A day after the Labour Government jaw droopingly suggested enormous Police State powers against anyone ever being around guns, video footage appears proving the very concerns many of us made about roving armed police squads…
Video of man being pulled over sparks fears about new Armed Response Teams
A video of armed police pulling over a man in Hamilton has sparked concern about the necessity for the new response teams.
A member of the public filmed the Armed Response Team pulling over a man they thought was armed and it’s raising questions about what their intentions are while out on patrol.
The teams, which were introduced a month ago, are deployed to high-risk areas across the country. They’re equipped with Glock pistols and bushfire rifles while patrolling the streets in specialty vehicles.
They’re only supposed to be used for the most dangerous jobs, but footage of the armed team shows them relaxed while pulling over a silver car in suburban Hamilton.
“The offender was flagged for carrying or possessing firearms, so they stopped that vehicle,” said deputy commissioner John Tim.
However, the man was found unarmed and arrested by the officers.
…now we all agreed having specially trained Police was preferable to ill trained cops, but the criticism I made was that before the ink was even dry on this scheme, the Police were already building in mission creep.
Look, we all acknowledge that well trained police with guns should attend any situation where someone has presented a firearm, but look how quickly the Police have added a slew of other things where armed Police can just rock up and involve themselves.
Pulling someone over with armed cops because they are ‘suspected’ of a firearm is bullshit and we all know it.
It is a recipe for trigger happy cops to go all American on our domestic population and we all know that will mean more young Māori and Pacifica men get shot.
We want positive and smart Policing, and specially trained armed Police who can respond quickly to someone who has presented with a gun, but what we are quickly seeing here is justification for the cost of these squads by extending what the Police are defining as a legitimate threat. Pulling over someone at the side of the road because they might have a gun isn’t a bloody threat to anyone other than the person the cops are pulling over.
Give them an inch and they take a mile so much for THE NZ POLICE learning their lesson seems they haven’t and probably never will aye Martyn.
Outrageous. We DONT want NZ to become like the US and much of the world with police being trigger happy with guns, surveillance and stop and search arrests.
Lets be clear its not the Police doing this its our “kind and loving” Labour lead government. Lets forget about prominent faces inside Labour and co and consider what this means. This is supposed to be a country of essentially unarmed cops, not one where Police forces start to look like para military, evoking thoughts and images of Latin American banana republic’s.
In my view its not acceptable, it should not happen and there is scant justification, save my belief that government are afraid of the public. The question that raises is why and what could they do to improve their public imagine? Perhaps keeping their promises would be a decent place to start.
This is a result of the hysteria whipped up over the unnecessary rushed excessive and unworkable firearms reforms. And it yet another one of my predictions being proved correct about the police agenda.
And i can speak from personal recent experience that the police are so arrogant and uniformed that they believe they have the right to enter ANYONE”S property without permission due to the search and surveillance act. The police are out of control. Mike Bush is an ego tripping fuckwit an we are on fast track to losing all our rights within 5 years. Thanks Jacinda you’re a muppet of the first order!!!
typo above should read UNINFORMED
Yep figured that and got a chuckle from it. My question would be…how did the police know the car had a possible firearms licenced person in it. Did they run the plates unlawfully or did they have reasonable suspicion a crime had been or was being or was about to be committed????
This is what the thinking people in this country are afraid of. This is a form of entrapment and incitement from police under some project they have adopted at some time of ‘preventing crime’ – being proactive against crime etc.
In NZ instead of arming up police and making big trouble to up their daily score, they could follow some practices from the past of spending time building relationships in low-income communities. These could be running gyms and sponsoring young fellows and girls in various competitions and projects, and the crime level would gradually go down. Not disappear! It wouldn’t be Crime Zero year, month or day. But it would be doing something good not negative. At present the police are exacerbating crime, and people who are victims of the dissolute and unemployed anomic** people that the police are targeting, feel they don’t get the help they need and no-one except the misanthropes in the country are happy.
google *noun: misanthrope
a person who dislikes humankind and avoids human society.
“Scrooge wasn’t the mean-spirited misanthrope most of us believe him to be”
**noun: anomie
lack of the usual social or ethical standards in an individual or group.
