CALL TO ARMS
It’s easy to believe that the police have gone soft on crime when you look at their treatment of rule breakers over successive lock-downs. First, there was Northland iwi-led roadblocks in March 2020, sometimes without a police presence in sight, intimidating, harassing and illegally detaining people on the roadside. Then, just recently, the lack of immediate arrests at the Destiny Church-linked anti-lockdown demonstrations in Auckland, not to forget the exuberant twerkers at the scorned North Shore party.
In the last two instances, police eventually prosecuted offenders but only after criticism that they were slow to act. Last April, the Northland roadblock denouement was played out in Parliament’s epidemic response committee, chaired by Tauranga MP and former Crown prosecutor Simon Bridges, who used the opportunity to attack Aotearoa’s top cop.
“There’s no scenario – this is law school 101 – in which a Kiwi is acting anything but unlawfully by stopping another Kiwi on a road in New Zealand,” Bridges asserted, to which Police Commissioner Andrew Coster replied that there was “nothing unlawful” about the roadblocks and operators were abiding by the regulations and had a police presence.
Fourteen years ago, public perception of the police was the opposite. In 2007, when 300 officers, including armed offenders squad and special tactics group members, launched raids in the Urewera Ranges and as far south as Christchurch in response to intelligence that Māori were organising paramilitary training camps against the state, hundreds of people subsequently demonstrated, claiming police brutality.
The raids resulted in 18 arrests but only four convictions and echoed similar police actions against Māori at Parihaka in 1881 and Maungapōhatu in 1916. Four of those arrested — the only ones to go
