@taniwharugby

Yup. In the same way you can't outswim a shark, you can't outrun a land-shark.

It's funny that the whole age thing even comes into play, given the amount of young teenagers or pre-teens who want to commit adult crimes.

I feel I might have already told this story on here but when I was frontline we had a failing to stop along Tamaki Drive late one night with a stolen Toyota Landcruiser that was being used in a series of robberies and various other types of crime around the city. We had the helicopter overhead so as per protocol, they took the lead in the pursuit and we pulled back. The offenders ditched the car in a street in a swanky street in St Heliers and split up in different directions. The car was overloaded with about 6 or 7 people so the helicopter was directing cops to the locations of the offenders, spread across 4 or 5 properties in the street.

I got directed to go and grab someone who was hiding down the side of the house. I'd left my torch in the car in my haste to get out. When the guys in eagle suddenly said my offender was making a run for it, and was going to directly cross my path down the side of the house, I couldn't see much. We had no idea what we were going into or who we might end up arresting, so I saw the dark figure flash across in front of me and I laid on possibly the best tackle I've ever made in my life. Hard and flush, right up under the rib cage, with my full weight landing on top of them. The sound of all the air escaping their lungs was fairly satisfying to me, given I was full of adrenaline from the chase.

Turns out the offender I tackled was a moderately sized 13 year old girl, who had been in the car, had been involved in all of the robberies, and who had a pocket knife and a screw driver in her pocket.

The point of the story (other than that 13 year olds are suprisingly satisfying to tackle) is that I had no idea of the age or race of the person I was using force on, as the dog handler in the story wouldn't have, and even if I had known their race, it wouldn't have mattered in a fluid situation. Also, 13 year olds are committing adult crimes with greater frequency, and a 13 year old swinging a knife would kill or maim an officer just as well as a 40 year old swinging a knife. It's a shame Marama Fox can't grasp this concept before she opens her mouth and cries racism.

I think the while "a conviction would stop me from pursuing (insert chosen career path here)" thing is a little bit stupid when it comes to serious crime.

Fair play when it's something like disorderly behaviour or something minor and dumb. But when you punch a female cop unconscious and then punch her three more times in the head on the ground while shes unconscious, bad luck. That's a serious crime, and had it been a cop convicted of doing it to him the cop would definitely be going straight to jail.

Just because you have doors open to you that not everyone else does, shouldn't give you a get out of jail free card when it comes to serious offending. I was equally disgusted when George Moala got discharged without conviction for slashing that guys neck with a broken bottle too. With great privilege (such as lucrative career options) Should come great responsibility. The fact his family blamed it on him living away from home at uni is an insult to every other person who has done the same thing and not bashed females after too many beers. That their statement referred to it as a "bad decision" is also an insult. A bad decision would be the first punch, not the three subsequent punches to an unconscious female just doing her job.

While I agree we should look to rehabilitate offenders, there also has to be a punitive element to the justice system. I've seen poor brown kids go to jail for far less than what this clown did. Unfortunately for them their parents didn't have the money to buy a big-shot lawyer to argue every single legal point of the case

@MN5 said in NZ justice system 2.0:

Yeah I read that bolded bit the other day and it made my blood fucken boil. A few of my ex colleagues went all the way and did the "sworn" thing ( ie became cops ). A couple are attractive blonds and I can easily picture them being the targets of all sorts of abuse and also worry that could easily happen to them after all a 50kg female isn't generally gonna fare to well against some pissed up aggressive bloke on Courtney Place.

My wife is about 50kg and worked frontline for a few years and she (thankfully) never had too many problems. Female cops are normally assaulted by other females because most criminals, except the worst or most desperate, still have a little bit of honour that extends to not bashing female cops. Female cops were also good at talking things down and de-escalating situations. I used to end up in way more brawls when I worked with other guys.

Speaking of the honour system, a long story, but I was working frontline in about 2009 and me and a female partner got called to a disorder/trespass job in Panmure. It came in as 2 guys arguing with the bouncers of a pub there because they weren't allowed in. It wasn't the crime of the century and we were in the McDonald's drive thru when it came in because we hadn't eaten all night. So as we went to it I was hurriedly trying to finish a big Mac combo.

