Law enforcement

Well not quite. The Police Association want a gun on every Police Officer’s hip, and I support them:

The Police Association says a gun on every constable’s hip could have prevented high-profile shootings of officers, including the death of Senior Constable Len Snee in Napier in 2009.

Mr Snee was shot by Jan Molenaar during a routine search for cannabis that led to a shootout and a siege that lasted more than 24 hours.

Association president Greg O’Connor said that if the officers had been armed, the siege could have been avoided.

“I’ll never be convinced Molenaar would have acted the way he did, had he known the officers were armed.

“With Jeremy Snow [shot four times in December 2009], he couldn’t defend himself and his partner couldn’t defend him either.

“And then the incident in Christchurch [in July last year] with Constable Mitchel Alatalo and Senior Constable Bruce Lamb. Once the shots were fired they had no ability to fight back,” Mr O’Connor said.

In its law and order policy, revealed yesterday, the association called for general arming and more training for the inevitable greater use of firearms.

But if we are to allow this then can we please also look at the right to carry in New Zealand, because if it is dangerous for Police ont eh streets then it is sure as hell more dangerous for the ordinary citizenry.

The streets would become an awful lot safer if we allowed Open Carry for suitably and comprehensively trained citizens.

Judith Collins has introduced legislation to increase the amount that Corrections can dock prisoners pay and apply it to the direct costs of their incarceration:

Currently Corrections can take 30 per cent of a paycheck from a prisoner’s work-to-release programme, up to $269 a week.

“This law change, should it go through, would enable Corrections to charge any prisoner who is earning income in the same way, whether it be through self-employment or an interest in farms or commercial property,” Corrections Minister Judith Collins said.

The bill would not be passed until the next parliamentary term, she said.

“It would be an irresponsible Parliament that didn’t think that prisoners in those situations should be contributing to the vast expense in keeping them locked up.

“If they’re using time in prison to make money, why wouldn’t we expect the taxpayer to be reimbursed? They get a free office, free board, free food.”

Ms Collins said she was not against prisoners working because it helped rehabilitation.

The bill would leave it in the hands of the prison manager and chief executive to decide if the work was appropriate.

“Clearly it would have to be something that was legal,” Ms Collins said.

The Inland Revenue Department would also be able to deduct money from prisoners’ wages for child support bills.

The Police are moving guns from the station to their cars:

A project to make firearms more readily available to frontline police is a step towards “general arming”, the Police Association says.

The project will see existing stocks of Glock pistols and Bushmaster rifles moved from storage in police stations to response vehicles.

Police Association representative Craig Prior, of Christchurch, said the project was a “step forward”.

“It’s a natural progression to what we would prefer – general arming at some stage in the future,” he said.

Prior said the move would make policing safer.

“It gives a tactical option which most officers don’t have access to. They’re entitled to use firearms and trained and qualified to do so, but now they will have access to them should the need arise, which is a good thing,” he said.

Farrar of course has gone all limp-wristed over this. I’d much rather have the guns on the cop’s hips in holsters than sitting in cars. The criminals are already armed, even a slight delay for the Police in protecting themselves is a delay that could get a cop killed.

The problem the Police will have now is providing suitable training for their officers. With pistols especially rounds down range is the key to accuracy.

Police I speak to seem to think so and is it any wonder when you see the turn around happening in the police and the support their minister gives them.

The single biggest thing though that has raised moral was the removal of the two top cops from the bullshit castle and appointing popular and competent senior police into those roles.

Peter Marshall has made an immediate impact by backing his troops and calling for better protection of them and Mike Bush has got proven results in Counties-Manukau by going back to good solid policing tactics. Both men are well respected by their officers and lead from the front not from behind a desk.

Judith Collins is backing them too with her support for the new Commissioner’s comments yesterday.

The minister is backing new Police Commissioner Peter Marshall, who yesterday revealed he intended to grant frontline police greater access to tasers and firearms, as well as relaxing the restrictions on when officers can use tasers.

He wanted lock-boxes in each of 2700-odd frontline police vehicles, each containing a Glock, a rifle, ballistic armour and a taser.

He also wanted police officers to be able to take a taser into a situation, such as a domestic violence, without the current restriction of needing approval from a supervisor via the communications centre.

Ms Collins said Commissioner Marshall had her full support.

