Posts by Kyle Matthews
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And somehow, I don't think the police will be paying any compensation for that. Ruin people's lives, walk away laughing - it's OK if you wear a uniform.
Let's wait until they're found not guilty before we start saying the police have ruined their lives unjustly. It may be that the arrests affect their lives adversely, sure. That may be entirely justified however.
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you might be ignoring the history of this case, and focusing on today's spin.
You don't want to break that down a bit more? I'm just taking forceful stabs in the dark, I'm happy to be convinced that the police made an absolute mess of it, but I only see paths to "we don't know" (still).
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See, the whole point of having courts is that the police giving information to one other person to assess isn't enough to prove beyond reasonable that someone is guilty of an alleged crime or even that there was a crime in the first place.
I never said it was evidence of them being found guilty. I said it was a good indication the executing search warrants and making arrests needed to be done.
There is a presumption of innocence for a reason. It is to prevent the kind of wrong-headed conclusions that proceed from things like:
The flaw with it is, in this instance, is that people who have possibly committed a crime, or going to commit a crime, and avoiding being charged under the TSA, because it's a crappy law.
It would be better if the law had been better written, the charges pressed through, so all the evidence could be presented in a court of law and their actions could be properly judged.
Now we're stuck with charges that won't reflect the severity of what police believe they have done/were going to do, and a bunch of evidence inadmissible due to warrant issues.
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"search and seizure among people who happened to sell something to someone who the police had an interest in."
Well again, I don't know the details. But if I sold materials that could be used in a terrorist action, to a person who the police believed was going to carry out a terrorist action, shouldn't I be raided? I mean, I may be innocent, but if the police give me a phone call and say 'oh by the way, we want to come around and talk to you about something', and I am actually guilty of assisting a terrorist, then I'm destroying the evidence and the police have fucked up.
People seem to be ragging on the police for their actions because it's not going to lead to a conviction under the TSA. Yet we had indications yesterday that that's not the fault of the police, that's the fault of the law. If these convictions had gone ahead under the TSA, and we did get to hear what was planned, would we be telling a different story?
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They did dress up as stormtroopers and seal off an entire town - that's always likely to attract a wee bit of curiosity from the press.
Was that the wrong action based on the information they had?
If we make the assumption that one, possibly more people, was involved in planning/preparing for, some sort of terrorist activity. An assumption, but that's presumably what the police were looking at from their perspective, and it was their action that kicked this off into the media.
If we follow that assumption, that there was at least one 'terrorist'. Who do we blame for that getting into the media? The police when they arrest him, or the terrorist for what he/she was going to do? If we say 'the police', then presumably it's the police's fault that drug dealers and pedophiles get labelled in the media as well.
The question shouldn't be 'did police actions make everyone think terrorist', unless the police actions were completely unjustified. The police actions are completely unjustified if there was no terrorist. The question (which I suspect we'll never know) is was there a terrorist, or probably more fairly, did police have good reason to believe there was a terrorist?
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there'd have been no drama.
you mean, "other than heavy-handed nationwide search and seizure under spurious pretences"?
C'mon Che, you can do better than that.
I think people need to read again what the Solicitor General said. From stuff. Firstly:
"I wish also to stress that the police have successfully brought to an end what were very disturbing activities. That the police did so without a single shot being fired, injury or loss of life, is a tremendous reflection on the professionalism and integrity of the New Zealand police,"
I don't think the police were perfect in their actions at Ruatoki, but that's not a bad independent review (and when I say independent, I point to the fact that he in the same media conference, turned down their application to use the TSA). There are valid questions to be asked about the police tactics on the day of the raids, and the legality of photographing people.
However we also need to keep things in perspective. Police clearly had a lot of evidence that people were doing something very serious. If that's the case, and the people had firearms, then the response is to go with the AOS and go in at dawn, and yes, people are going to be inconvenienced and scared shitless. That's unfortunate, but this isn't a traffic stop for speeding. It's suspected terrorists.
I work with a guy, and a couple of years ago he opened his window one evening to find an AOS guy in black with a gun crawling along the garden beside his house. Turns out his neighbour had gone off his medication and was waving a knife around at his flatmate, who had locked himself in his bedroom and called the police. You better believe my colleague wasn't complaining to the police that his garden got messed up. He was just grateful that they were there and it was resolved without the knife-wielding maniac coming to visit him.
The police have said that they had evidence that people were doing bad things. The solicitor general has backed that up after viewing their evidence. People who have been to bail hearings, or heard from other activists (eg Bomber if you believe him) have made similar comments.
If we believe that the police had reason to believe that people were armed and dangerous, and planning to do something stupid, then the response is automatic. You come in at dawn when they're sleeping. You put your body armour on because they have guns. You shut down the community to control where people can go and make sure that innocent people are kept safe, and the 'bad guys' don't escape.
It's all very well for everyone to rag on the police, and there are issues that they'll need to address. Surely the counterpoint is however, to balance what the police did, with the unknown of what some people were planning to do? Which is worse, nationwide raids which scare a bunch of people and make them angry against the police, or a bunch of so-called activists planning to blow stuff up/kill someone/whatever it was they were planning to do? As Russell has said many times, police clearly had information, and I suspect if we'd all had the same information, we would have wanted them to intervene.
