Police admit motels data they tried to hide ‘paints a very unattractive picture’
A more than 900% spike in police call-outs to just five Rotorua emergency housing motels can finally be revealed after the Ombudsman ruled data requested by Stuff a year-and-a-half ago, which the police admitted “paints a very unattractive picture”, should be released.
Back in January 2022, Stuff asked police to provide data on the number of times they had been called to five motels in 2016 – before their use for emergency accommodation – and also in 2020 and 2021.
Police declined to provide that information, citing privacy reasons and commercial interests.
Stuff referred the matter to the Ombudsman and more than 18 months later, it ruled police should hand over the data.
The numbers revealed that across five motels, which Stuff agreed not to name, there were just 46 call-outs over the whole of 2016.
That figure rocketed in 2020 to 259 call-outs, spiking again the following year to 491 call-outs.
From 2016 to 2021, that was a staggering 967 per cent increase in call-outs.
After investigating the matter the Ombudsman ruled that “New Zealand Police should not have refused the request”.
The written ruling also revealed police sought to keep the figures private as “the data paints a very unattractive picture” for the motels involved.
“This is particularly relevant given that MSD had engaged the services of significantly more motel service providers in the region,” police said.
Rotorua National MP Todd McClay blasted the initial police decision to keep the data covered up, and suggested political interference played a role.
As if anyone in the Labour Government were clever enough to hide data like this, there is certainly political interference, but it’s not from the Politicians, it will from the Bureaucrats covering each others arses.
The exact same thing is happening over in Rehabilitation with John Campbell finding out that what passes as male violence programs is nothing more than an underfunded box ticking exercise.
Which of course is what it is.
The underfunded joke of NZ regulations is no where better exemplified than with Megan Woods comments that the Healthy Homes programme is barely policed and that she just ‘trusts’ Landlords to do the right thing!
There is an unspoken neoliberal straightjacket agreement between the Wellington Bureaucratic Elite and the Political Class, the Politicians won’t force real taxation on the wealthiest to properly fund our social services in return for political cover so that when those underfunded services fail, no one is ever held to account.
Kettling the homeless into Motels with none of the real service wrap arounds was of course always going to fail.
Our box ticking male violence ‘rehab’ programmes are in the exact same situation as well as any policing of Landlords, everything its underfunded and poorly policed and people just fall through the cracks.
We are so focused on underfunding everything and then covering up the problems caused by that underfunding is what Politics actually is in NZ.
Consider how undertaxed we really are and at how successful the neoliberal agenda has been in allowing the mega wealthy to get away with a rigged casino.
Welcome to the Land of the Wrong Uptight Crowd!
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NZ tax take, spending and debt are below the OECD average.
The message is clear.
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Bugger this, the police are covering their ministers arses big time, aka poll ratings, which is repulsive and to the casual observer, could be seen as rather corrupt!
Fenton St is the sum total of Labours and Minister Davidson’s disastrous achievements in housing and thanks to their faithful commissioner, the problems they created by concentrating so much dysfunction in such a small place has be hidden.
Of course the good people of Rotorua will know this first hand.
anyone who doesn’t want to fix this can STFU about crime…desperate peopledo desperate stuff
The government stopped doing slum clearance and started creating slums. They sold off entire public housing estates, which immediately turned into slums; they found shabby motels and turned those into a state-funded slum; and then they restricted supply of new homes, to that everywhere else turned into an overcrowded, high-priced hell hole.
I just wish Phil Twyford was reinstated. He would fix all this.
Some of those crowing about this may be just a little hypocritical. Just look at National’s Tania Tapsell, who is pretending that this shows that the current (failed) social housing is bad, while cutting social services across the board.
Have these motels, in which the most vulnerable- including some of the most criminal- of people have been concentrated, people who should be in proper social housing, led to concentrated social problems? Sure.
But many of the problems affecting these people existed before- just in lower concentrations, and further away from areas like the poncy couple blocks off Rotorua’s main drag.
Instead of turning these people out on the street like Tapsell wants to, it’s time to have serious solutions.
Yeah, nah nah, show us that you have no idea how bad it is in Rotorua.
