I feel sorry for the police on the frontline, not only do they now have to phone in to see if they are allowed to arrest someone, they now have this list of items to make a judgement call on.
Did you know that the Police are no longer required to charge people with a range of offences including:
- Assaulting Police Officers
- Supplying synthetic drugs
- Abducting a child out of New Zealand
- Assaulting a Taxi Driver
- Possessing child exploitation images
- And much much more.
In fact below is page 1 of a list of 12 pages of offences National’s Simeon Brown received under the OIA that Police can instead refer the offender to ‘Te Pae Oranga’ for a community hui rather than charging the individual for their offence and holding them to account.
The reality is that an alternative resolution might be appropriate in some cases but only where it is a minor offence. I don’t think many New Zealanders would consider the attempt to abduct children out of the country a low-level offence. Certainly, no parent would. Nor would intimidation or threats with a firearm qualify as a minor offence and it certainly seems to go against the Governments own draconian crackdown on firearms owners.
If I assaulted Police, or anyone else for that matter, with a firearm I’d get the proverbial book thrown at me…if I survived the ensuing hail of gun fire from Police. But it appears a Maori offender committing offences with a firearm can elect to receive a group hug from an Iwi Community Panel.
These are serious crimes, in some cases very serious, and they deserve appropriate consequences.
The Government is so focused on reducing the prison population that it’s letting criminals off the hook.
Labour’s soft on crime, hug a crim attitude is putting the safety of our communities at risk and it’s preventing the Police from doing their job.
Worse still, it appears to be entirely race baced. The Te Piki Oranga (Maori Wellness Services) website states:
After being arrested for an offence which can be heard by an Iwi Community Panel, the participant is given the choice by the Police of attending a panel hearing or having the matter dealt with by the Police and Court.
Further;
“The iwi community panel process aims to repair the harm caused by the offending promptly using restorative Community Panel process”
This is an initiative under Te Piki Oranga (Maori Wellness Services), a Maori Primary Health provider, and delivers a range of health services for Maori.
Te Piki Oranga is a kaupapa Maori primary health provider for Te Tau Ihu o Te Waka-a-Maui (the top of the South), set up in collaboration with the Nelson Marlborough Health (NMH) and existing Maori Health providers. We deliver a range of health services on behalf of regional and national health partners.
Our qualified kaimahi (staff) create a supportive environment for whanau, providing quality and accessible Maori health and social services that are consistent with the concepts of whanau ora and tino rangatiratanga (self-reliance and independence).
This appears to be a by Maori, for Maori health provider that excludes all other ethnicities. Therefore it stands to reason that their programme ‘Te Pae Oranga’ that the Police are using is exclusively for Maori.
What the Police have done, either unwittingly, or more alarmingly, with clear intent, is set up a two-tiered policing system based entirely on race or ethnicity.
The unwritten goals seem to be to give Maori offenders charged with a long list of offences (some violent offences) a slap on the wrist with a very soggy bus ticket.
Creating an ethnically based system is yet another step towards an apartheid system where the minority have laws and policies that specifically give them preferential treatment over and above other ethnicities. Apartheid was a system of institutionalised racial segregation that existed in South Africa and South West Africa (now Namibia) from 1948 until the early 1990s.
What we are seeing here is the slow but inexorable move towards separate systems that favour Maori over all other races.
It seems we’ve learned nothing from history.
Police OIA Final Response by The BFD on Scribd