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q9SZlypyK-4
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BOnx5k2TiGk
Greywarbler – How right you are. What you say about the police building relationships in communities is spot on. By chance I’ve read Uni Criminology papers on this, and it’s all good.
Unfortunately the community police initiative was dismantled by the police hierarchy.
Community police told me that they are now only permitted to stay only one year in a community police station before being moved to another station – as far as I know, in the same city.
This obviously jeopardises relationship-building between police officers and the public, when officers are frequently changing. It also makes it harder to set up and involve youth in activities, when the initiator is going to be booted out by her/his bosses, and their successor may have a different skill set.
It is not fair on the young people in the community who could well benefit from it, or on any idealistic coppers hoping to effect change – most of them probably start out that way, and it’s a crying shame if the oxygen-deprived upper ranks thwart their noble ambitions. They should be nurturing all this stuff.
I don’t know how many Neighbourhood Cop Shops have been totally disbanded either, but the importance
of a reasonably stable one, where cops and community can get to form relationships is so self-evident, that
it’s lunacy not to be doing it.
The community cops who told me about it, were fairly circumspect and not jumping for joy, and they registered my astonishment that just when everyone on a local patch is getting to know each other, then one side gets pulled out.
Before the MSM sold its soul, this is the sort of issue they could have helpfully followed up on, but chances are any query would get fobbed off now with jargon and gobbledygook from a semi-literate PR aide with a long long job title.
If they are doing less community policing Snow White, and; moving constables on after a year so perhaps they don’t show any friendly bias, or it is just a small part of their training, to get a feel of working with the community, then its value is diminished for both police and community.
The whole trend in neolib is to treat people punitively when not obedient. People are regarded in a sectorised, categorised way – as consumers, clients, human resources. Those in authority tell people what they want them to know and take note of, then watch them to make sure they comply, then punish them by fines etc if they don’t comply.
It is interesting how our justice system works. People who don’t stop for the police to interrogate them may be chased until they lose their mental balance, crash and die and perhaps cause death and injury of others. That is when they have not committed a serious crime in the present. Yet there are a number of fraudsters who are operating in NZ who can be taken to Court for stealing people’s life savings, and slide out with some small penalty and change identities to evade the law, repeat again and again. Alwo there is repetition with child abusers, violent nutcases. These are prople that should be apprehended and kept aside to allow the public safety, particularly women trying to leave abusive partners.
So much to do, so little time apparently for working with and for the general public, but time for punitive stuff to those who don’t immediately obey the Blue Gods.
Greywarbler – The impression I had discussing their whole raison d’etre with the community cops – good and several conversations – was that certain areas are a pushover compared to the demanding work in less law-abiding areas; but there can be work arounds and compromises for all these things, and I thought that the guys at the top were making things harder for the troops, but I couldn’t work out why. I still can’t, but often these things are to do with funding. Platitudes about changes in the style of policing don’t wash when applied to the old style community policing.
One of the criticisms made of Wally Whatshisname was of his standing with one foot up on a chair seat, when talking to people on secondment. Apparently the senior blokes still do that, and I see it as threatening and sexually intimidating – I experienced it once as a school girl with a guy in shorts, and I could see his penis dangling down, and so ever since I have considered it an inappropriate action in a professional environment. It may just be thoughtless – or dingbats may think it informal and friendly, dunno.
Your second paragraph reads like the job description of a modern govt dept, where it’s a good idea for newbies to accept all the dire warnings which the veterans give them about how things are run, and the union – if it’s the PSA – may be no better than management – and that’s putting it kindly.
There is general agreement that the police are infinitely better now about the realities of domestic violence, and they do spend an enormous amount of their time dealing with it, and whatever the concerns about ‘uplifting’ children, it impacts on them too – they have to go to court ( or something like that ) to get warrants, and many of them are family people with children themselves.
The scenarios for women dealing with abusive partners are massively complex as I am sure you know, it’s a total whopper, and part of the dark underbelly
of NZ society which is so terribly tragic because for many women and children it impacts upon the whole of the rest of their lives, and some women forever carry a guilt for not having gotten out sooner – even when they didn’t know how to.
