With the Maori Party pushing for a secret police force to hunt down white supremacists based on woke narking, the danger that the NZ Police could seize the Hate Speech law and start an unofficial Stasi is a genuine concern.
Police are already champing at the bit with illegal face recognition mass surveillance powers, they can’t believe their luck at the rising demands from Hate Speech mania.
The activist woke see hate speech laws as a weapon to smash those they hate by manufacturing threats the way they did with a Rachel Stewart.
So imagine 5000 complaints in the first month of the hate speech law passing.
If Police don’t take any complaints to prosecution that will start a new wave of criticism from the woke that Police aren’t protecting them from hate.
But what if Police actually see this as a unique opportunity to gain more power and resources.
Police could say to Jacinda, ‘Look Prime Minister, we would love to arrest all those hateful people saying hateful things, but there are so many complaints, we need extra resources”.
Police could argue for more resources to arrest more people from the tsunami of woke complaints.
Suddenly an operating Stasi to hunt down hate speech gets specific funding and infrastructure and before we know it, Police are incentivizing triggered millennials to make Police complaints to keep the entire madness going.
The unintended consequences of this Hate Speech law continue to mutate.
Don’t give the Police this kind of power – it’s incredibly dangerous.
The same woke writing off free speech concerns are the exact same people who will call police with hate speech complaints.
When we stand for free speech we are Nazis.
When they push for police powers they intend to use to lock people up for 3 years it’s fucking noble!
Look, I’ll cut the woke a deal.
You can win the hate speech vs free speech clusterfuck if you promise to call the prisons that Hate Speech heretics will be sent to as ‘gulags’ ok?
Because that way at least your self righteousness can be ironic.
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To finish my original comment that loaded by itself before I finished, Grey Lynn bicyclists took over the Harbour Bridge and that was too much for police.
They appear short of staff and will power under their current leadership, I don’t think hate speech will register somehow.
Hey X-ray – the current police leadership is generally regard as the best for a while. Remember it is not the police who are agitating to control citizens’ talk and thoughts, it is the government, and it is the police who the government want to use to do this – they’re the fall guys here, with government even saying that the police will decide what is hate speech – another slippery government cop-out. Pun intended.
Don’t see the police telling the media/government it is not very workable with their current work load.
Or the justice system asking for more courts to be built and more prosecutors and legal aid for all the new cases arriving (many of which will be thrown out after taking up resources).
Remember these are the cases which are being investigated, thrown out or re tried in the UK. Doesn’t seem to be a good use of resources or anything about terrorism or hate speech.
“On 13 October 2001, Harry Hammond, an evangelist, was arrested and charged under section 5 of the Public Order Act (1986) because he had displayed to people in Bournemouth a large sign bearing the words “Jesus Gives Peace, Jesus is Alive, Stop Immorality, Stop Homosexuality, Stop Lesbianism, Jesus is Lord”. In April 2002, a magistrate convicted Hammond, fined him £300, and ordered him to pay costs of £395.[15][16][17]
On 2 September 2006, Stephen Green was arrested in Cardiff for distributing pamphlets which called sexual activity between members of the same sex a sin. On 28 September 2006, the Crown advised Cardiff Magistrates Court that it would not proceed with the prosecution.[18][19]
On 8 December 2009, Mr Justice Richard Clancy, sitting at Liverpool Magistrates’ Court, acquitted Ben and Sharon Vogelenzang, hoteliers, of charges under the Public Order Act 1986 and under the Crime and Disorder Act 1998. The Vogelensangs were charged after a guest at their hotel, Ericka Tazi, complained that the Vogelenzangs had insulted her after she appeared in a hijab.[20]
On 4 March 2010, a jury returned a verdict of guilty against Harry Taylor, who was charged under Part 4A of the Public Order Act 1986. Taylor was charged because he left anti-religious cartoons in the prayer-room of Liverpool’s John Lennon Airport on three occasions in 2008. The airport chaplain, who was insulted, offended, and alarmed by the cartoons, called the police.[21][22][23] On 23 April 2010, Judge Charles James of Liverpool Crown Court sentenced Taylor to a six-month term of imprisonment suspended for two years, made him subject to a five-year Anti-Social Behaviour Order (ASBO) (which bans him from carrying religiously offensive material in a public place), ordered him to perform 100 hours of unpaid work, and ordered him to pay £250 costs. Taylor was convicted of similar offences in 2006.[24]