When we arrived, it turned out one of the guys had an arrest warrant so he bolted down behind the shops, which are pitch black. I had left my torch in the car and was full of Mcdonalds so i gave up the chase after a few hundred metres and wandered back to see if my partner was okay with the other guy, figuring we'd get a dog to track the fulla I'd lost. As I rounded the corner, I saw the second offender shove/hit my partner and take off. It wasn't a bad assault but she was a bit shocked. I took off after him, thankfully he was kinda fat, and I was kinda gassed plus full of McDonald's so we had a slow motion footchase down Queens Road in Panmure. My partner had called for backup, saying she has been assaulted so suddenly there were a couple of nearby sirens audible which made the guy run down a dead end alleyway to try to get off the main road.

I got in the alleyway and yelled at him to get on the ground and he was under arrest for assaulting police. Just as I slowed to a walk and the offender put his hands up,this big old white guy who had seen the assault on my partner from the comfort of the pub came tearing past me and punched the offender square in the jaw with one of the cleanest punches I've seen landed and screamed "don't ever hit a woman cop" then proceeded to try to go to town on this guy on the ground. I then had to pull him off, and unluckily for him, one of he biggest guys on our squad turned up, and thinking the big white guy was the main offender spear tackled him and put him in cuffs for his troubles.

Hilariously, the first offender I lost was hiding behind a rubbish bin about 6 feet away in the same alley, looking petrified about what had just happened to his mate, came out and lay on the ground without being asked.

I think we ended up having to warn the big white guy for assault, just to cover our asses in court. Bizarrely enough, he had a sizeable criminal history for all sorts of things, but was staunchly pro police and anti violence against women so wasn't gonna let it slide.

@No-Quarter said in Ngaruawahia P dealer eviction:

If they have such great intel on who and where the P dealers are why would they not work with Police to have them arrested? The argument "oh the cops haven't done anything about it" is crap because getting to the heart of these operations takes a huge amount of effort and investment. If this gang already knows everything and wants something down about it then why not give the info to the Police and make their jobs 1000% easier.
.

That's exactly it. The general public reaction to this (by general public, I mean the cross section of society who care enough to comment on the herald and stuff facebook pages, so not really accurate), is "why aren't the Police doing this instead of the gangs? They're also the same people who will (rightly) complain that the Police are overstepping their mark whenever a court case is thrown out because a warrant is ruled illegal or a search unlawful.

I worked in high end drug enforcement for just over 4 years and it's without a doubt the most difficult, frustrating but rewarding form of policing I ever worked in. It's not as simple as seeing some scrote driving around in a 200k Benz and deciding they're a meth dealer. I was lucky enough that our squad was really well resourced, so when we chose a target, we normally always got there in the end, but for an average frontline cop or Detective in a small provincial centre, they'll be running on a bare-bones budget, have limited drug investigation skills and even less resources. Coupled with the workload of being one of only a couple of Detectives in a small town, the desire for proactive drug enforcement is pretty low. Add into it that drug enforcement doesn't generate "statistics" (such as burglary resolution rates etc), and you'll find that it's almost frowned upon from above.

Hence, it's not even as simple as the cops just deciding they're gonna investigate the guys either, even with someone saying "Joe Bloggs is a drug dealer", it still wouldn't be enough to get you a search warrant, or over the line in court.

I'm fairly neutral on the Tribal Huks (aside from the stupid name). Gang members come in all shapes and sizes, and while they're certainly no angels, but they're probably not the Headhunters or Mongrel mob either, in terms of criminality. It's not unusual for gang members give back to the community by coaching sports, helping the elderly etc, so being part of a gang doesn't necessarily mean you're gonna be an evil monster. There are plenty of absolute scumbags who don't wear patches as well.

Pink seems like any number of gang members I've come across in the past with a massive ego, loves the spotlight and likes to talk about what a good guy they are. Personally, if they want to go and bash the shit out of some meth dealers, I'm fairly neutral on that, too. But they can't complain if they wind up being locked up for it. Its a slippery slope when you allow a gang to be judge, jury and executioner, without any due process. If it makes the community feel a little bit safer, so be it. But I would bet the house on the fact that meth addicts in Ngaruawahia are still easily able to get their fix from somewhere close by. You can't save people from themselves, so you'd have to ask if it's actually making Ngaruawahia any safer.

From memory, the victim in that matter was being a bit of a knob, but not violent or aggressive. Just a bit mouthy. I'm not entirely sure it's ever justified punching some guy out just because he's being a bit lippy. Yes, we all think about doing it, but being a thug just because someone is being cheeky is never really on. You also run the risk that you do them serious injury or kill them.

