Written By:
Steve Pierson - Date published:
3:56 pm, October 17th, 2008 - 46 comments
Categories: crime, election 2008, national, police, slippery, spin -
Tags:
National has a press release out blaming Labour for a supposed increase in assaults on police. Now, there are more people and more police than ever before, so all things being equal there will be more assaults, but it would be a concern if the rate of assaults had increased. In fact, the rate on assaults per police officer has remained steady for the past decade. While every assault is bad, at least things are not getting worse.
(sources: Police annual reports)
If National really cared about solving problems in our society they would not try mislead us with these pathetic tricks.
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They really are shameless, huh? But I guess when you know the media don’t have the resources to fact check you it makes sense. Just make shit up and you get stories like:
“The National Party says assaults on police are out of control and it’s blaming the government’s soft stance on crime…”
What evidence do you have the assaults should increase with the number of police? If anything, I would expect the opposite, that a stronger law and order presence would reduce all crime, and make assaulting police a riskier and less desirable proposition.
If you really cared about solving problems in our society, you wouldn’t try to mislead us with these pathetic statistical tricks.
more hootonpiffle milo. if YOU really cared about the problems in our society then you would not be supporting the national party
Respect for the police has dropped in the past few years, and the media has to take some responsibility for supporting the criminals and not the Police.
I mean take at tonight’s news, they had those Tuhoe criminals on, one of them was quite the word smith saying “mongrel cops” he should rent himself out for weddings.
What got me though is the media didn’t call the other Tuhoe member up on her statement that “This is racist”
Werent most the people arrested, Caucasian?
I hope the media actually know they did break firearm laws?
bd…the meedia in New Zealand have become infantilised and ineffectual. all they want is a scoop and to KNOW someone who is famous. apart from that they dont give a stuff.
“media has to take some responsibility for supporting the criminals”
No, that is entirely wrong, crime is going down, yet the media is reporting more and more of it.
Then again I guess I’d blame the media for over reporting crime which results in bad policy…
well when you have the perennial yappers garth mcrostie and ross mcvicar going flat out non-stop all year with the meedia hanging on every word then it is easy to think that crime is out of control when the reality is we have statistically the same number of psycopaths as anyone else. come to think of it where are mcivicar and mcrostie now the election campaign is on. why dont they have the courage of their convictions to speak up and have their assertions challenged?
Ah Brett,
From my understanding these cases are just through to the pre-deposition stage and likely to run out of time for those. This means that the actual court case is likely to be before the end of of next year if we are lucky.
So I’d say that your statement is a little premature, pre-emptive and shows an attitude for a presumption of guilt. Also most of the charges from my recollection are that they handled weapons (not even fired them) without a license. On that basis I suspect that the entire rural community (including myself) have been ‘guilty’ or firearms charges at some time.
How about not trespassing on the courts prerogatives on this site. This isn’t the Dominion-Post or whatever the wellington rag is.
How come they are playing the race card? even though the majority of people arrested were white? and why isnt the media calling them on this.
Believe me the media is going to be very manipulative in this case, just like they did with that wanna be cop killer Steven Wallace.
you right whinger trolls…you are trying …very bloody trying. John Key would tell you he liked hummus if he thought that would get a vote..and you guys would agree with him…you’re a source of humour though….
You don’t think respect for the police has gone down in the past few years? You don’t think the media is bias against them?
Brett: I haven’t seen the news. But I think that referred to the manner in which the police descended on a small Tuhoe community and treated everyone in it as a potential terrorist, detaining people without charge.
Since almost all of the people weren’t arrested and were rather pissed off. And the Tuhoe have a fraught relationship at the best of times over their treatment in the early 1900’s, I’d say that the police (probably the TAU) created their own PR disasters without help from others.
Oh I see, you’re selectively picking out the wellington and auckland raids where those excesses by the police were not as extensive.
But of course the person speaking was Tuhoe wasn’t he.
The police made the arrests they felt they needed to make, and the media jumped all over it, trying to make it as a race issue. There are several firearm issues that need to be sorted out by the courts.
Just wait and see, the court case will be our media’s wprst hour, they will play on people’s emotions they will try and make this a race case or worst a human rights case, when in reality these jackasses MAY have broken serious firearm laws, It;s nothing to do with race.
I support the police. But I do think they stuffed up mightily and the Tuhoe raids were very much a race issue. The only intepretation I can make is that they went up there yes to deal to the problem, but secondarily to put the Tuhoe in their place.
Sue them, I say.
Brett,
“wanna be cop killer Steven Wallace”
I think you’re in one of your excitable moods tonight but I’ll bite anyway. You do know it was Steven who was killed by the cops, don’t you?