Mentioning this here can bring down a rain of blame from blokes – just another tired old story as they defend the indefensible – and child abusers should just be dumped on some semi-deserted island and left to live off fish and fern roots – and be nice to each other. If poss.
Tell it like it is Snow White and you may get a brown shower from the males who want to be freee and not care about bloody women and their problems, literally. There is no fellow feeling for the other gender there, and some women seem to dislike other females also.
The justice system is so out of whack that a prison is a costly shithouse it seems to me. There are some successes but the guys (and women) need so much more done for them, and for some the change would be just so that they can live adequately with other crims in a farm setting in a contained facility. for life. Could it be that some could have family and conjugal visits there, or controlled weekend visits to see children? Could there be education sessions that partners could come to, and earn an NCEA credit – having a shared experience that comes out with both having a small certificate that says success!
It would be good if there could be a facility that offers better conditions, counselling, self-knowledge and appreciation would be a boon for everyone, and finding your own hidden talents and ‘soul’ would be a personal win, but also one for a well-functioning society – which at present we are not. We are brutalised and it makes us all have a lesser life than otherwise, makes us mean. grasping, disappointed and angry and dependent on temporary buzzes from drugs etc.
Greywarbler – Bill English made a statement to the effect that our prison system was a societal moral failure, and he was right.
There are countries who do it better than we do, but every single time there is action to try and improve the prison system, opposition politicians scream that the govt is soft on crime, and that they won’t be soft on crime, and the voters respond accordingly; law and order is an cynical little vote getter.
The bottom line of course, is to have a better functioning society which doesn’t breed criminals. It can be done, but there has to be the political will to do so, and I doubt that National or Labour have the guts and the moral integrity to initiate transformational change; there are constructive small steps being taken in various prisons, mainly I think by volunteers and NGO’s.
It staggers me that so many male crims are functionally illiterate, and that’s an indictment of our education system, and I don’t know how this has happened.
The male-female violence is very much a hangover from harsh colonial times, and our terrible child abuse and killing
rates should concern all – it’s horrific – but little blue penguins are cuter and the Maui dolphin is endangered.
I had assumed they’d be carrying rifles to a critical incident and not pistols. There uniform is also standard Y’know I’d expect these guys to be wearing tactical gear and not normal beat cop stuff.
March 15th Christchurch was the excuse they had been waiting for.
Remember this is a six month trial lol and my bet is that will become a permanent deployment with falsified crime figures too back it up.
The old Green party would never have sanctioned this in a million years.
We don’t have a real Green Party today; – just a shadow of what the Green Party I knew who stood real change now while under Rod Donald and Jeannette Fitzsimmons as they were awesome leaders of our environmental justice bless them both.
Jeanette Fitzsimons – Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeanette_Fitzsimons
Jeanette Mary Fitzsimons CNZM (born 17 January 1945) is a New Zealand politician and environmentalist. She was the co-leader of the Green Party of Aotearoa New Zealand from 1995 to 2009, and was a Member of Parliament from 1996 to 2010.
Rod Donald – Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod_Donald
Rodney David “Rod” Donald (10 October 1957 – 6 November 2005), was a New Zealand politician who co-led the Green Party of Aotearoa New Zealand, along with Jeanette Fitzsimons. He lived in Christchurch with his partner Nicola Shirlaw, and their three daughters.
The real acid test will be the response by the media, the police and the public to someone getting shot in the back whilst running away. Especially someone with a tan. The clock has begun ticking.
I got called a “Gun Nut” here for merely suggesting that the government and some readers/bloggers here were over reacting to Christchurch. This event was obviously not a new “clear and present danger” (in fact mass shootings are incredibly rare in NZ) that required an instantaneous knee-jerk far-reaching Government response and I warned that potentially new “gun reforms” (a lot which I predicted would have nothing to do with guns) might infringe on basic NZ human liberties. Well here we are.
What does being called a nut even mean to you? To me when I say gun nut or machine gun it just signals that I’m fed up with all the bullshit.
