Officers ‘should have waited’

"Time is your friend. You can negotiate with this person as long as it takes." Inspector Bryan Buck

A second senior police officer has criticised the actions of police officers who arrested Gregory Mcpeake.

Inspector Bryan Buck, who has wide experience in managing tactics, dogs and the armed offenders squad in Canterbury, has told a court that Mcpeake’s car was safely contained when it was found parked near Napier, and there was no need to lead an assault on the car.

Buck’s evidence was provided in the trial of four officers charged with assaulting Mcpeake with a weapon shortly before he died while being arrested.

The officers, whose names are suppressed, are on trial in the Napier District Court accused of assaulting Mcpeake, 53, in the early hours of March 13 last year. The Crown claims they used excessive force by using Tasers and dogs. The defence argues that they acted appropriately given the information they had at the time. There is no suggestion they caused his death.

Mcpeake had driven from New Plymouth to his parents’ home in Hastings, where he used a batonlike weapon to seriously injure his 76-year-old father, Ray.

Hours later he was found sitting in his car at a car park in the Napier suburb of Westshore.

Police knew Mcpeake was a large man who might be drunk and violent, might be armed with a crossbow and could be suicidal.

Mcpeake, who weighed 179kg, refused to get out of his car after being asked to multiple times. Officers were worried he would start the car and drive away.

Officers smashed the car’s windows and used pepper spray, but this had little effect. They then used two dogs and two Tasers, but these failed to get Mcpeake out of the car.

Eventually he was manhandled out of the driver’s seat. He was handcuffed and arrested but died a short time later.

Buck spoke about the police tactical options framework, which outlines which actions or tools such as dogs or Tasers could be used in specific circumstances.

He said there was no evidence of any contingency plan in the event that Mcpeake did not get out of the car in response to voice command. In the absence of any contingency planning, the senior officers involved in the event had to make their own judgments, he said.

Buck said none of the officers had gained a full picture of the situation from the briefing. One officer, for example, had not been present for the entire briefing.

If the officers believed Mcpeake had a crossbow in the car, it was not appropriate to have led an assault on the car, he said.

Buck said the parked car had been effectively ‘‘cordoned and contained’’ by the placing of road spikes at the car park exit, and it was very unlikely Mcpeake could have driven away.

‘‘Time is your friend. You can negotiate with this person as long as it takes’’, Buck said.

Cordoning and containing was the appropriate action, he said.

On Monday the court heard evidence from police national coordinator for police dogs, Inspector Todd Southall, who said police were not trained to deploy dogs into vehicles due to the confined space, and the fact the offender could attack the dog or drive away, or may have another dog in the vehicle.

‘‘The threat [from Mcpeake] was at most, in my opinion, actively resisting. But that was it. Opening the door and allowing the dog to bite was not necessary... There were other options,’’ he said.

Just because pepper spray and Tasers had not worked, it did not mean dogs should be deployed, Southall said.

Once the keys had been removed from Mcpeake, the threat of assault or GBH was gone and the correct option was to ‘‘hold’’.

- Fairfax NZ