On 20 April 2010, police arrested Dale McAlpine, a Christian preacher, of Workington in Cumbria, for saying that homosexual conduct was a sin. On 14 May 2010, the Crown decided not to prosecute McAlpine.[25] Later still the police apologised to McAlpine for arresting him at all, and paid him several thousand pounds compensation.[26]
On 23 April 2018, Scottish YouTuber Mark Meechan of Coatbridge, North Lanarkshire was fined £800 after being found “grossly offensive” for posting a YouTube video that was viewed over 3 million times depicting him training his girlfriend’s pug to respond to the phrase “Sieg Heil” by lifting his paw in a Nazi salute. [27] Tory MP Philip Davies requested a review of freedom of expression in parliament in response to the conviction.[28] Comedians Ricky Gervais and David Baddiel tweeted in support of Meechan.[29][30][31] Tom Walker, Shappi Khorsandi, and Stephen Fry defended Meechan and criticised other comedians for their silence on the issue.[32][33][34] Meechan, who plans to appeal, was sentenced to pay an £800 fine on 23 April 2018.[35][36] A crowd of about 500 people protested the move in London.[37]
In 2017, 19-year old Croxteth resident Chelsea Russell quoted a line from Snap Dogg’s song “I’m Trippin'” on her Instagram page. The line, which read “Kill a snitch nigga, rob a rich nigga”, was copied from a friend’s page as part of a tribute to Frankie Murphy who was killed in a car accident at age 13.[38][39] Hate crime investigators were alerted to the presence of the slur and charged Russell with “sending a grossly offensive message by means of a public electronic communications network”. Defence lawyer Carole Clarke stated that she received a request from one of the arresting officers that the word “nigga”, the subject of the trial, not be used in court.[40] In April 2018, District Judge Jack McGarva found Russell guilty and delivered a sentence which included a £585 fine, a curfew and an ankle monitoring bracelet.[41] However, Russell’s conviction was overturned by Liverpool Crown Court on 21 February 2019.[42]”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hate_speech_laws_in_the_United_Kingdom
I agree on police being the fall guy, cowardly politicians stand back like little angels when it all turns to shit from their all care no responsibility attitude and let the police field the blame.
Disagree on the police leadership however.
The Police themselves have been driving a lot of the changes to firearms law (much of the legislation was written before 15/03/2019) and are responsible for introducing many new policy changes (bypassing standard law making procedures as the Government has largely given them a free pass to do this) to ratchet down pressure on law abiding firearms owners with the perceived aim of reducing law abiding firearms owners, and it works. There are considerably less law abiding firearms owners since the March 15th terrorist attacks, especially after the Gun Buyback.
All security services want increased powers & funding, what they do with that is not always what those giving the powers & funding actually intended. Before the terrorist attacks, the Police routinely used resources given for Firearms Licencing for other purposes, because the Police know licenced firearms owners are generally not the problem. Even today Firearms Licencing is poorly run, poorly resourced & poorly managed, hence the delays, confusion & rules made up on the fly. There is a political game being played here and the Police are not immune from joining in. This is all about control, so be careful what you wish for.
On the contrary going after some individual who got their pronouns wrong or is religious is easy prey like traffic enforcement, much easier to profit from that than a woke mob of cyclists – a large percentage of who are probably lawyers and work for government.
You’re making a compelling case for algorithm-housing body cameras for the police policing pronoun usage and monitoring the grammar villainy which makes people hungry and homeless, causes carnage on the roads, deprives hospitals and hospitals of funds, and has kids barefoot in winter. And that’s with just addressing the technical stuff, let alone the meanings.
It worked for the government’s committee led Meth standards to evict many from state housing to be sold off to private ownership…. oh wait, now more are homeless, the meth standards were shown to be bogus…. sadly stupidity becoming the law and being used to harm people is rampant in NZ under the committee/lobbyist/power hungry model of law changes.
saveNZ – The prospect of the government utilising the police to mutilate language is such a grotesque nightmare that I shall vote Act to stop them.
