I don’t want to sound racist about these roaming armed Police Officer Teams b-u-u-u-u-u-u-t

About these new roving armed police units.

Look, most New Zealanders would agree that when a cop pulls a trigger, you want the best trained cop do it. The truth is that the vast majority of our police are ill trained in using firearms and you don’t want garden variety Mr & Ms Plod getting their guns out of the locked box in their car and getting involved in a shoot out.

You want specially trained Police in these circumstances and the current situation of the AOS being called into HQ and suited up and equipped and then sent out is a genuine time lag on being able to respond, so again, roving units that are specially trained and are already in the field to deal with firearm threats is a legitimate tactical decision.

Now in terms of the threat? Well, I don’t want to sound racist b-u-t, all those angry white loners out there, like the Christchurch terrorist, are very, very, very emotional about their favourite machine guns getting banned and are saying all sorts of angry erratic nonsense. Don’t get me wrong, some of my best friends are white men, but as the old Māori proverb goes, ‘When cracker go cray cray, he goes full cray’.

So roving armed cops specially trained in tackling angry white male gun owners is a step in the right direction.

Facetiousness aside, the Police keep telling the media these roving armed cops are a response to Christchurch – but that’s only partly true – this has been offered up as a policy response to the simmering gang war between the 501s and the domestic gang faction. It seems Stuart Nash has woken up to the reality of a gang war erupting on the streets of NZ and these roving units are part of the solution.

So, roving armed police who can immediately respond to gang violence when a gun has been presented (or when a white male goes on a rampage) actually on the face of it sounds like smart policing, but the ink wasn’t even dry on the press release before the Police immediately begun to expand the events these roving Police units would be called to and suddenly Efeso Collins’ and Tim Mckinnel‘s criticisms became very acute.

It went from an incident where a fire arm has been presented (which most would agree is a threshold that requires this sort of armed Police response) to ‘suspected’ of having a gun.

‘Suspected’? Oh no you don’t, ‘suspected’ is the worst of all worlds, but it won’t just be those who are ‘suspected’, it will also be arrest warrants and drug raids.

Notice the mission creep is immediate.

We all get needing specially trained cops to attend an incident where a firearm has been presented, but that immediately slips to ‘suspected’ of having a firearm and arrest warrants and drug raids.

I don’t want pumped up ninja cops kicking in doors with guns drawn, that is just a bloody recipe for disaster. We have a containment policing philosophy where the Police contain a situation and then talk the person down, militarising our police force to kick in doors with guns drawn and questions get asked second will result in more people being needlessly shot.

Look, we let the NZ Police kill at will with their deeply flawed police chase policy, do we need to expand that to shootings as well?

Don’t the NZ Police get to kill enough citizens? Why let them have more?

See, this started out reasonably, went racist in a way you weren’t expecting, gave you some insight into how the gang war is really shaping this policy and ends damning the cops for killing New Zealanders.

It’s a rollercoaster of a blog.

In short, roving specially trained armed cops only turning up to incidents where a firearm has been presented as a response to the looming gang war – good!

Roving specially trained armed cops turning up to every single event they can possibly ram into justify the cost of having these units on call 24-7 that results in more young poor brown Kiwis getting shot – bad, very bloody bad!