Yes I do know Steven got shot and killed by a Police Officer, I know the media played on emotion and started to scream “He was shot for breaking windows”
He was actually shot swinging a baseball bat at a Police officer’s head.
Paul Holmes seemed to forget this point every night for six months.
well look what happened to holmes and his worm…give it a rest. it is totally self centred to keep going on about something you can do nothing about.
Self centred??????
How?????
Felix,
sorry he wasn’t killed by the cops. He was shot by one police officer. Big difference.
you are makingyour feelings more important than the event itself and as you can do nothing about that then you are compounding the self centredness…got it now?
I thought for a moment that you were discussing assaults *by* police?
[clarified. SP]
“just like they did with that wanna be cop killer Steven Wallace.”
With a comment like that, you are in no position to try and identify bias sorry
“You don’t think respect for the police has gone down in the past few years? You don’t think the media is bias against them?”
They sure have made some monumental fuck ups in the last few years, that could have something to do with it.
How am i doing that?
milo:
I support them as well. In general, they’re better than anywhere that I’ve seen elsewhere, and I can’t think of an alternative. However I think they could do with having a closer look at their internal structures. They seem to be somewhat archaic.
The Tuhoe raids and the way that they’ve been targeting activists over the last few years has (IMO) shown quite a failure in their intelligence gathering. Do I think that they could do with a bit of external commentary. Unfortunately I don’t think that the msm are up to it. They concentrate on headlines and that isn’t useful.
Anyway, it is good to see from SP’s numbers that they aren’t at a higher risk than previously.
Hah! Nice shot lprent. SP’s numbers indeed. Gee, I followed his source link, and couldn’t find anything in the 2008 annual report. Which page of that was it on?
OK here’s a different tact.
This has been a line of opposition parties since Adam was given a badge and Eve as his partner (sorry couldn’t resist), crime is up, crime is up.
Simon Power is even on record as wondering why labour hasn’t “sorted out crime” and Key on record as concerned that Labour hasn’t “fixed crime”.
So in 3 years time when there are people in Jail for the rest of their natural life, I very much look forward to the crime free society these two bastards are promising us. After all to “fix” or “sort” out crime is to imply that crime can be cut completely.
In three years if this lot get in, are we to assume that there isn’t going to be any crime? Oh nirvana – but what about the white collar criminals?
So it’s a couple of strikes and your out if your a violent criminal, yet if you are a stealing thieving bastard who ruins more than one families savings, business or retirement, do you end up in prison for life.
National are playing to the fears that have been whipped up by that psychopathic radio station ZB. You can’t “fix” or “sort out” crime – it’s a ploy – gimmick. The sad thing is it’s not called an election bribe, yet it does a hell of a lot more damage to society than giving a universal student allowance.
failing that National better patent what they are going to do and sell it to every law enforcement agency in the world and make this country rich again, because not one other country has ‘fixed’ or ‘sorted out’ crime.
Actually Paul, I think crime has decline a bit in all western societies because we are locking people up for longer. Just a theory though. Don’t have the detailed analysis.
This from Eric Crampton of the University of Canterbury on my blog
“On imprisonment without parole, check the work of Joanna Shepherd in the Journal of Legal Studies, 2002. Long story short, California’s 3-strikes legislation did a lot to deter crime. It even deterred first offences. The biggest problem identified by others (Iyengar) has been that there’s some evidence of a severity shift on the third strike: if you’re going to be put away for life for any offence on the third strike, you might as well make it a good one.”
Nice so while in NZ we’ve been getting crime down (yes the stats show this) and violent crime up, looks like ultra violent crime is going to rise even further.
I’ve heard this before when I was in Canada on a CBC debate, but didn’t catch any references. Basically the police were saying they were seeing a rise in fatal instance, when a burglary when wrong it really went wrong.
Here’s the reference
# Shepherd, Joanna. 2002. “Fear of the First Strike: The Full Deterrent Effect of California’s Two- and Three-Strikes Legislation’. Journal of Legal Studies XXXI (January), 159-201
Could be something in it, but at the end of the day we haven’t taken away the reasons people are committing crime just added a helluva padlock at the end. Will the extra prison admin staff be counted as extra civil servants?
But this is still different from “fixing” or “sorting” crime out like the accused Labour of failing to do. Funny the last National govt didn’t sort out crime either – can’t have been a priority for them, too many doll bludgers to pick a fight with.
Here’s the quote from Simon Power on 30th Jan
Labour has had “nine years to stamp out crime'”. that’s right folks, not just control crime but stamp out crime.
Funny too the biggest increase in the rate of crime according to the statistics was during the 70s and 80s and has plateau since then.
