Michael the Archangel is a busy lad. He is not only the patron saint of paratroopers and grocers but he also keeps a watchful eye over the police.
His feast day, September 29, is commemorated throughout the country as Police Remembrance Day, when police officers killed in the line of duty are recalled and honoured by their comrades and families.
It is also a day when former staff members who have died in the past year are remembered.
In New Zealand since records began in 1886, 29 police officers have been slain by a criminal act and at least 17 more killed by accident.
Otago has seen three of its officers lose their lives to foul play. In 1966 Constable Donald Stokes was beaten to death in Dunedin when two prisoners tried to escape from police cells.
And 1990 saw double tragedy in the province with Senior Constable Peter Umbers being batoned to death in a confrontation with a robbery suspect near Ranfurly, while Port Chalmers police sergeant Stewart Guthrie was shot dead in New Zealand's deadliest criminal shooting, the Aramoana massacre.
The blackest days for the police force were undoubtedly in October 1941 on the West Coast, when four officers - Sergeant William Cooper and Constables Edward Best, Frederick Jordan and Percy Tulloch - and three civilians were gunned down by Kowhitirangi farmer Stanley Graham.
Much has been written about this dark episode in our history and was the subject of the 1982 feature film Bad Blood.
The fatal shooting of 35-year-old Const Tulloch by Graham certainly left its mark on our family. Const Tulloch's father we called ''uncle'' and my mother recalls the image of him weeping as he received a sugar bag containing his son's personal belongings, including his bullet-torn and bloodstained shirt.
As a young child I was a frequent visitor to my grandmother's home, where uncle lived in the ''whare'' at the back of the section.
I was often drawn to a black and white photo on the wall showing hundreds of onlookers lining an Auckland city street as they paid their respects to the slain policeman at the passing of his funeral cortege. And as children we were warned not to play with plastic guns (''cops and robbers'') when uncle was around.
Kowhitirangi (or Koiterangi as it was once commonly known) lies 14km inland from Hokitika on flat dairy country that stretches out to the prominent landmark of the Doughboy mountain and the Southern Alps beyond. I've visited the tiny farming settlement twice.
On the first occasion I stopped to ask directions of a farmer who turned out to be a relative of Const Best, who died three days after being shot by Graham.
The farmer showed me a Kaniere Gun Club medal dated 1932, found on Graham's property and won by him for excellent marksmanship.
This was a portent of the tragic events nine years later, when Const Tulloch and his fellow police officer, Const Jordan, were both killed by one bullet from Graham's Mauser rifle.
On my second visit, Kowhitirangi had lost its anonymity.
A monolithic memorial stone to the victims now stands in front of the site where Graham's house once stood - the bungalow was burned to the ground by locals soon after Graham was tracked down and killed by police at his hideout near the Doughboy, in the biggest manhunt witnessed in New Zealand.
Brass plaques honouring the four policeman and three civilians killed in the tragedy are affixed to the huge monument, which has a hole cut in its centre, to give a view of where the gate and pathway led to Graham's house and the site of the shootings.
While I respect the good intentions of the memorial's proponents, the monument sits uncomfortably with me.
Its sheer size and the unnecessary ''peephole'' seem to me to be an intrusion into this quiet rural settlement, where locals in the past 70 years have been reluctant to talk to outsiders about the grim days and nights of that terrible event.
This reluctance of mine was reinforced when I observed a large crowd of tourists excitedly gathering around the monument to have a group photo taken - not relatives of the victims paying their respects as I had hoped but sightseers with a macabre curiosity.
Found in Const Tulloch's possession after his death was a copy of A Policeman's Prayer, which included the words: ''Let me look into the face of death with unblinking eyes and with no sense of fear''.
When the decision was made to call on Stanley Graham to seize his firearms because of his increasingly aggressive and erratic behaviour, Const Tulloch was in plain clothes as he was not on duty that day.
He simply went along to make up the numbers. As the events of that fateful day suggest, Const Tulloch appeared fairly relaxed in his backup role with ''no sense of fear''.
But it's that thin line - the thin blue line - between routine police duties and the sudden ''look into the face of death'' that makes us appreciate the risks policemen and policewomen face each day in carrying out their role of keeping the peace.
And Police Remembrance Day, on the feast day of St Michael the Archangel, is a sobering reminder of those risks.
Tony Eyre is a Dunedin writer.
