In an earlier article I expressed a concern that the NZ Police were getting a bit too keen on playing Cowboys and Terrorists. I wanted some more data so I sent a letter to the NZ Police asking a number of questions around this issue. I now have a response to that letter.

Continue Reading “The Police Response” »

I’ve been reading Bainbridge’s blog for a while. He’s a US law professor and it’s been very interesting to see his entries from his recent trip to New Zealand. One comment has stuck in my mind, however:

First he quotes from Tracy Watkins:

Even up to the eleventh hour, with the polls running against him, few commentators were willing to write John Howard off. He had been far too formidable an opponent and made too many comebacks for many to dare to predict defeat. Mr Key faces a similarly formidable opponent in Miss Clark, who has 20-odd years’ more street-fighting experience.

Then he responds with:

The US election could offer two candidates – Hillary and Rudy – who are among the greatest political street fighters of our era. Both know you don’t bring a knife to a gunfight. Both could clean Clark and Howard’s clocks.

The more I think about this, the more surreal it gets.

I have no doubt that Clinton and Giuliani are seasoned political operators in their own worlds, but the rules seem very different over there. Fund-raising, personal wealth and personal influence seem more important, and people run more as individuals than as part of a party machine. There also seems to be a terrible fear of direct confrontation or contradiction, with a preference for slur by advertisement. (Yes, anyone from the US is welcome to laugh at my misconceptions.)

Clinton is a political coat-tailer using the publicity she got from being a presidential spouse to attempt a third-world style political dynasty, whereas Guiliani is a two-term mayor of a city (albeit a large and influential city). To my mind nothing either of them have done compares with the political abilities needed to attain and maintain the leadership of a parliamentary democracy through multiple election cycles, as both Clark and Howard have. For a start there’s the daily cut and thrust inherent in a parliamentary system, then there’s maintaining party discipline, and finally there’s the knowledge that the leader can lose their position at any time if their MPs lose faith in them.

And to look at a slightly different and not entirely relevant example, could you imagine how amusingly one-sided a debate between George W Bush and Tony Blair would be?

I’m getting increasingly disturbed by the Police’s keenness to use SWAT-style tactics for executing search and arrest warrants. I note that in the recent case in Christchurch they even used ‘incendiary devices’ as they stormed the place. Therefore:

Police National Headquarters
PO Box 3017
Wellington

Dear Sir/Madam,

Under the Official Information Act I request the following information:

1. Which people, positions or ranks within the NZ Police are authorised to deploy squads of armed police (such as the Armed Offenders Squad, anti-terrorist squads or similar). To clarify my request, I am referring to all squads or teams using SWAT-style tactics and equipment.
2. The number of times these squads have been called out in each of the past 10 years (1996-2006) and in the current year to date (2007).
3. The percentage of those call outs that were in response to an incident (e.g. a shooting) as compared to a planned deployment (e.g. to execute an arrest warrant). Any other statistical breakdown of reasons for deployment recorded by the Police.
4. The policy used to determine whether to use these squads to execute arrest warrants.
5. The policy used to determine whether to use these squads to execute search warrants.
6. The policy used to determine whether these squads will make an unannounced forced entry when executing search or arrest warrants.
7. The circumstances in which these squads are authorised to use incendiary devices such as flash-bang grenades when making an unannounced forced entry.
8. The number of times incendiary devices such as flash-bang grenades have been used in each of the past 10 years (1996-2006) and in the current year to date (2007).
9. The number of injuries caused by the use of incendiary devices such as flash-bang grenades in each of the past 10 years (1996-2006) and in the current year to date (2007).
10. Details of any oversight procedures performed either by the Police or any other body (such as the Police Complaints Authority) to review the use and activities of these squads.

Regards,

Thomas Beagle

So, Fairfax Media have released the “Terrorism Files” – a summary of the facts from the evidence the police submitted to get the search warrants that led to those over the top Ninja-Police raids a few weeks ago.

