Wagner Nicky: Policing Bill — In Committee 
Wagner Nicky: Policing Bill — In Committee 
[Volume:649;Page:17870] 
NICKY WAGNER (National) 
: 
 National supports the Policing Bill. We support it because it is designed to provide the best policing services for New Zealand and that is something that National is very keen to see. It is well and truly time to update the Police Act 1958 which was passed over 50 years ago. 
National is also concerned that many Kiwis do not have the confidence in the police that they used to and hopefully this bill might repair some of that damage. As a child I was taught: “The policeman is your friend.” Not all children believe that these days and I think that that is a real shame. As a kid knowing that the policeman was my friend made me feel safe; it made me feel that if anything went wrong there was someone there to help me. As National’s spokesperson on youth affairs it concerns me that so often the relationship between the police and young people is fraught. There are faults on both sides: young people are often rude and disrespectful to the police but in return the police are at times insensitive to and heavy-handed with young people. The situation just escalates. 
I have been heavily involved with the work being done to address the boy-racer problem in Christchurch. I have worked closely with the police and I have been really impressed at how they have handled the situation. They are in a no-win situation. The boy-racer cars are noisy and as those fleets of modified cars drive round our city they make life absolutely unbearable for families business and anybody with accommodation on those four avenues. Anyone who lives within earshot really is affected. The police come under constant attack because people ring up and say: “Where are you? I can’t stand this noise. What are you going to do about it?”. The problem is that the vehicle noise rules are so slack that even if the cars are doing nothing worse than cruising round the streets they affect the eardrums of the people of Christchurch. 
The Canterbury police have been very active on the streets particularly on Friday and Saturday nights and every weekend numerous cars are ticketed for a multitude of offences. Just recently over a 3-week period 74 cars were taken off the road for being unsafe or having illegal modification and 900 drivers were prosecuted—900 drivers in 3 weeks. Of those 900 prosecutions 193 were for speeding 197 were for noise 184 were for licence breaches 70 were for drink-driving offences and another 22 were for other charges. However I note in defence of the young people in Christchurch that Inspector Derek Erasmus made the point that the majority of drinking offences were not committed by young people—the offenders were not the boy racers. 
There has also been a lot of concern in Christchurch about crime in the central city because—like in most New Zealand cities—large numbers of people are attracted to the central area. They are attracted by the entertainment; they come in to party and they come in to drink. Many are young people and many sometimes behave in ways we would not like them to. But the police in Christchurch have worked very hard with new techniques that perhaps were not available 50 years ago to keep control in the central city. They have been working hard with closed-circuit television cameras—in other words security cameras—to stop things from happening by watching and making sure that people are safe and they also have been using footage from those cameras to prosecute people if things do go wrong. They have also been working very hard to get a large number of police out on the beat. Yes we know that is the old-fashioned kind of policing but it is something that people like to see because they feel safe and they remember “The policeman is your friend.”