Ummmm. What?
Undercover cops to ‘spy’ on bar patrons
An ”outrageous” initiative will see undercover police officers ”spying on patrons”, Hospitality Association chief executive Bruce Robertson says.Southern district police last month began stationing plain-clothes officers in licensed premises to ensure licensees were complying with the Sale and Supply of Alcohol Act.
But that approach has raised the ire of the Hospitality Association.
”It’s not appropriate for police to be spying on patrons,” Mr Robertson said.
”If it wasn’t so serious it’d almost be funny.
”They [licensees] can just as readily be inspected by a uniformed police officer. We think the public will find this abhorrent.”
Dunedin alcohol harm reduction officer Senior Constable Ian Paulin said the policy had not been used in Dunedin yet, ”but it will happen”.
”It’s going to supply valuable information about what goes on in licensed premises,” he said.
It would not result in a reduction in uniformed officers patrolling the streets and the officers who went undercover would be ”brought in from outside the area, not impacting local numbers”, he said.
It was not about trying to catch licensees in an underhanded manner.
”If they are doing a great job, that information will be fed back to the bars, so it will go both ways,” Snr Const Paulin said.
Licensees were recently sent information about the policy and their obligations under the Sale and Supply of Alcohol Act.
The initiative would run until July next year, ”targeting risk times and risk events”, he said. Police first used the tactic in Queenstown late last month.
In NZ, we like our fascism, the way we like our racism. Casual.
I am praying that this is the tipping point that wakes the sleepy hobbits. The all seeing Eye of Mordor that Key has allowed the GCSB to become with his mass surveillance legislation coupled with his vast expansion of police powers surely must stop at the sacred doorstep of the local pub?
Remember, currently the Police can patrol any premises they want. We’ve all seen them come into the pubs, and anyone obviously pissed gets picked up really quickly. So why the hell do the Police need to send in undercover agents to spy on people? This is surveillance that is a gross over step of Police power.
We live in a free country. It’s a liberal democracy, where Police powers are kept well within a confined and monitored area, allowing cops to go undercover and start spying on civilians in a relaxed state is an alarming rearrangement of the power of the state to the individual.
This has all the ingredients for gross abuses of power at a time when the NZ Police Force have hardly shown themselves to be well equipped to handle such enormous discretion. Entrapment, abuse of power, unwelcome sexual advances all mixed within an alpha male Police Culture of denial that sees loyalty first and the law second is about as advisable as NZ launching a solitary re-invasion of Iraq.
If this happens, it’s not just the gross intrusion of civil liberties we will have maimed, the harvest from such poisoned seed will reap an empire of bitterness and justifiable grievance.
Ngati poaka should investigate complaints rather than indulge in spying on pub patrons. I bet they won’t put undercovers in the Northern Club. This is just another step toward a police state, where most of us will be watched 24 hours a day. Nope, not needed at all. Time to stop.
Yep, can pretty much guarantee that these undercover police won’t be interested in drunks or who the bar is serving. What they’ll be doing is listening in to peoples conversations and any one who talk opposition to the government will be tagged and watched. It’s been done before in NZ.
I’d be interested to know why or how you can “pretty much guarantee” it. Put your tinfoil hat back in the box.
Can you name a State with a secret police force that hasn’t abused that power?
Because you don’t need under-cover cops spying on the clientele to pick up drunks and under-age drinkers.
What a shame.
Why cant I go to a bar and get drunk? Anyway I will do it at my flat
So after police surveillance of pubs what’s next?
Supermarkets?
Pre schools?
Schools?
Hospitals?
Rest homes?
Public transport?
The list could be endless!
Police state here we come! Disturbing to say the least!
homes? bedrooms? cars? hotel rooms? Already happening.
Great post Martyn.
It’s possible, even likely that everyone who has visited TDB or any other NZ left leaning site has had their IP address tagged by the NSA/GCHQ et al. It’s likely that the GCSB / NZ Police / Security Establishment have access to the database where this information is recorded. Spying on law abiding New Zealand citizens who have left/progressive views has happened many times before.