Trying to reform the police is a fools game. With the media the way they are there is no scrutiny so if business’s and politicians think no one is looking they will think they cane get away with murder almost. So the guns are going and gone burger.
“Gun nut” was clearly used as a derogatory term to label me as some sort of far-right crazy simply for calling out what I saw as a knee-jerk over-reaction to an obviously highly politically (deliberate, I might add as said by the perpetrator himself) loaded and incendiary event.
Had the same experience @Nitrium. We have a whole bunch of urban liberals on here with zero life experience when it comes to the rural heartland of NZ. I include Bomber in that remark. No experience with firearms and therefore no understanding of how and why guns are used. The number of urban families who rely on family members who hunt to provide meat for collective tables would astound most on this blog. Myself I use a firearm for pest control . Another skill that has been viciously derided on here. As i have said before the rural urban divide is a gaping chasm thousands of kilometers deep. Urban muppets like our PM are being lead by the nose by the police because they don’t know shit!!!!!! This issue will bite Jacinda deeply on the arse come election time . No thanks to you Bomber!
Gun using people in rural heartland are not separate from the misuse of guns. They are useful to rural people and will not be banned for that reason, as I understand it, it is the rapid repeat fire automatic whatever is the subject of the bans. However rural people’s hearts are not necessarily pure and without criminality. An example is the killing of Scott Guy, a really rural gun attacker.
So please don’t present yourselves as totally misunderstood. Perhaps there should be regular meetings and get-togethers between town and country so that both sides of opinion could be aired and better understood. Rural needs to learn about urban matters too.
I suggest you Shona and other rural people notice criticism about some rural matters and take it personally, instead of taking it seriously and thinking how to right the matter raised. That is what good rural people would do, not just bat away criticism with cries of unfair.
If you are open to new ideas for a better relationship between town and country which would give you support in your honest endeavours on the farm, how about forming town-country relationships where you can have a friendship and interaction and help between families. Once you had formed a relationship of friendship and trust, they might come and visit and help during lambing or calving and stay with you, or just have a weekend on the farm. You could have a short stay in town and get shopping, a show, attend to legal, accounting, business matters, a break. The children could alternate with visits in school holidays. If there were regular get-togethers with town and country initiated from both sides, a let’s get together bringing isolated rural to town and a meal and music, and vice versa in a back and forth way it would start to break down this defensiveness from rural, and this arrogance and ignorance often shown from town. It would take organisation, but there has been a rural organisation for promoting health and services which could take it on as part of their program, and the large number of retired folk in town, would find it enjoyable volunteer work, useful to the community, like being involved in hospice support as so many are.
“However, the man was found unarmed and arrested by the officers. ”
Why was he arrested?
bert – they were already looking for him for another offence – it was reported in the ms media.
While I don’t typically frequent the same sphere’s of influence and political ideology Martin or this blog typically entails.
I feel this is worth commenting on mate.
I don’t know what dysfunctional authoritarian knee-jerking this government or the Police are currently involved in to justify this based on rational evidence… But this is horrific, a disgrace to New Zealanders and generally only will end in avoidable bloodshed of innocent Kiwi’s like in the United States.
Blood will be on the Labour Party and this governments hands in time as this tragically unfurls. We the people of this nation will never forget whom to blame in future and whom to fear to elect again in modern times.
This is a much greater tragedy than any terrorist attack, it’s terror/intimidation upon our country as a whole by government. Not mentioning stripping our human rights away needlessly on behalf of those whom would wish to harm us!(The government is basically doing the Terrorist’s work for them!)
Keep up the good work opposing this as much as you can Martin.(Even if your other political leanings are odd at times)
May future New Zealand victims know that a few of us spoke out… We made our voices heard while we could. It’s just a shame political apathy is the way it is in New Zealand.
Notice the police want armed officers but category reject body cameras smh!
So much for our NZ Police strategy to reduce Maori crime rates it wont happen while our gun carrying police are locked and loaded ready to kill our Maori people what bastards
Can everyone look up a movie on Youtube named : The Gray State …… !
The last hour of it will explain whats happening.
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