The bit that rankled me in that article is "He partially blamed Asthana's death on late night opening hours, and said he had suffered the loss of his naval career, experience financial hardship, "as well as emotional scarring, guilt, depression and anxiety all as a result of my actions". "

Generally when you go to prison for killing someone you lose your career and therefore experience financial hardship. But at least you're not dead, like the guy you killed is. McFarland looks to be a big boy, and the victim doesn't look very big at all. When you hit someone in the head with that sort of mismatch, you absolutely roll the dice.

It's also a pretty long bow to draw to say that it's the late night opening hours. There were probably 3000 other people out drinking in the CBD that night as well, and very few of them decided to punch someone out over something so minor.

I agree with Godder's sentiments regarding the fine balancing act with liqour enforcement. While it is absolutely necessary in some places, the Ellerslie races is a perfect example of where they have gone overkill. Can't BYO anymore because glammed up girls and guys in suits got too drunk, (but didn't really cause any major trouble). Yet still, the fun police decide they're gonna do something about it, even in the absence of any real violence or disorder (I did lock a guy up there once who was too drunk to notice my car was an unmarked CIB car and kicked it when I honked at him to get off the road, leaving a pretty good dent. But that's another story)

When I was frontline, or worked special events (RWC etc), I was never a fan of locking people up solely for breach of liquor ban etc. I agree that the bans are in place for all the right reasons - not just to stop people taking a heap of cheap piss into town and preloading before going into licenced premises. But also to stop drunk people carrying glass bottles (potential weapons) around town and generally just milling in the street drinking.

In general, they have been quite good for reducing disorder in hotspots. That said, in my past life, I'd had mates locked up for the relatively minor offence of carrying a half empty bottle of lion red from a taxi to the nearest bin outside a nightclub and it's pretty shithouse and not a good look for the cops in the eye of the average citizen. I used to deal with liquor ban breaches either by making people tip it out, leave the area with it (if they had heaps of booze in a car and I didn't want make them waste it) or else my favourite of telling them that I was just gonna go and write in my notebook and if the alcohol was gone by the time I turned back around that they'd be all good, however they disposed of it. I'd then sit in the car and chuckle at a bunch of 18 year olds trying to knock back beers so they wouldn't get poured out. Obviously used in only the right circumstances where the guys weren't already hammered, and weren't causing problems, but always hilarious.

My reasoning was that it was far better enforcement than just being a fluffybunny and locking them up and wasting my time and them ending up with a conviction for something stupidly minor. That said, it was a massive attitude test as well. If they decided they wanted to be a cock, then I enforced the law, because chances were that they were gonna be a cock later on and we'd end up dealing with them then.

Since those times though the balance of enforcement has shifted with liquor ban enforcement and it's now a case of locking people up is only the very last resort, as opposed to where it used to be the first resort, which is absolutely the right move.

At the end of the day, alcohol does a huge amount of social harm, so enforcement is absolutely necessary, but as Godder mentioned, it's quite a balancing act to do it. A huge percentage of frontline lock ups are alcohol related, but it's also unfair to penalise those who can use it responsibly, just because a minority can't.

@mariner4life Thanks mate. Chance meeting with @Donsteppa at work the other day made me realise I hadn't been on here for a very long time.

Incredibly this was the first thread I clicked on in a good two years and it felt like I'd fallen into some weird-ass parallel universe.

@mooshld said in ALI IN TROUBLE - DRUG ARREST!:

The problem with a famous guy saying he was buying it for a mate is that if they are really your mate they should come forward and take the heat off of you. If they don't then they're not really that good a mate are they, so you can probably just go ahead and name them.

Yup, and if he was indeed buying it for a "mate" who wasn't present, it would indicate that he obviously has a good working relationship with the coke dealer, otherwise why would he be brokering the deal on behalf, given how much he has to lose...

If I had a dollar for every person I locked up who blamed whatever illegal thing they had in their possession or action they'd just done on a mate, I'd almost be able to afford an All Blacks supporters jersey.

I locked a kid up called Wolverine once.

There was a chapter in the book Freakonomics a few years back which discussed a study done on how if an employer is sent an identical CV, one with a "normal" name and one with some sort of retarded made up name, that the employer will choose the normal named potential employee something like 95% of the time. The moral I took from that is that you're setting a kid up to fail for life by giving them a stupid name.

@Kirwan said in Universal income:

I'd be in interested in seeing the figures with scrapping most social welfare payments and replacing it with universal income.

If it's basically a wash then you could save money with less red tape and free up access to help those that need help. The flip side would be personal responsibility and no further handouts.