With Key’s good old mate Fletcher at the GCSB helm I’d bet good money there is a degree of ‘surveillance’ on those who disagree with Nact and the neoliberal paradigm, at least the more vocal / active types.
Putting boots on the ground, undercover is just the next step in ‘normalising’ components of the surveillance state.
What’s next? 3am door knocks? Slippery slope indeed.
So they have enough police to go undercover in pubs do they? How come they don’t have enough police to investigate other crime such as burglary, assault, sexual assault, etc? National likes to reap maximum publicity for things that make the MSM excited like boy racers, meths labs, benefit fraud and drink driving so they direct the police to focus on these things. But when it comes to offences like burglary, theft, vandalism the police don’t bother much because the MSM aren’t particularly interested in writing about them and thus National can’t get much publicity value. With National it is all about publicity and promoting the illusion that they are tough on all crime, whereas in reality they have downsized the police force and slashed its funding so they have to cook the crime figures to support the illusion and shield the NZ public from the truth.
Given the attention that David Cunliffe has raised towards domestic violence, it really irks me that this issue has not resurfaced. In 2012, the NZ Police stopped including reports of domestic violence as part of the NZP Statistics. The justification for the omission of these reports was, they are adopting a new model of data collection based on an existing model that is run in Canada, and that after its trial period, they will resume the inclusion (in 2015) of domestic violence as part of the NZP stats.
So here’s the rub. National LOVE to play the “tough on crime” card. Judith Collins recently bragged about the crime stats being the lowest they had been since 2012. Oooh, just a wee bit coincidental, it appears.
So here is my bet on the political games of the next 2 years, depending on the outcome of this years election.
1) A successfully incumbent National led coalition continues to crow of the low crime stats, then, next year, when the NZP reintroduce those figures, that coalition will of course point out the temporary omission as justification for the sudden spike in crime.
2) A Labour led coalition wins the election, and next year, when the stats are reintegrated, National and ACT and friends will swing gleefully from the rafters, shouting hysterically about the sudden increase in crime that has occurred, quite obviously, as a direct result of “socialist policy”, unless, of course, they have come up with a snappier soundbite by that time.
Pub Spy!
The plods have a real fetish with licensed premises, not surprising given what goes on in their own watering holes.
I remember the team policing of pubs in the 80s and 90s when they would break all sort of laws as well as bodies in their enthusiasm. Keep the cops well away from lawful citizens social time.
And yet another step closer to Big Brother…..
Seems a perfectly sensible move from the police to me.
Could end up like an episode of Get Smart: Police watching sis, watching gcsb, etc etc. And in the mean while all the sane people are nice and warm at at home drinking. As who can afford to go to the pub these days?
“This has all the ingredients for gross abuses of power at a time when the NZ Police Force have hardly shown themselves to be well equipped to handle such enormous discretion”… and now Labour wants them to be able to put the burden of proof on the defendant in rape cases?
Delighted you are indignant about this. Perhaps we may now have the same level of indignation about Little’s proposal that men accused of rape should be required to prove consent.
‘I am praying that this is the tipping point that wakes the sleepy hobbits.’
Don’t hold your breath. The way the NZers follow insane fashion trends, cover themselves in tattoos and glue themselves to television sets in order to watch rigged corporatized sport should be a clear indication that the majority are clueless and don’t care.
By the way, the prime function of police is to protect the top 1% from the masses. Always has been; always will be.
You’re an algorithm, right?
And the good news is that, under Labour, anyone they catch will have to prove their innocence.
Reminds me of the undercover cop in the Huapai Pub when I worked there in the 1990s. He was the biggest druggie out – we had to kick him out of the pub when he lit up a joint inside the bar. He was a drug pusher – always had plenty of it, busted heaps of people at the end of an 18 month sting, though most of it was through entrapment because he was always after drugs. I hate to think how much the whole operation cost. For little benefit.
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