likely to be apprehended for drug offences (especially cannabis-related). • 6 times more likely to be arrested for violent offences. • Māori are significantly overrepresented in the remand population (Workman, 2011: 17). Racism, Māori youth and wāhine Māori Racism means that in youth justice, where Māori present with typically “less severe” offences, they are nevertheless more likely to be institutionalised into supervised care irrespective of the gravity of the offence (Workman, 2011, pp. 12–23). In the 1980s, the number of Māori women in prison was under 10 percent (Jackson, 2021a). In 2020, Māori women were the fastest-growing prison population in Aotearoa (George and Ngamu, 2020, p. 242):