Can't help but think we are at the beginning of a permanent underclass.

This article here really sums up the "underclass" situation for me

When I was in the Police, we used to deal quite a lot with some of the homeless people, or people who were living on that fringe. They were responsible for an enormous amount of crime in the city, and not just some sort of Robin Hood stealing from the rich to get some food.

Breaking into cars, sexual assaults of females walking alone home from town, violent and indiscriminate beatings, homicides etc. Most of them had at some point been blacklisted from Housing NZ homes for trashing them, not paying rent, making drugs in them etc. It's not like they hadn't been offered help, they had just thrown it back in the face of the relevant agency. Plenty of them were trespassed from WINZ offices and/or the City Mission because of abuse/violence they had directed at them.

I could imagine a universal income being given to these people would result in it just being wasted the exact same way their welfare payments are, and then hands going out again asking for more money and complaints that the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer.

I'd rather see some sort of incentive offered for people to get sterilised once they've decided that they've had enough kids. A lump sum payment for someone getting the snip, or their tubes tied might stop a homeless woman like this winding up 12 weeks pregnant. It'll also stop a bleeding heart story from the Herald or Stuff in 27 weeks time about how she is on the streets with a newborn baby.

I liked the walker brothers for the very reason that they were an unknown quantity. The reality is that bar a handful of players, the current Warriors squad is a dumpster fire made up of guys past their use-by, guys who probably wouldn't make many other squads, and other mediocre players. Even under someone like Bellamy I doubt this squad could be top 4. At least taking a chance on the brothers would give them a chance to prove their mettle with a team who sadly won't do much without a complete overhaul.

Im a loyal as hell fan, but the Blake Green saga summed up the current Warriors outfit for me - publicly tell him he's not wanted, give him the option of immediate release and then publicly complain when he leaves that his heart wasn't in it. What did they expect was going to happen?

@Donsteppa - remember when the Mafia had Ian "Ferret" Foster at the top of our "know your enemy" list - circa 2004, for continual disservice to BOP players during chiefs selection?

We were well ahead of our time...

Two thoughts:

I'm genuinely surprised the TAB had the BoP at -24.5 favourites in this one. Southland were decent last week.

The commentators said they're surprised Selby-Rickit missed the All Blacks team. Personally it's hard to see the ABs selecting someone who has a recent conviction involving kicking someone in the head resulting in a fractured jaw.

@African-Monkey said in NRL 2020:

People can criticise the sin bin but rules are rules and Tevaga was stupid enough to throw the short jab.

Disagree. The scuffle started because the tackler was blatantly grinding his head into the face of Tevaga after the tackle was completed. You sinbin one, you have to sinbin both.

Atrocious reffing across the board tonight. I'm not one of those warriors fans who thinks the refs consciously have a vendetta against us, i just think it was completely sub-par. Warriors threw about five million forward passes tonight, all of which got missed as well. Hard to come back from that 16 nil down, a lead which was built on the back of that terrible sin binning.

Two of the most Warriors tries in a decade scored in the space of 5 minutes.

I'll call it now, we're gonna win by 50

Warriors v Parra - arguably the worst sinbinning I've ever seen in any code with Jazz being being binned. Including the 2019 RWC yellow/red card debacle.

That game was about as close to "clinical" as I can remember the Warriors playing in quite some time. We just looked in control for that last 30 minutes.

Its incredible given the stars they've lost this season and certainly makes you question whether that's where some of the problems lay.

Murchie gets more and more likeable every week. He's like Charlie Gubb but with talent to back his enthusiasm

@Snowy said in Fern Helpline:

My post just got upvoted by a cop. Things get more humorous by the day.

What can I say? I love my dark humour...

I'm about 6 months late to the party, but great thread. @Virgil I trust you drank your way through the lockdown like I did.

Don't know how helpful it is to anyone but I'm an investigator by profession. Have investigated stuff in both the public and private domain and have a niche in social media / open source investigation.

If any ferners have dodgy prospective children-in-law, pesky tenants/landlords (i have a side interest in property so know the ins and outs of tenancy stuff to a degree) or need a real brief vetting or finding of someone, I might be able to help. My inbox is always open.

@mariner4life said in NRL 2020:

@Nepia that link has already been made

and i just read that we offered him $800k last year? and that was the offer the Broncos beat by offering him $650

I wouldn't sign, he is the exact type of player we are trying to avoid (i hope)

He has "Sione Faumuina 2.0", written all over him. Talented but comes with all his own personal issues which will likely continue to detract from his career.