I’ve read through this cherry picked summary and so far my response consists of “Is that it?” The two main thrusts appear to be:

• a lot of talk about what they want to do but no actual evidence of plans to do any of it
• a bunch of people doing paramilitary training in the Ureweras

There are two main questions that come to my mind:

1. Should what they were doing be illegal?
2. What is an appropriate response to people engaging in such behaviour?

Planning Crime

On the first count I’m going to give a qualified no. In general, the Police are claiming that these people were preparing to commit terrorist acts and the quotes definitely indicate that they were discussing them and even training for them. However, there seems to be no evidence that they had gone to the stage of planning these acts, let alone doing them.

I’m wary of “crimes of intention”, where we arrest people because we think they’re going to do something but they haven’t actually done it yet. There’s a huge gap between talking about doing something and actually doing it (otherwise we’d all probably be healthy, fit, successful and rich!) On the other hand, I don’t think that it’s necessary to wait for the bomb to go off before we arrest the people planning to plant it. Where should we draw the line?

I suggest that a good line would be where people cross from planning in the abstract to planning in the concrete. Or, to put it in an example, I don’t think it’s actionable to say “We should kill John Key with a sniper rifle” but I think it is actionable to say “I’ve booked a room with a good view of the target. X will deliver the rifle to you the day before, we expect the official party to be at the target spot from about 10:05 for approximately 15 minutes.” On the evidence published by Fairfax there’s no sign that they were anywhere close to that.

What About Paramilitary Training?

As well as this talk, it appears they also engaged in paramilitary training in the Ureweras. This involved camping, exercises and weapons training. These are all perfectly legal activities and engaged in by tramping clubs, gun clubs and paintball gamers across the country. I’m not sure I see a difference just because they were wearing balaclavas while doing it.

As for the firearms charges, sure, go ahead, but if your only crime is not having the proper license to own a gun that you could otherwise legally own, it’s really pretty trivial.

Appropriate Response

However, just because something isn’t or shouldn’t be illegal doesn’t mean that you should just ignore it. In general I’m against the idea of the state spying on people without reason, but in this case I believe that the evidence we have seen so far does provide sufficient justification. The police were right to be keeping them under surveillance.

Overall, I think it was a mistake to arrest them now. It was wrong as a breach of the civil rights grounds of the accused, and it was wrong on pragmatic grounds because it has brought the police and the state into disrepute.

I think that the appropriate response was to keep monitoring them to see if their plans did start getting more concrete. If they did, only then would charging them with criminal or terrorist conspiracy offenses seem appropriate.

There’s been a few articles in the paper recently about patriotism. In particular, some people have suggested that we should be trying to increase the sense of patriotism in the young by flying the national flag at schools and encouraging the singing of the national anthem. I find this issue interesting because these arguments completely leapfrog two important questions:

• Is patriotism good and should we be encouraging it?
• Will flying the national flag and singing the national anthem instill patriotic feeling?

Is Patriotism Good?

As is normal in these arguments I’d like to draw a distinction between pride and patriotism. The New Zealand nation is a construct that we are all working on, and I believe that we can feel pride in what we have achieved together and the general success of the project to date.

But the word patriotism doesn’t make me think of this simple pride, instead it brings to mind jingoism, war, stereotyping and the division of people based on trivialities such as birthplace and location. Patriotism is a negative emotion that should be discouraged, and trying to promote it makes as much sense to me as promoting hate or violence.

But even being charitable and accepting that “simple pride” is the meaning that people are talking about when they say they want to encourage patriotism, what does it mean to promote it? Is it the state’s place to promote emotions such as love and pride? What other emotions and attitudes should we be genuflecting towards, should schoolchildren also sing odes to the greater glory of the family or motherhood? I think that we should be letting people decide for themselves and not compel them to indulge in nationalistic rituals at school.

The Effectiveness of Nationalist Symbols

Then we come to the second question, the effectiveness of using anthems and flags to promote patriotism, something to which I am opposed to on philosophical, aesthetic and practical grounds.

Firstly, flag-waving and the singing of national anthems seems far closer to the negative jingoistic version of patriotism. I know it’s a simple-minded comparison but they conjur up the Nazi’s use of imagery and ceremony to bind people together into barbaric fascism. (I find it interesting to note that the modern democracy I most associate with flag-waving and patriotic feeling is also the one that seems to be flirting with fascism.)

Secondly, while I don’t want to refight the flag issue in depth, I find the current flag to be ugly, obsolete, and too close to the Australian flag to be an effective symbol for the nation. And the national anthem is a dreadful dirge with a strong religious element that is innappropriate for our secular society.