( Stuff is doing it all by themselves anyway. Who do they think they are?)
Stuff’s owner and former editor bought the rag for $1 and has only a 6mth course in journalism formal qualification, according to this article. https://www.irishtimes.com/life-and-style/people/the-new-zealand-rose-who-became-a-media-mogul-1.4327660
Let hope it does not come to that Snow White, and Labour and Greens come to their senses…
Ah, you’ve brought in the Greens. Surely it would be easier and cheaper to get them to draw up a list of rude words, worse words, hateful phrases, gender bender teasers, and nasty metaphors, and then normalise them so that they’re no longer offensive ? Davidson could do this singlehandedly – she got the whole country saying c**t – or gave it a jolly good shot.
Great point Martyn, what a criminal misuse of resources that would be.
Whatever. It’s going to cost the taxpayer a big bundle of money, cause massive social disruption, has the potential to wreck undeserving people’s lives, can be weaponised for dodgy reasons, and will wreck the English language as woke-ism is already doing with grammar – actually quite important as
statutory interpretation and legal issues can depend upon accuracy and precision in the use of language.
This week a man wrote of being called a middle-aged fat white man in a workplace meeting. Colleagues referring to each other this way is not ok, and doesn’t address any real issues. It may be part of the breakdown of society we are now witnessing, and it all creates a convenient diversion from the grim realities of climate change and the heart-breaking poverty and violence in the lives of our most precious taonga – deliberately seeking or constructing occasions of offence is no recipe for social cohesion, just social control and trouble making.
That is inappropriate speech not hate speech and they should be modernising the ERA so these sorts of cases can be heard quickly and cheaply, not getting the police involved in every dispute.
Savenz Agree, but inappropriate speech can be used to try to engender hate or to deflect from real issues. My point, which I didn’t make clearly – and still aren’t – is that that sort of mean comment shouldn’t be being made in a floor meeting held to discuss relevant or current issues – and I’d like to think that it doesn’t with competent managers.
Cops mightn’t have to do that much hunting down. On the grapevine, they receive a stream of complaints from Muslim women subjected to rude or abusive behaviour, and the PM may too. It’s hard to handle. Matthew T complained to the DomPost about an alleged racial slur and said that he shouted back at the woman concerned. Marama D lectured wanting normalisation of the word cunt, in response to her experience, which was probably very unpleasant for her.
What Muslim ladies are experiencing, is part and parcel of what many of us experience as females growing up and living in New Zealand, and by and large, we don’t shout back, we try not to escalate. The Muslim ladies are a more visible target when dressing differently – their choice. A Kiwi woman artist at art school in Benares said that she had to start wearing a sari because Indian men would follow her in the street and hiss at her. Muslim males have never been regarded as sensitive new age guys themselves; harassment is horrible and intimidating, especially after the Christchurch murders,
but suppression of free speech is not the way to solve any issue.
Wokeplod will no doubt jump at this opportunity.
Woke Coster will have a few hundred officers to redeploy now the government has decided to have a fully integrated gang system where the proceeds of organised crime get funded back as seed capital.
In further news British American tobacco has just won a contract with the MOH to manage (little) Aotearoa’s smokefree campaign while KFC have a similar contact to reduce childhood obesity. All the while not a cent to Mike King.
Lol.
All the cops I’ve spoken to about this proposed law ( a total of one) don’t like the sound of it. I might try and nobble another when I venture out on the tundra today, but am a little touchy about them fleeing when they see me coming.
Proceeds of crime law here same as civil asset forfeiture law in the US
To be fair, with Rachel Stewart the issue was whether she was a “fit and proper person to have a gun license”. At least there is now a known standard, “one cannot make jokes about hunting people with guns”.
Just as after 9/11 joking that one had a bomb meant you were not allowed to board the plane.
But you are right about about the consequences of institutionalising something – the Urewera raid was people looking to justify their existence. The same would apply once funding was made for the for resources to manage complaints of hate speech.
For mine there needs to be differentation between offence taken at offensive comment and incitement to hate and incitement to violence. The police deal with the latter and another body with the former.
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