“I think he’s absolutely right. I’ve been out with the frontlines a lot. It’s harder to get a taser out than it is to get a Glock out, and frankly that doesn’t make sense to me.

“A taser is a non-lethal option and it should be easier for police officers to be able to take it with them when they go into situations, without necessarily having encountered a threat.

“They should be able to use their discretion and we should be backing them to use their discretion … The public are very aware that the police are not misusing them at all, and that they do save lives, not only members of the public but also offenders.”

It was a ridiculous situation where the Police had to jump through too many hops to deploy a non-lethal devices and very few to deploy a Glock. I know what I’d rather be hit with and that is a taser rather than having a 9mm hole drilled in me.

What we now have with our Police force is a return to confident, competent police chiefs and a minister willing to back them. No wonder there is a huge turn around in moral within the ranks and no wonder that crime over all is dropping with more cops on the street and crims being banged up for longer. Only the truly sad liberal panty-waists are complaining about locking up our crims in jail. most New Zealanders simply want to live in peace and quiet without the predations of the criminal class.

It is little wonder that Judith Collins appears to be the most popular police minister ever.

I see the Government is moving to licence bouncers.

I wonder what the Olympian who is afraid of his own name will do when that law comes in?

He surely can’t be a fit and proper person to hold such a licence.

This law will have a bit of an impact on the current muscle bound gorillas in the pay of gangs frequenting some establishments. A good move I think.

A lot of the current bouncers though already work for security companies and so are already licenced.

Given Phil Goff’s new found love for tough justice like shooting looters and shackling them to shovels for 18 hours a day, I wonder what he proposes for the 15 gang members arrested today in police raids?

a. Put them in stocks
b. Brand them
c. Cut off their hands
d. Stone them
e: The aforementioned summary execution or shackling to shovels

The year is but 4 days old and Judith Collins has shown that she is continuing where she left off.

“I get tired of commentators who sit in their ivory towers telling the police what they should do and who live in areas where they’ve never had to confront real crime.

“Anybody who is so moronic to think that someone fleeing police is not criminal activity needs their heads read. Do they think dangerous driving is not criminal activity?

“Police have had years of getting really abused for doing their job and, frankly, I think the public is behind the police and they’re getting sick of the police taking a beating every time the police go and do their job.

“The public realise that police just can’t stand by and let dangerous drivers take over the roads.”

That was in response to suggestions that the Police policy with regard to fleeing drivers should be loosened to stop organ donors criminals trying to flee from Police.

Instead both the Police Association and their Minister are in agreement and there should be zero tolerance. For those who don’t get dead the punishment should be that they be locked up.

The trick now though will be to get the panty-waists in the Ministry of Justice and the judiciary to agree, though knowing this minister I don’t think that will be a problem.

Perhaps though we could also introduce the Mugs in the News concept and start with fleeing drivers as a trial.

UPDATE: It seems the Minister is more in tune with public sentiment that the drop-kick in charge at Justice.

In my previous post I talked about citizens defending themselves, and while I was away in the bush there was yet another case of our Police are being attacked with weapons.

Two police officers ran for their lives when a routine callout resulted in a man allegedly chasing them with a metre-long samurai sword.

The officers were responding to reports of a man lying naked and drunk on the front lawn of an Otara property.

The incident comes after four separate attacks on New Zealand police officers this month – two involving machetes.

Police Commissioner Howard Broad suggested the machete assaults could be copycat attacks.

Two things are abundantly clear.

Firstly that criminals think that it is now a valid response to interest in them from the constabulary is for them to attack them with sharp, lethal instruments. The liberal panty-waists like Simon Power and his ilk will of course think the solution is for them to pass a law banning sharp weapons and making it illegal to attack Police. They ignore the fact that criminals don’t follow laws and in some respects we already have those laws in place. Banning sharp weapons will further dis-arm the general, law-abiding population, allowing criminals to have even more control over them. The answer is actually to arm our Police and stop pretending wer are living in the crime free fantasy land that inhabits Simon Power‘s and other panty-waists minds.

The second thing that we need to understand here is that if criminals are quite prepared to attack Police officers then they of course are completely willing to similarly attack a largely unarmed population without out fear of retribution or injury. Ordinary citizens are left to call on the Police for protection when it is abundantly clear that the Police are ill-equipped to defend even themselves.

