Golriz Ghahraman, 1.5g of cocaine, a large Polynesian male and 4 cops walk into a bar…

This is hilarious…

Exclusive: The Police, the cocaine bust and the racism row
Police had cut through a carpark to avoid nearby traffic lights when they noticed the Mazda Demio.

What happened next would go all the way to the country’s second highest court, lead to accusations of racism and the dismissal of an apparently straightforward drugs charge.

…read the entire fiasco to get a clear picture of the bullshit that transpired, but the case raises bigger questions than the shallow defence of racism here. The ‘ large Polynesian male’ had very clever lawyers in Ghahraman and Pecotic who have raised the spectre of racial profiling as the reason why the four cops in their van stopped the defendant in the first place, that’s smart politics in an environment where Judges and the law are increasingly being bombarded with academic studies showing our Police (and most Police forces) are racist.

The fact that Police Commissioner Mike Bush could admit that NZ cops were racist in 2015 and it not make any ripple in the mainstream media highlights how accepting of that racism our system has become.

The issue here however is not that a large Polynesian man wasn’t co-operative with the Police when they first approached him (which his lawyers immediately translated into racial profiling), the issue is that the NZ cops actually have incredibly invasive powers that desperately need checking for all NZers.

This case matters because it’s about civil rights, not racial profiling. If this had happened to a white NZer it would be equally questionable.

The Police need to have reasonable grounds to suspect you are committing a crime and can’t just start randomly searching you based on bullshit reasons. A cop calling out to you, “Hey, what are you up to?” and you ignoring that cop isn’t a good enough reason to arrest you.

In this case the defendant didn’t bother responding so the Police have used that as their justifiable reason to investigate further. During their ‘investigation’ they have ‘discovered’ a ‘knife’ they see through the car window. The ‘knife’ was a craft knife but the Police interpreted that as a weapon and Police can search you if they believe you have a ‘weapon’. Once they searched the van, they found 1.5g of cocaine which annoys the hell out of me because the bloody cops can stumble across 1.5g of coke yet ‘my guy’ can’t find any!

So what we have here are cops using their powers in the most underhand and demonstrably absurd ways to discover a tiny amount of cocaine. Sure they found it, but they did so based on faulty reasoning and an abuse of their own powers. Stopping someone brown in a public space isn’t a power the Police have and redefining a craft knife as a weapon to enact a search is ridiculous.

Many reading this story will insist that the Police did no wrong because they did in fact find 1.5g of coke, but that misses all the abuses of power leading up to that find.

We live in a liberal democracy, not a police state, the rules are written to protect the citizens from police abuse of power, it’s not written so the Police can randomly stop and search citizens.

You want Police who respond to crimes, not Police who are just randomly cruising around looking for crimes because that’s when they stop becoming a protection and response unit and transform into a law unto themselves.

If you look at all the great abuses of power by NZ Police, it’s always when they are doing ‘preventive’ policing, i.e. – they are out searching for wrong doing rather than reacting to it. The problem is that your average cop is an arsehole and when left to their own decision making processes always tend to abuse human rights rather than protect them.

What we desperately need here is a civics campaign to actually alert NZers to what their rights are when dealing with the police.

Here’s a basic run down…

1 – You have to give police your name, employment details and your address. You don’t have to give them anything else.

2 – NEVER agree to anything the cop asks or says to you beyond those 3 things.  NEVER agree to a search of your vehicle or person. NEVER! The majority of NZers get into trouble with cops because they acquiesce to police authority. You say, ‘Officer, I am not resisting arrest but I am not acquiescing to your request to search myself, my car or my property. I am wanting it noted in the most clear terms that I have not agreed to this breach of my human rights’.

3 – Always write down their police numbers, and ask the Officer to provide it (if they don’t they always have id numbers on their shoulders).

4 – Demand a lawyer and NEVER, NEVER, NEVER, NEVER tell the cops anything. NOTHING!

It is highly unlikely that NZers have the intellectual flexibility to be able to see a Police force that abuses power is a bad thing when they find coke and that this entire case will quickly degrade into an argument about racial profiling so expect sweet  bugger all to be resolved in the following shit fight about to erupt over this.