Behind the balaclava

Nelson Mail TV reviewer Victoria Guild catches a glimpse of the men and women who regularly put their lives on the line for others.

Luckily, most of us will never have anything to do with the armed offenders squad. But that doesn't mean we aren't intrigued by how they operate. We know they wear black, carry weapons, wear balaclavas, and often cop a lot of flak if they happen to shoot someone.

The three-part documentary Line of Fire (Mondays on TV One) leads us from the formation of the squad in the 1960s through to the present day, interviewing past members and giving us a rare behind-the-scenes look into one of New Zealand's more secretive organisations.

Nowadays the squad, and the ultra-elite Anti-Terrorist Squad, is highly trained and highly equipped, but back in the 1960s it was a very different story.

The squad was formed after four policemen were shot and killed in the space of a month in 1964. Members wore old army clothes dyed black and were armed with .308 rifles and .38 Smith and Wesson revolvers dating back to 1942.

Callouts were still rare, but they laid the foundation for today's squad with their ethos of cordon, contain and appeal.

The first episode focused mainly on the first fatal shooting by the AOS, in Wellington, in April 1970. Bruce Glensor kidnapped a woman at gunpoint and held her for several days.

Colin Lines told us how squad members came up from Nelson and down from Masterton to help. Lines knew Glensor from his days as a youth offender and had been talking to him by phone. He hoped to get to the area to talk to him personally, and was on his way when Glensor was shot.

Even though almost 40 years have passed since that day, Lines was pretty emotional about Glensor's death, and obviously felt that if he'd been able to get there in time, Glensor could have been saved. It was good to see that despite the squad being justified in shooting Glensor (he had his gun to his hostage's throat and was threatening police at the time), there was still a sense of loss. For these guys, the best result is if no-one is hurt.

A wife told of how close her husband came to pulling the trigger in a domestic-related kidnapping, and how relieved he still is that he didn't. Another member, Taff Jones, came face to face with a gun-toting man in street and drew his own gun, but after talking the man down, he discovered that his gun was a toy.

There were guys who talked about the fear – "Anyone who says they don't feel fear is a bulls....er" – and guys who talked about the effect on their family life.

Squad members carry a pager and need to be ready to leave at a moment's notice, missing important family milestones if required. They are sometimes away from home for up to two weeks.

Then another life was lost in 1975, which brought up the sticky issue of why the squad doesn't aim to wound instead of aiming to kill. Lawyer Rob Moodie – then the head of the Police Association – coined a phrase that remains at the core of AOS operations. He wrote that members of the AOS "shoot not to wound, not to kill, but simply to achieve the instantaneous and complete elimination of the offender's capacity to kill or seriously injure others".

With the advent of the police negotiation team, the squad tries to use every other avenue to defuse the situation first. Some of the more gung-ho members admitted to thinking that talking was a waste of time. Others knew that sometimes, the only thing an offender wanted was for someone to listen. Upcoming episodes will look at the accusations of the squad being trigger-happy after several high-profile fatalities in the 1980s, and one of the darkest moments in New Zealand's history, the Aramoana massacre.

ONE TO WATCH: For sheer drama, there's nothing that comes close to a real-life tale of survival. I Shouldn't Be Alive (Mondays on TV One) is compelling viewing: extraordinary stories told in bare-bones style by the survivors. -

- © Fairfax NZ News