But then i guess its easier to complain about Tapsell who got voted in merely a year ago then complain about hte EX Labour Mayor that filled these motels to the brink, appointed a gang banger to be the spokesperson for all these people and terrorize them with his own security gang, and who then together with the Labour MP (the one now running for the seat of Allen) lost – bigly i might add, and who disappeared to never be seen again.
The fault for this misery is not grown on Tapsells compost heep, it is grown in Labours. And many people have called out the misery from the get go. When you put three/four people into a one bedroom hovel in which you can not cook, nor wash your clothes, nor can the kids play outside, where alcohol and drugs are consumed openly, where single women rather stay in their car over night then get hasseld by the security gang from Tiny Deane, where not a single one of these homeless have tenancy rights, where they can not complain lest they get chucked out, you look at whom put the people there, and you take them to task for their utter failure to perform.
And that would be Labour, EX Labour Mayor Steve, wanna be Labour MP – MP for hire Tamati Coffey, dear Jacinda, Sepuloni, and so on.
IF there is one reason Labour deserves to lose in a landslide it is their utter inability to accept responsability for their works and their reflexive ‘it was not us, look at that new person over there surely it was them’ screeches.
So fucking over that bullshit.
Mirror Mirror on the wall who is the worst ‘
My dear voter, National was bad, but Labour Labour was the baddest of them all.
And so far Tapsell has not turned anyone out on the streets, but she is rightfully pointing out that commercial zoning is not suitable for residential housing, and that motels are not a place for kids to be raised next to gangbangers, 501, druggies prostitutes and the likes.
And Labour could have spend the last few fucking years building some goddamded houses.
One good thing about covid was homeless were allowed into motels whether the prime reason was to help the homeless or help moteliers lacking tourists it was a win win. But that was nearly two years ago, well past time to provide motelled families a house or state house. Meanwhile there are vacant speculator owned houses. Levy a vacant house tax and use the money to build more state houses to drive down rents and house prices.
In my neighbourhoods I am seeing some new state house builds coming to completion. And word is lots of builders facing a construction downturn are lining up to secure state house contracts.
so lets have a state housing organisation that willl provide continuous decent employment to tradies joseph
Yes and that would lower the build cost without 20-50% profit and 15%
Gst levied on the way through. And don’t forget the neo-liberal Labour policy of borrowing from Aussie banks to fund the build. What a waste.
” Police declined to provide that information, citing privacy reasons and commercial interests. ”
Isn’t it so typical of the times we live in that all someone has to do when being asked for information that is in the public interest to expose it all of a sudden its commercial sensitivity. The privacy act has become a joke as the only people it protects are the ones who want to continue to behave with no credibility or exposure for their dodgy doings or supress information.
Time and again commercial sensitivities let the corporate or high powered organisation a licence to like the most corporates and government organisations in this little tax haven continue to behave without any scrutiny.
The NZ Police are more and more becoming a private Police force who don’t enforce the law on behalf of the public but now act as agents to protect commercial and business interests.
The playing field has become so unbalanced in favour of neo liberal interests.
I think it’s more that the police have become politically partisan, and, importantly, this is inimical to the separation of powers. The IPCA report on what they did at Albert Park must be scrutinised very carefully.
commercial sensitivity translates as ‘oh shit you’ve caught us with our trousers down’
If life gives you lemons … very good.
And people wonder why Tamati isn’t very popular in Rotorua, or why Steve Chadwick got out when she could?
Tamati has only one chance at a life again, and that is to get as far away from rotorua that he can. He sold the leases to his two hospitality businesses last year, lost every local election he stood for and it seems was not hired as a professional pencil pusher by Te Arawa.
Yet another example of extraordinarily poor management by the Labour Government.
They are guilty of a dereliction of duty.
It’s sad but true that today’s homeless society are housed in motels when under the previous Nact Governments extremely poor management of the economy and their dereliction of duty to all New Zealanders meant Nact left them to live and die on our streets and in cars. And Seymour protests about social housing being built in Epsom is clear evidence a Nact coalition only governs for the wealthy and elite.
The right bloggers on this site are clueless to the fact.
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