Thirdly, would venerating the flag and singing the national anthem actually build feelings of patriotism? My Nazi example above obviously implies that I believe it can be effective, but that was in the context of a society dedicated to reinventing itself and I don’t think this applies here. Rather I suspect that it will just another meaningless ritual that we force children to suffer because it makes a few people feel good about themselves. I’d prefer that the time be spent learning about New Zealand history (the good and the bad) and letting them make their own minds up about how they feel towards the country.

Once again another Guy Fawkes where the squawks of the fearful and timid are louder and more annoying than the booms and shrieks of the fireworks. Once again we have to put up with ever more restrictions, stern warnings from politicians and the whining of the Fire Service. I unashamedly support the Guy Fawkes celebrations and the fireworks that go with them.

• I like the beauty of a roman candle shooting into the night.
• I enjoy the community aspect as people flock to the big public displays or have a few friends around to the back yard BBQ/party.
• I like the anarchic feeling as people indulge in the pseudo-dangerous activity of playing with decorative explosives.
• I appreciate the absurdity of celebrating something so irrelevant to our modern lives (neither the Catholics nor Protestants seem like much of a threat to our society).

Some might argue that fireworks are dangerous and can cause people to be hurt. While this is undoubtedly true, I think it’s important to note that the number of injuries is generally low (and probably lower than other mass activities) and most are very minor. We don’t need the safety nazis interfering, for our own good, with another pleasure enjoyed by the mass of New Zealanders.

Last night Kim and I went for a walk. It was a still clear night and the sight of the fireworks sparkling in the sky against the lights of the city was quite beautiful. Parties were everywhere and people were having a good time. I thought it was wonderful.

Three comments about the police ‘anti-terrorist’ raids.

1. The political reaction is highly revealing. We have been told that Helen Clark and John Key have both been briefed on the raids and I assume that they therefore have more information than the general populace.

If there really was a serious threat that the police had averted through their investigations, don’t you think that we’d see these politicans lining themselves up behind the police, ready to bask in the glow of public approbation? Wouldn’t a nice juicy anti-government terrorist conspiracy be a great opportunity for both leaders to parade their law and order credentials and their love of peaceful democracy, all the while making sure they mention the words ‘Maori’ and ‘terrorism’ enough times to scare the white middle-class?

Instead the politicians have been distancing themselves from the police as fast as they can while mouthing general platitudes about “supporting the police and the rule of law”. I note even John Key did some anti-police posturing while speaking to the extensions to the terrorism bill.

These are not the actions of people who are expecting this to end with convictions and commendations, they are the actions of people who know that the police have made a colossal conspiracist balls-up and they’re trying to work out how they can get out of the splatter zone before the shit hits the fan.

2. I’m suspicious of the police’s use of the black-clad ninja squads. While their use would seem appropriate when you know you’re going to be doing an assault against an armed and belligerent defender (i.e. your average armed offenders callout or hostage situation), using them to execute arrest warrants seems like intimidation. Did they really have any reason to believe that just turning up and knocking on the door wouldn’t have worked?

3. This may sound odd, but the general scepticism shown towards the police raids have made me somewhat proud to be a New Zealander. While I expect that a real terrorist act in New Zealand would lead to the same sort of craven and cowardly behaviour that the US populace is still engaged in, at least it gives me some hope that we wouldn’t give up all of our suspicion of government power and the civil liberties that go with that view.

Yay, I just made my first submission on a Bill before the house. Down with the Electoral Finance Bill! You’ve got until the end of the day.

I wish to state my opposition to the Electoral Finance Bill.

I accept that elections have special considerations when it comes to freedom of speech and that there are good reasons for imposing additional controls to ensure the fairness and transparency of the democratic process. However, the opposed bill goes far beyond this and unreasonably limits the legitimate political activities that political parties, issue groups and individuals are entitled to engage in.

The election period is one of the times when New Zealanders pay more attention to national politics and therefore it is important that all views can be put forward and robustly debated. The bill imposes far too many limits on political speech and will damage the quality of our national political debate. It is also an abhorrent affront to the peoples right to free speech.

The bill is majorly flawed and cannot be saved by just a minor patchup; it should be scrapped.