The hard questions need to be asked and politicians need to step up or get out of the way.

Of course what is not mentioned is the underlying cause of all this mayhem. I bet dollars to a knob of goat-sh*t that methamphetamine abuse is the common link in all of these attacks. With long-term use the ability to reason and rationalise is destroyed…that is why you get these nutters going psycho on the Police with weapons…they have lost the ability to reason. They also know that mostly the Police are not equipped to deal with such attacks. Arming the Police would firstly protect the officers, and secondly provide a necessarily scary deterrent to shock even the most P-addled criminal into thinking twice about taking a knife to a gunfight.

The pinko panty-waists will now say that criminals will simply carry guns. Newflash…they already are…and guess what? They don’t have licences and aren’t vetted and sure as hell don’t keep their weapons safely locked away. All that only happens with law abiding citizens.

The “death free” Queens Birthday weekend had terrible weather conditions, and as a result there were less accidents because people tended to drive to the conditions, or didn’t drive at all. In other words the weather was the educating and common sense factor, not the vaunted crack down on the policing tolerance of the speed limit.

From what I can see of the deaths in the weekend they were not merely as a result of speed, but of poor driving and poor vehicle control and knowledge.

By definition every motor accident is a result of speed, as two stationary vehicle will not hit each other or anything else.

The battle that needs to be fought is the poor standard of driving, not a battle against exceeding an arbitrary speed limit.

In France or Germany a piece of straight motorway is safe at 130 kph, while a similar straight piece of road in NZ is unsafe at 130kph. How does that work?

Is a French or German driver safer at 130 than a Kiwi? Doubtless the answer is yes, because Kiwi’s can’t drive. It is too easy to get a licence, and the Police are only interested in revenue rather than education.

The only thing that has reduced road deaths in recent years is the improvement in vehicle and road engineering. The Police speed campaign can not lay claim to any gains, as has been clearly demonstrated this past weekend.

NZ Road Toll 2004-2008. Statistics: http://www.transport.govt.nz/research/road-toll/

Peter Cresswell is perhaps one of the best thinkers in the NZ Blogosphere. Today he has a post on the failure of the Police campaign to scare us into driving safely on the long weekend.

Eight people killed on the roads over one long weekend is a tragedy.

The tragedy of this weekend’s road toll is that police were led to pursue a flawed traffic policing policy this holiday weekend on the basis of believing their own headlines.

They were put off by the statistical anomaly of Queens Birthday weekend, when a weekend with no deaths on the roads followed the announcement for that weekend of a traffic policing policy of “zero tolerance” for speed. (A policy that also generated a huge uptick in revenue.)

All the authorities trumpeted that the policy caused the triumph with the road toll. They were so certain they re-imposed the policy this weekend, and re-ran all the ads and notices warning motorists to watch out for policemen watching them.

But they forgot that correlation is not causality.

Trying to convince drivers that speed is everything—that driving a few kph over the speed limit is going to kill us all—and convinced themselves by their own publicity, they  succeeded only in fooling themselves, and being surprised this morning at a number they thought they had no right to expect.

Eight people killed is a tragedy.  Perhaps some of those drivers might not have died if police over the weekend had focussed on dangerous driving instead of sitting on their bums to collect revenue from motorists driving a few kph over the speed limit.

A serious re-think over the focus on speed alone needs to be done in PNHQ. Focusing on speed fails the logic test, especially on a weekend where the weather was good and the roads were dry.

Accidents do happen and for a whole lot of reasons, not all of them are because of speed. The Police need to realise this, unless of course their big focus is for revenue reasons rather than for safety reasons.

It also stands to reason that there is an inherent number of deaths that will always be associated with roading and driving. We must surely be approaching that number of annualised roading deaths now, meaning that spending millions advertising to stop more deaths will do nothing. In fact the case can be argued that non-governmental initiatives like side intrusion beams, air-bags, collapsible steering columns, better suspension, better roading technologies and crumple zones have done more to alleviate road deaths than any government advertising campaigns.

Peter Cresswell raising an interesting point about the thinking of the Police. That if “the statistical anomaly of Queens Birthday weekend, when a weekend with no deaths on the roads followed the announcement for that weekend of a traffic policing policy of “zero tolerance” for speed is correct” then now the reverse must be true, that putting more Police out on the roads actually caused more accidents.