The Solicitor General clearly indicated yesterday that it was the law that was at fault.
But in a damning critique yesterday, Dr Collins said the act was almost impossible to apply to domestic terrorism in New Zealand as it was too complex.
I'm guessing we'll never know fully what people actually did and what they were planning to do. But I've reached the following conclusions:
1. Police had evidence which they believed indicated some sort of terrorist activity. That evidence has been viewed by an independent person, and backed up. The correct response to that evidence was to intervene and eliminate the threat.
2. That evidence will now never come to light, and we will never really know what people were planning to do. The police will, as often happens, catch it because they are unable to fully tell their side of the story.
3. Peace/environmental/sovereignty issues will get lost in the mess and not advanced at all, and possibly damaged.
4. A bunch of people who were probably only associated by accident with the 'really guilty' will have their lives turned upsidedown.
5. The major fallout is going to be Tuhoe/Ruatoki kids inconvenienced, people photographed and searched, which is the least important part of the story.Tomorrow night 'Out of the Blue" is going to screen, and I highly recommend watching it. None of the residents of Aramoana had a go at the police for refusing to let them into the community while David Gray went on his rampage. Sure, that situation was different from Ruatoki, but the police don't know what's going to happen when they arrest people with firearms, under the assumption that those people are willing to use those firearms. Sometimes a bit of overkill is better than fucking it up.
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Silly me. It was the media all along who invoked the Terrorist Suppression Act to get the search warrants for the police to start this whole charade in the first place.
Well what Broad said on Morning Report this morning, was that within two hours of the warrants being served, the media were all over them, so he called a media conference to address it.
And the media who made up lurid claims of IRA handbooks, napalm bombs, and conspiracies to murder George Bush, Helen Clark, and John Key...
Get real. While journalists never reveal their sources, the only place these claims could have come from was the police.
Well that's my question. Does anyone know, or is it just a big assumption? I'm not saying it hasn't come from the police, but everyone is bagging on them for waving around the terrorism flag. Broad indicates that that wasn't just the police - is he wrong, and do people have evidence that they leaked stuff to back that up? Because as far as I can tell he's correct when he says that the release of the warrant wasn't done by the police, that was one of the people that it was served on. And as has been pointed out elsewhere, the police had to put the TSA on the warrant to enable them to charge under that law.
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I don't see why it should be a question of an embarrassment for the Police.
I think the only way it doesn't end up seriously embarrassing is if, the story comes out, and is bad enough that the public in general thinks "wow, how can these people have gotten away with that and only been charged with firearms offences?"
If the story doesn't come out, or it isn't a bad enough story, then yes, the police will be the (unluckily so due to bad law?) ones looking stupid.
It still comes down to the telling of the tale.
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The goddamn police were all over this like a rash. I mean, come on. Ignore the media, just look at what the police did. It started with dawn raids and locking down a town and involved harassing some pensioner, among other farcical activities.
That doesn't relate to the 'terror' story at all. If you're going to bag the police for starting the 'whole terrorist thing', then the question is, did they use that phrase or dump it in the media. Or did the media pick it up themselves or get it from elsewhere?
Because what Broad indicated in his release, is that it was confirmed by the search warrants being made public by the suspects. Idiot Savant you seem to have a different story that I'd be keen to hear more of. Who started waving 'terrorist' around first?
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Danyl is right - either way, they screwed up. Either they targetted innocent people, or their decision to view it as 'terrorism" rather than ordinary criminal activity led to them not being able to lay appropriate charges. And either way, its a failure of police leadership, for which heads should roll.
Broad made this interesting statement in the media release:
It was unfortunate but unavoidable that the 'terrorist' term became associated publicly with this case and the people connected with it before the Solicitor-General had made his decision. We had to advise those subject to search warrants that our searches and inquiries related to potential offences under both the Arms Act and the Terrorism Suppression Act.
I haven't picked through it closely enough to see if he's right to say that it was the media/public that ran with the terror ball, rather than the police having anything to do with it.
Because the Solicitor General has said that things have gone on and been planned that people will be very concerned about, but that there's a fault with the law which is preventing that being pursued under the TSA.
Whether or not that is going to prove to be a fair couple of statements, and whether or not that message will get through properly, remains to be seen, but it is an alternative proposition to 'the police fucked up big'. The alternative is of course 'the law is an ass, and had it been properly written 12 people would have been charged under it'.
I'm still going to want to see the actual story comes out. I'll make my judgements on what people have done by myself.
My thought being that rather than a ramping up of Police powers from AOS call-outs as with the roaming axe murderer to full tactical anti-terror role is a big leap and that that leap to domestic warfare (which counteri-terror is) shud be handled by the SAS.
Wow, that's the worst idea I've seen for a while. Because what we want instead of police officers who are experienced in dealing with people in difficult situations, often under stress and having to show restraint, is the SAS who are a bunch of highly trained killers.
Yes, let's let the serious parts of the army loose on suspected criminals. Because that worked well in Fiji, where they beat up a guy when arresting them, as compared to NZ when... no one was physically hurt at all.
There are reasons why lots of countries have laws against armies getting involved in domestic issues like this.