Posts by Matthew Poole
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what is fundamentally unreasonable about reviewing the event and determining whether the use of tasers could have helped resolve this situation better?
O'Connor knows perfectly well that Tasers will never be deployed in response to a firearm. That was made abundantly clear when they were first being evaluated, and makes perfect sense. A Taser has a maximum range of about 7 metres. A pistol is lethal at several times that distance, and even the effective accurate range is further. A rifle is accurate and lethal at 20 times, or more, a Taser's range. It's simple sense that a firearm threat must be met with a firearm, and O'Connor is completely aware of that fact.
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I draw your attention to s9 (4) of the Defence Act 1990
And I draw yours to s9(4)(b)
that the emergency cannot be dealt with by the Police without the assistance of members of the Armed Forces exercising powers that are available to constables
Driving a sodding great armoured beast is not exercise of a constable's powers. Using force to achieve resolution of an armed stand-off is. I say again, the LAVs were not utilised in a manner requiring that the House be advised. The soldiers driving them were just drivers, not shooters, based on the available information. Any shots fired from within would've been from AOS/STG, not from the Army.
Read the whole of s9 and you'll see that merely operating the LAVs to provide an armoured, protective vehicle is clearly under s9(1). -
as distateful as Mr O'Connor using it to argue for "more Tasers, faster".
I'm constantly amazed at how out-of-touch union officials can be when it comes to their responses to tragedies. The NZPFU achieved new lows (even by their standards) when, with SSO Lovell dead less than 12 hours, there appeared on their website a piece with Derek Best (the fire fighters' equivalent of O'Connor) calling for increased numbers of career-manned appliances to be sent to fire alarm activations, with the implication that somehow Tamahere wouldn't have gone as pear-shaped if there had been three appliances, or four, on the string instead of just the two from Hamilton. It disappeared within hours, I hope due to outraged feedback from union members, but that it was there at all was just disgusting. Unseemly haste in making political capital from a tragedy does bad things for the palatability of your message.
That said, I've been impressed with the fairly moderate utterances from our political figures. I'm sure that'll change, probably once it's known if all the injured will survive, but that things are still seemly from the Beehive is nice.
And as an aside, I sincerely hope that the injured civilian gets the New Zealand Bravery Star. Reading those citations, his actions definitely qualify.
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Caleb, if the police want to use the military as anything other than glorified bulletproof vests, there are statutory checks and balances. Parliament is sitting, and it's incumbent on the Minister of Police to notify the House immediately if the police will be using military force in resolution of a situation. See the Defence Act. No such notification was made, so your horror at this deployment of "military materiel" obviously doesn't meet the standards of a law that's been in place for most of the last two decades.
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So how do you stop gun hoarding?
You can't, is the short version, unless you give the police the power to conduct random raids on any house to ensure compliance with the law.
If you outlaw owning guns, only outlaws will own guns. The people who will comply with the law are not the ones about whom you need to be concerned. By definition a criminal is not law-abiding. This extends to not registering their firearms. A registry doesn't suddenly make these people abide by the law.Also, what does a registry do to stop hoarding? Why should we stop hoarding? Seriously, why? The police already know the address of every firearms licence holder in the country, with it being an offence under the Arms Act to fail to notify a change of address. They know before any warrant is served if there is a licensed holder resident, and that is certain to be one of the factors considered when determining risk. Mollenar didn't have a firearms licence, as I understand it, so no legal measures would've changed his habits.
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The question remains. Why did they not have the intelligence?
Because it sounds like this guy's friends weren't talking to the cops. We don't live in a police state, Steve, much as people like to characterise it otherwise. If nobody informs the police of something, they don't know. They don't have surveillance cameras in every home, and half the population informing on the other half. Unless you want to change that, intelligence failures are a routine fact of police life. It's just unfortunate that, in this case, the failure resulted in a fatality. The same occurred with the shooting in Mangere last year, where it was unknown that there were weapons in the target house.
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The police had "intelligence" that this guy had a pot plant. Did they not have "intelligence" that he also had Guns, ammunition and explosives? and that he may not be the "full quid"?. I think this is the more important part of the problem and should be addressed by any inquiry.
Well, quite obviously they didn't have any such intelligence or it wouldn't have been a simple cannabis warrant. It would've been an Arms Act warrant, backed up with the full might of the Napier AOS and the nearest bomb squad. Your apparently low opinion of the police and their concern for their own wellbeing isn't borne out by historic fact. If they have advice that it's dangerous, they take firearms and do things in a totally different fashion. Look at how they do raids on gang headquarters, for example.
As I noted above, it's simply not practical for every search warrant to be treated as high-risk. AOS officers have other duties, and even in Auckland are too few in number to attend every single warrant serving undertaken each day.
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I would just like to be reassured all the right legal boxes were ticked before the army were called in.
There are none, for something like the use of the LAVs that was undertaken. The Logistics Manager determines that the available resources are inadequate and advises the Incident Controller. The IC and the LM establish that a resource is available through the Army, and a request is sent through the Police to the Ministry of Defence to mobilise armoured vehicles to act in a support role for evacuation. It's not an armed deployment to carry out police functions (and I wouldn't be surprised if the LAVs didn't even have ammunition on-board when they were carrying out duties), so there's no issue of the Defence Act requirement to notify Parliament. That's only necessary if the IC wants to use soldiers to do a police job, such as sending in the SAS to terminate a terrorist incident. Simply making use of military vehicles to do things for which the police lack the equipment isn't a devolution of powers.
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Two things need to be done. All weapons and ammunition need to be registard.
No. Just no! A firearms registry does absolutely nothing to help with gun crime, and ends up costing north of a billion dollars, vastly more than projected, and that's without actually being completed. They're worthless "be seen to be doing something" projects, nothing more.
At least Chester Borrows seems to have a clue, saying "the horse has already bolted" when asked if a registry would catch all the existing firearms. Hopefully that'll be the end of it, though I can already hear Alpers' strident cries to resurrect the registry concept.
As for Lawhs (article above), don't get me started. Arming the police is not the solution, it's just a way of adding to the problem. I haven't seen anyone credible (O'Connor isn't credible, and hasn't suggested it anyway) suggest that things would've been the least bit different if Snee et al had been operating under a permanent-carry model. The only thing the police could've done differently that would've absolutely resulted in a different outcome would be if they'd treated it as a high-risk warrant and gone in with the AOS. But they had no information to indicate that was necessary, and it's totally impractical to treat every search warrant as high-risk.
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This was a massive police overreaction sparked by a bungled drugs raid. Doesn't anyone else find the trend towards militarized policing in this country just a little scary?
"overreaction"? To a man who demonstrated that he had no qualms about opening fire on unarmed police? Overreaction would've been following through on some of the more nutjob-like TBR caller suggestions. My favourite was dropping heavy things on the house from a helicopter, to crush it and the man within.
The LAVs were there because, unlike a number of American police departments our police don't have armoured vehicles at their disposal. Something about militarisation of the police, you say? Not at all. Having to look at or know that their colleague's body was lying there for 33 hours, unable to retrieve it due to taking fire on every approach, is really bad for morale. Even unconsciously it is on the mind of every senior officer, right the way up to Broad, and that's not healthy when the situation is still unstable. Retrieving Snee's body removed that distraction, but the only way it was happening was with the LAVs.
Also, with at-risk civilians in the area, how would you have had the police extract them? In their patrol cars? Trying to protect them with those ballistic shields as they crossed hundreds of metres of firing range? Get real. You're yet another Armchair General who thinks that he could've handled it better than the officers on the ground.