Goff Phil: Annual Review Debate — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeGoff Phil: Annual Review Debate — In Committee[Sitting date: 03 May 2016. Volume:713;Page:10681. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Hon PHIL GOFF (Labour—Mt Roskill): I am really glad the Minister of Police is in the chair because the ethnic communities have asked me to raise directly with her in the House the concerns they have about their security particularly those who are retailers. What they tell me about is the gross inadequacy of the response they are getting to protect them in their communities and on the streets when they have raised matters with the police.Just a week ago we had the Indian Central Association conference. The president raised with me and with three National colleagues who were there the fact that they had had a gutsful of the sort of complacent response they were getting from the Government. It says “It’s all OK because crime is coming down.” and we have heard that again from the two previous National speakers in the Committee. The ethnic communities say that this is a Government that is increasingly arrogant and out of touch with what is happening in the community.Let me give the Minister an example of what happened at the meeting we held last Friday night. A lady got up. Her name is Mrs Smruti Patel. She has a superette the Island Superette in East Tamaki Road Ōtara. The day before—last Thursday—a robber had broken into the shop attacked her husband with a hammer and left him bleeding and seriously injured. She told the meeting that when she rang the police they said they were too busy to respond. I find that inexplicable. I am not sure that that can be right but she said that and I had hoped there would be a policeman at that meeting to respond to her because I had written to three Ministers—the Minister of Police the Minister of Justice and the Minister in charge of Child Youth and Family—and said: “We have got this growing concern. The ethnic community wants your representatives to come along to answer the questions to respond to have dialogue with them and to hear their concerns.” You know not one of those departments turned up. They all said no. They declined to be there. The request we made and I had made through the Ministers was respectful; their response was not.We had the case last week of a young Thai girl who had had her iPhone robbed off her. She has a “find your iPhone” app on her iPad. She found out where the offenders were. She rang the police and said: “Come with me and get my phone back and arrest the offender.” They said: “No we won’t.” She had to turn up herself with her taxi driver to retrieve the phone and with no police to arrest the people who had robbed her of that phone.I had another case referred to me of a man whose home had been burgled and the burglar had taken his credit card. A service station rang him up and said: “Your credit card’s been used to buy petrol.” He rang the police up and said: “They’ve got it on closed-circuit television. We can find the identity of the offender.” Do you know what happened? The police said “We’re too busy. You’ll have to go down there and retrieve the footage.” and he did. He went down and he got it he took it the police and they said: “No that’s not enough evidence. You’ll have to find some more.”Another man who was at the meeting Indy Purewal has a superette in the Minister’s own electorate. On a Friday night 3 weeks ago the assistant who was asleep upstairs in his bedroom was woken up by an offender trying to break in through the window. He rang the police while the man was still there trying to break in but the police said they were too busy.On the Sunday again the same shop assistant was behind the counter when seven teenagers came marauding into the shop stealing cigarettes trying to open the till and taking the goods. I have seen it all on closed-circuit television. He rang up the police and the police said: “We’re too busy to come.” The offenders were still in the vicinity. It was only when the owner Mr Purewal turned up and said: “I’m going to go out there with a gun and get these …” that the police then came immediately. But I ask the Minister why that shopkeeper had to do that to get a response.The police tell me that they are too busy too stretched and too under-resourced to respond in the way that every New Zealand citizen has the right to have the police respond to them when they are under attack. New Zealanders have had a gutsful of this and they have had a gutsful of the arrogance and the complacency and the fact that this Government is so out of touch that it will not respond other than by saying what the Minister of Justice has just said which is: “It’s all right crime’s coming down.” If you are the person who is the victim if you are the person who has been attacked then that response is not adequate.I say to the Minister that it is time she got the resources to the police to get for example more than 6 percent of all burglaries resolved. If you are a crook in Auckland and you are stealing from houses you have got a 94 percent chance of getting away with it. Those figures have got worse every year.