Clendon David: Policing (Storage of Youth Identifying Particulars) Amendment Bill — In Committee Third Reading 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Clendon David: Policing (Storage of Youth Identifying Particulars) Amendment Bill — In Committee Third Reading 
[Sitting date: 16 August 2011. Volume:675;Page:20909. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
DAVID CLENDON (Green) 
: 
 Part 2 is the gist of the Policing (Storage of Youth Identifying Particulars) Amendment Bill. This is the part that seeks to restore the power of the police to revert to the practice they undertook in good faith until October 2010—that is to retain the youth identification particulars where youth are given some penalty within the Youth Court. This goes to the heart of the matter clearly: what powers do the police have? Clearly nobody is denying the obvious necessity for them to gather the information. That is how they do their work and achieve their ends. The question of retention is clearly the key to it. I do not accept the notion we have heard from a number of speakers that this is an inappropriate place to be debating some of these issues around the rightness the appropriateness of keeping all of the information for any young person against whom a charge is proved. It is very difficult and I have been listening very carefully. I think it illuminates the discussion a bit to recognise how much difficulty all of us are having with these words “convict” and “conviction”. I return to the earlier point I made that the legislation on children and young people very carefully avoids the notion of conviction in terms of evidence being presented that is sufficient to satisfy a judge that a young person has offended.  
In the specifics of this issue in support of this bill there is a regulatory impact statement and it encourages us to believe that the police ought to regain the powers that are contained in Part 2. I quote from the regulatory impact statement which states: “An ongoing series of challenges to Police processes in historic cases will also impact negatively on the trust and confidence in Police.” This is one of the few attempts within the regulatory impact statement to give us some substantive reason why we ought to revert to the practice of prior to October 2010. I reject the proposition that in any way this matter could reflect badly on the police. The police did not make the determination in Parliament clearly. In good faith as police officers they continued with what was then current practice and I think it reflects well on the police that as we understand it they were the first to recognise that they were acting illegally and brought this to the attention presumably of the Minister of Police or indeed of Crown Law. We do not know. That is one of the many gaps in our knowledge given that this has been before us for only a very few hours.  
I reject the proposition that whatever the outcome of this proposed legislation and particularly of Part 2 it would reflect badly in any way on the police. The Minister in her contribution rejected the inference that some members were saying the police were acting inappropriately. I think the words used were: “the police being mean”. I am not suggesting for a moment that the police are being mean. What is irrefutable however is that there is an institutional bias. We know that if we revert to the retention of the youth identifying particulars there will be many more details kept of young Maori particularly than of any other ethnicity. We know this because of a well-proven researched and demonstrated institutional bias that young Maori men in particular are more likely to be questioned; if questioned are more likely to be arrested; and if arrested are more likely to be charged.  
The CHAIRPERSON (Lindsay Tisch) 
: I warn the member that it is probably unwise to make those sort of comments. I ask you to come back to Part 2.  
DAVID CLENDON 
: Thank you Mr Chair. In the final part of Part 2 in new section 34A it re-establishes if you like the proposition that the Youth Court can make orders under paragraphs (a) to (n) of section 283 of the Children Young Persons and Their Families Act. That is the penalties applied will get more serious clearly from a telling-off and discharge through to residential supervision. By simply reinserting those sections or by accepting the logic of that we are missing an opportunity to do better. The point has already been made that the 1958 Police Act was very different from the 2008 Policing Act. The social and legal context has changed.