An app created by two Tauranga police officers has made waves overseas for its simple approach to reducing reoffending rates within communities. When police find someone in need of help – such as a Rotorua woman who drove on her learner’s licence for years – they can break the reoffending cycle by making a referral to relevant services. Harriet Laughton catches up with the cops behind Awhi.

A woman driving on her learner’s licence for 15 years says she is “glad” police pulled her over and fined her after they referred her to a programme that helped her pass her restricted test in three weeks in February.

Rotorua’s Careylee Ngatai said she “just gave up” after she failed her restricted licence four years ago and if she had not been pulled over she said she would still be driving her son around on her learner’s licence.

The police referral to the local licensing support programme was made through an app called Awhi – te reo Māori for “help” and an acronym for Alternative Ways of Help Intervention.

Awhi was created in 2018 by two Tauranga police officers to help reduce reoffending and it was so successful the country’s driving testing system initially became “overloaded” by people booking their tests.

Ian “Saddles” Sadler and Dennis “Den” Bidois said they created the app to help police “solve the symptoms” of crime.

Ian Sadler and Dennis Bidois created the Awhi app which is used by police officers across the country.

Bidois said the app went “viral” within New Zealand and overseas and is available to every police officer in the country. The app was replicated in Canada and Australia in 2022.

Sadler and Bidois were tasked with cutting down the reoffending rate within their community, and it only took an hour to come up with the idea for Awhi, a referral tool police used to connect people needing help to the relevant services that could support the person’s particular needs.

Sadler, then a highway patrol officer and now a senior performance analyst for the national road policing centre, created the technology for the app while school community officer Bidois fostered relationships with providers and police.

Ian Sadler was behind the technology for the app designed to help break the reoffending cycle.

The referral process took “under two minutes” after the person consented and all officers needed to do was fill in the blanks on a pre-populated email sent to a service provider.

“We came to the realisation we have a whole bunch of service providers in the community and a whole bunch of people who need to talk to them, but there was nothing in the middle connecting the people needing help,” Bidois said.

He said referrals were made “as well as” not “instead of” disqualifications, fines and arrests.

After its launch in Western Bay of Plenty in 2018, word spread and it expanded to the Eastern Bay of Plenty and Waikato East in the first three to four months and achieved a national rollout in May 2022.

To date, about 81,000 referrals have been made nationally, including about 18,600 in the Bay of Plenty – 8300 in Rotorua and 5200 in Tauranga.

Bidois said the high number of Rotorua referrals was due to a Rotorua and Tokoroa-based organisation called Moving Mountains NZ, which helped people – including Ngatai – pass their driver licence tests.

Most referrals were related to road policing and family wellbeing, which accounted for 57.51% and 23.8% of the country’s referrals respectively. Addiction services, mental health and accommodation followed.

Bidois said after they started making referrals to organisations that could help people get their driver licences, wait times for tests increased drastically across the country.

“We overloaded the system because all these people figured out, ‘man, I’m actually ready’,” Bidois said.

Sadler said the app had helped some people out of a cycle of police interactions. He shared another driver licensing story.

He said a woman had been in contact with police 41 times before she received her referral when pulled over for driving with a passenger on her restricted licence.

A fortnight later, she passed her full licence and landed her first full-time job doing deliveries.

Sadler said police had not stopped her since.

“We get called because of the symptoms. We solve the symptoms. You’re under arrest for hurting your wife. But what’s the problem?” Bidois said.

“Because if we don’t solve the problem, he comes back, the problem is still there, and we arrest him again and again and again.”

Sadler said the app was used to help non-offenders as well. For example,he had sometimes pulled over a car full of young people and referred them all to get their licence.

“As time went on, I’d be talking to the driver and people from the back seat would be going, ‘hey Mr, can I get one of those Awhi things?’” Sadler said.

‘Punishment is not the main goal’

Moving Mountains chief executive Nouha Tavita said after the app launched, client numbers “went through the roof”.

In the last financial year, 80% of its clients gained their full licences, 76% gained their restricted, and 95% gained their learner’s.

Tavita said they were “far exceeding the national rate for success”, with NZ Transport Agency data showing a 52% pass rate for the calendar year so far.

Moving Mountains data revealed the main barriers people faced to sitting their driver’s test were low literacy and numeral skills, financial barriers, confidence, and not having access to a roadworthy car.

The Ministry of Social Development granted funding for the programme last year, meaning any person with an Awhi referral was fully covered for their test and was given driving lessons from one of six teachers in the Bay of Plenty.

Tavita said she received calls about clients in court asking about their participation in the programme, and she said it could help the judge be in their favour if they were engaged.

“Punishment is not the main goal anymore.”

Harriet Laughton is a multimedia journalist based in the Bay of Plenty.