I posted about this back on Jan 31
http://concernedoflinwood.wordpress.com/2008/01/31/national-party-spin-bollox-1-08-c-mr-power/
Brett Dale
Typically in a case involving the police killing someone, the evidence is conflicting. The police said Wallace was waving the bat. Other witness said he was holding the bat at his side or across the front of his chest. The officer who shot Wallace, armed with a glock pistol, made a unilateral decision to confront wallace. Witness evidence suggests the cop mistook Wallace for someone else and antagonised him by calling him a cunt. A police dog handler was on the way and the police officers involved could have cordoned off the scene and simply backed off and waited for dog handler to arrive. The officers failed to follow police procedures and Wallace was killed…all for breaking windows. Wallaces death was particularly disturbing because it was unnessasary. Any criticisms of the police handling of the situation either in the media or by his family is, I believe totally fair.
cut to the chase…why is there so much crime? is it a necessary and sufficient condition of industrial capitalism, i.e. it is anomic or is it just natural for a certain percentage of a population to do what they want without considering the consequences. how is that we can send a man to the moon but we cannot ascertain the root causes of the pathology in our midst? Is it or is it not possible to find the answer to this question and do we really want to know?
Alexandra, my understanding is that one of the windows he “broke” was a police window, with a police officer sitting on the other side of it. He broke it with a golf club.
When somebody swings a golf club at your head, and smashes a window just inches away, calling it just “breaking windows” seems like a pretty gross distortion of the facts.
Thats numbers of assaults. Got any data on numbers of serious assaults, or assaults with weapons as opposed to some drunk bloke taking a swing and falling over?
If things haven’t got more dangerous for cops in the last decade, why has your precious Clark-led government bothered to shell out for anti-stab vests? Is it just cos Cullen felt like spending some more money? Hmm?
The incidence of crime is a direct extension of the politics of ‘choice’ and the post modernism foisted upon schools by national in the nineties. Ideas have consequences you know and when the effects are time delayed then they are that much more insidious.
The Realist:
“sorry he wasn’t killed by the cops. He was shot by one police officer. Big difference.”
1. Does this apply to everything that every police officer ever does?
2. If not, why not?
3. Do you have any idea what the word “officer” means?
Anyone who saw the evidence that the witnesses gave knew they were very much unreliable and bias.
The drunk couple that Paul Holmes interviewed a few days after the shooting showed the attitude of some small town NewZealanders, apparently according to them, “The Police were going nuts shooting everybody in site”
The fact is, Wallace swung a bat at a Officer’s head so the officer shot him in self defense.
Probably the most irresponsible statement to come out of the whole mess was Willie Jackson’s statement “That white policemen have a problem of killing Maori in this country”
Well very few Maori have been killed by white policemen in the over 100 year history of our police force, and in most cases the shooting has been justified.
This police officer that saved his own life and the life of his fellow officers, and perhaps members of the public is a hero.
Paul Chase,Migs Morgan and Steven Wallace are three Maori shot dead by police that I can recall and Brett Dale, the idiot 30k tory boy, asserts that few Maori have been shot by police.
Abbot had been at the fireman pissup till at least when he had the run in with Wallace which was around midnight. Either way it had only been about a little more than 3 hours since they had the tiff, and there is Abbot around 4ish watching Wallace smashing windows at both the fire station and the police station….both related of course to Abbot since he worked at both places. He then returned to the station to get pistols and him and his pig mate headed back into town where they found Wallace had smashed the windows on the Chemist as well, and was heading back to his car at the end of the street when they confronted him and shot him dead. Three shots through the side and one through the back shoulder exiting thru the front shoulder blade. The weapon Wallace was supposed to have raised at Abbot was found over 70 metres back down the street on the opposite side.
He is not only a racist, but trigger happy, fearful and a fucken liar, put all four together and you have a dead Maori full of holes for doing what? breaking glass?
How many Maoris have been killed by Caucasian policemen in the over 100 years of the NewZealand police force? and how many of them Maoris were armed with a weapon at the time?
He was not dead for breaking glass, he was dead for swinging a bat at an officers head.
Those on the right wouldn’t wouldn’t call a Policeman a pig.
those on the right are pigs.
Charming.
here pig pig pig. here pig pig pig pig. here pig pig pig.
I dont like pigs but I like bacon!
I would like to fry yours!!!
have you considered therapy d4j?
anyway I am getting tired of trading insults with fleas so go back to the post by “cha” , read, come back and say something relevant please
capcha: prefer monday…me too…tonight seems to be the maddies ni!ght out
Strange really. That graph would produce an upward trendline if I’m not mistaken!