Random stoppings ended ingloriously
Forty years on, it’s a phone call I still remember. A Saturday morning in October 1976 and Police Minister Allan McCready, a Manawat¯u dairy farmer, was trying to downplay the furore that had erupted after random searching for “overstayers” on Auckland streets had begun a few days before.
Polynesians weren’t being targeted, he claimed, it just looked like that in Auckland because “there are so many of these people”. Then he added: “If you have a herd of jerseys and two friesians, the friesians stand out.”
It was a comment that helped fuel the growing outrage, bringing the joint police-immigration department’s Operation Pot Black to a sudden end the next night. During the four nights involved, more than 800 pedestrians — almost all Polynesians — had been stopped at random and asked for proof of their immigration status.
Auckland police chief A G Berriman warned that anyone who spoke in a non-Kiwi accent or looked as though they were not born here, should carry a passport. Among those stopped was a M¯aori woman on her way to work. “I hope you are a good M¯aori,” said the police officer as he sniggered to a colleague.
At the time, Immigration officials admitted that of the 10,000-12,000 estimated “overstayers”, 40 per cent or so were in fact people with expired visas from Britain and the United States. Asked if they were also in his sights, Berriman told me, “We’ve only just started this. We went for the obvious ones first.”
Immigration from the Pacific Islands had been encouraged in the early 1970s because of labour shortages, but many overstayed their temporary work visas. In 1974, with an estimated 6000 illegal overstayers, dawn raids were launched to track them down.
An embarrassed Labour Government halted the practice as “alien to the New Zealand way of life” and declared an amnesty. This played into the hands of populist National leader Rob Muldoon, who used the anti-migrant card to help win the 1975 general election.
On February 17, 1976, he revived the dawn-raid policy, hitting 18
houses in Onehunga and four in Ponsonby before sunrise.
One of the initial targets was longtime legal resident, and wife of a New Zealander, Tongan-born Telesia Topping. She was woken at 6am to find a young constable checking under her bed and in her wardrobe for overstayers. She emerged from her bedroom to find at least eight policeman beginning to drag six visiting relatives into a waiting police van. They all had valid work visas.
I recall the Immigration bosses being upset, not by such embarrassments, but by our
Then came Operation Pot Black, the random stopping of anyone with brown skin. It proved a step too far.
reference to them being “dawn raids”. Dawn, they argued, was around 5am. The Auckland Star noted that sunrise, that day, was officially at 6.53am.
Months of indecision followed, with talk of amnesties and voluntary departures getting nowhere. Then came Operation Pot Black, the random stopping of anyone with brown skin. It proved a step too far. As Sergeant Peri Ngata, head of the Auckland branch of the Police Association, courageously said, the order his colleagues had been given to stop people on the street to check their immigration status was “abhorrent to say the least”.
By December the Government admitted defeat. The dawn raids and random stopping both ceased.
Brian Rudman won the 1976 Dulux Journalist of the Year Award (then the country’s top journalism award) for his coverage of the crisis in the Auckland Star.