Questions over police methods

ON the face of it, policing sounds quite straightforward.

There are laws, and police are there to see they are enforced. But how they go about doing that most effectively is also a matter of good judgement.

In some situations, a softlysoftly and educative approach will be best, while on other occasions, particularly where loss of life may be imminent, they may have to act decisively and sometimes forcefully.

They may not always get it right and sometimes they are found to have broken the law rather than upheld it.

Whatever they do, they are rightly subjected to scrutiny.

A couple of examples of a lack of judgement in recent years were the decision to set up a checkpoint to breathtest elderly euthanasia meeting attendees in Lower Hutt as an intelligence gathering exercise, and the unlawful raid of journalist Nicky Hager’s home.

Closer to home, last year concerns were raised by a Dunedin barrister that police were taking advantage of drivers’ naivety to conduct breath tests in homes, sometimes hours after they had been driving.

This year, questions have been asked about what led to the raid of an Auckland rightwing activist’s home and the manner in which it was conducted.

It is difficult to see, with the amount of detail which has been made public so far, what role, if any, good judgement played in this.

According to the man concerned, Dieuwe de Boer, who is an outspoken critic of the gun buyback scheme, the raid occurred at dinner time when he was organising ice cream for his two older children. His wife was feeding their 4weekold baby in bed.

Police served the search warrant, half a dozen armed officers entered the house, and more were outside. Mr de Boer said they called for backup later.

The warrant stated they had reason to believe he had a prohibited magazine fitted to a .22RL leveraction rifle.

Mr de Boer said this rifle is designed to hit paper or to hunt rabbits. Its nowillegal magazine holds the industry standard of 15 cartridges.

The police eventually left emptyhanded. Mr de Boer says the rifle was no longer in his possession when the raid took place.

He suggests the police implied they would keep having to raid the houses of people he knew until the firearm turned up.

This approach by the police sounds heavyhanded and, since it backfired, all it has done is fuel the ire of those who feel persecuted or aggrieved about the buyback scheme.

It has also prompted some politicians to accuse the police of political motivation.

The police could surely have worked out that Mr de Boer would blog about the incident.

Were they hoping that if they found the weapon, he would write about that and frighten other people into handing in any illegal weapons they might be harbouring?

What the police have denied is that in seeking the search warrant they used information from Mr de Boer’s April submission to the Select Committee hearing on the Arms (Prohibited Firearms, Magazines, and Parts) Amendment Bill.

Included in his submission was an image of his .22 leveraction rifle which he expected would become a prohibited firearm.

However, in a blog post dated the same day as his submission, he published essentially the same information as the submission, under the heading Constructive Criticism on the New Firearms Legislation.

As law professor Andrew Geddis points out, the law forbids courts from using Select Committee submissions in court proceedings, including obtaining search warrants under the Parliamentary Privilege Act 2014.

That makes sense. People need to be able to give information through that Parliamentary process without fear of reprisals.

What is not clear is whether reproducing the submission online has the same protection for the submitter. Prof Geddis says this question has not been answered in the courts before.

Maybe it is time it was.