It's a bit of a Pandora's Box. Prior to last year the Police didn't need to be routinely armed unless an armed suspect was on the loose.

They didn't get armed after that because of the Christchurch shooting, they did it because gun crime dramatically rose.

The reason it rose is two-fold: there was initially panic around a confiscation and then an a forced buy-back creating a massive black market, and armed cops (and armed gang members themselves) in general cause a sense of urgency amongst criminals to become armed.   With the rapid growth of gangs in NZ those guys practically raced to get guns. 

Then you get to the reason why they shoot at cops. Even the stupidest crims don't shoot at the cops because they just don't like them. They're thinking about being shot themselves (or otherwise locked up) and now that they have guns, they have a third option aside from running or being caught.

It's impossible to turn back the clock and get all those guns back easily. But at the same time the cops were warned over and over again not to create the situation above with the *exact* reasons I just mentioned being cited. Their administration has failed them, because their administration doesn't particularly care about front-line officers. They care about running the police and gangs with guns have the unfortunate effect of causing the Police administration's responsibility, power and budgets to be bigger. It's not the *sole* thing going on but it's a big conflict of interest when the Police gets paid more the worse job that they do. It's no coincidence that Bush retired with very little notice right after a series of rapid declines in public safety. 

  Every cop knows this, so the gangs get worse but there's no low-level policing to stop it. The most they can do is ask them to stop doing whatever it is they're doing at the time. Individual gang members done something wrong? No problem, arrest em. Gang business?  And the dedicated gang activity team is focused on bigger stuff.

We simply need to import gang-busters to NZ, like yesterday. We cannot rely on any existing organisation in NZ to take care of it because they all have gang associations in some way. I know local guys who are out of the defense force now who would gladly split wigs but there'll always be situations where they run into someone they know, which means they can't go home and switch off because someone knows who they are.

It is unfortunate that smashing gangs is going to make certain problems worse (more Māori in prison, for example, when that statistic is already unacceptably high for them) but it needs to be done, and it needs to be done right now.