The death of police sergeant Derek Wootton last Friday in the course of his duty when he was struck by the fleeing driver of a stolen car serves as a tragic reminder of the often dangerous work the police do on our behalf.
The police in Otago have not been spared the loss of members of the force while carrying out their duties, and many will remember on the occasion of Sg's Wootton's funeral service today the tragedies of Constable Stokes, in Dunedin, in 1966, Senior Constable Umbers, near Ranfurly, in 1990, and Sergeant Guthrie, at Aramoana, in 1990.
Sergeant Wootton was the 27th officer to die in the line of duty.
His death has led to calls for the force to be greatly strengthened, and routinely armed, as well as for more directly greater penalties for drivers who try to escape or outrun police.
The nation certainly needs a strong and capable force but it is equally clear that all the police in the world will not provide enough personnel to restore, by that means alone, a better level of law and order in the community.
Every day brings its quota of bashings and killing which, within living memory, were once almost unthinkable.
And more police at the scene when Sgt Wootton died would likely not have prevented the particular circumstances of that tragedy.
There is little doubt that we, as a community, have largely been the cause of the steady increase in the levels of violent behaviour, and have done little or nothing either individually or collectively to reverse the trend.
Our cinemas, television screens, the Internet, and DVD shops are saturated with the depiction of mindless violence and, more significantly, violence without realistic consequences to the perpetrators.
In fact, a philosophy of violence coupled with a self-destructive craving for consuming alcohol and other drugs seems almost to have become a popular alternative to the humdrum of ordinary daily living in many quarters.
Guns and knives also proliferate, although fists and boots, propelled by what seems to be a deep-seated rage, remain the most frequently used weapons of choice in almost every town and city in the land.
Today, even motor vehicles - as several recent cases testify - can no longer be excluded from the armoury of available retaliatory weapons by the thugs who live among us.
The circumstances of Sgt Wootton's death, and many other members of the public, seem explicable only by a mindset of utter moral indifference.
It is a mindset becoming all too commonplace, particularly among young adults.
Only by the investment of public effort and steady, unrelenting pressure will the declining moral standards which have led us to this situation be remedied.
There is no magic answer.
Doubling the police force would certainly not produce it; nor would routinely arming the police.
The community itself, in all manner of ways, has to re-establish and constantly to emphasise the general inhibitions that formerly operated universally against the use of guns, knives, and physical violence.
And these inhibitions need to be in place at a much earlier level - long before hotels and petrol stations are robbed at gunpoint, long before small shopkeepers are shot dead as they stand peacably at their counters, and long before policemen are cut down while endeavouring to maintain law in order on our behalf - a job we self-evidently shrink from doing.
It may well be that a point is reached soon where such effort as is being made (and we think here of a range of policies, from Neighbourhood Watch to the recent implementation of primary school physical and mental health assessment) will be supplemented by the wider community deciding that it has had enough of lawless behaviour.
Perhaps today's service for Sgt Wootton will mark that point.
Recent comment by those associated with the tourist industry, and from tourists themselves, that they do not think New Zealand can any longer be regarded as a "safe" destination, is the clearest of warning signals - when coupled with the similar fears expressed by recent immigrants - that our laxity might have a very large potential unrecognised cost.
After all, if criminals are prepared to take on the police, what chance does the ordinary person stand against them?When, in connexion with recent events, talk of vigilante squads becomes common currency (misguided as it is), then at the very least consideration ought more widely to be given to the circumstances in which we all find ourselves.
The gospel of tolerance across all aspects of anti-social behaviour, which has been preached for the past 40 years, has clearly produced its long-predicted - and long-denied - fruit.
While the killing of Sgt Wootton shows that the thin blue line remains our chief, and hard-pressed, defence against anarchy, it is not the only defence.
That lies in our own hands and in our own actions, every day.
