'Repairs top priority'
AFTER 42 years of policing, Wanaka area response manager Senior Sergeant Allan Grindell (60) leaves the job on Friday — taking holidays before his retirement.
At the top of the list of his retirement projects are repairs to a knee damaged while playing for Otago Boys’ High School against Southland Boys’ High School before he joined the police.
Snr Sgt Grindell was born in Invercargill, educated in Dunedin, joined the police in 1976 and introduced to policing and some ‘‘pretty rough pubs’’ on the beat in Wellington.
‘‘Those were the days of slygrog places.
‘‘It was a good place for a young policeman to learn.’’
In 1981 he was a member of the ‘‘blue squad’’ which escorted the Springbok rugby team around New Zealand on its controversial tour.
The squad would form a ‘‘skirmish line’’ to hold back protesters at each game.
‘‘We took a lot of abuse there, which was part and parcel of the job.’’
At the time, he was a senior rugby player for Kaikorai and ‘‘always a rugby man’’.
But, after experiencing the violent protests ‘‘I think I changed my view.
‘‘It just wasn’t worth the hassles for New Zealand.’’
After working as a constable in Dunedin he took up the position of sergeant in Wellington in 1986, and worked on serious crime cases with the Combined Investigation Unit.
In 1992 he took up a senior sergeant’s position in Dunedin. He recalls the Castle St riots associated with the Undy 500 student car rally from Christchurch, which was his first encounter with social media.
‘‘There was a big crowd and a few bottles being thrown and we thought if we move them off quick we’ll be fine.
‘‘And we did that, but we forgot about the power of social media, so within about 20 minutes the crowd had tripled.
‘‘That was a long night.’’
Snr Sgt Grindell moved to Wanaka in 2009 and remembers two or three years when, at New Year, most of the windows in a Wanaka hotel were smashed.
Glass bans, liquor bans and a zerotolerance approach helped improve behaviour.
More than 40% of Wanaka work is now around road policing. ‘‘It’s not just foreign nationals. ‘‘It’s our own people driving pretty badly too.’’
Snr Sgt Grindell said he had no real plans for his retirement, although he anticipated that his golf would improve.