Thursday, July 20, 2006

Police Reporting

Two interesting bits of information from the South Island police force.

1. A West Coast police officer used a search warrant to get his girlfriend's cell phone records, because he was convinced she was having an affair. He has just been sentanced to 300 hours community service. "Inspector Vern Morris says the sentence is fair, but the loss of a good officer is disappointing." A good officer?

2. The National Party has leaked another police memo:

The latest memo orders staff to stop focussing on drug and dishonesty offences, and deliver a minimim of two traffic notices each shift.
This seems like an entirely reasonable reprioritisation to me. If the police have to do something I'd rather they were out on the highway than harassing poor people, which is what drug and dishonest offences actually amount to (rich people's dishonesty offences are called fraud and are treated entirely differently).

5 comments:

  1. The thing about poor people who steal is that they mostly steal from other poor people who can least afford insurance, burglar alarms, decent locks etc.

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  2. rich poeple should be given fines sufficient to deter.
    So if graeme heart does somthing bad he should get a 1 billion dollar fine.
    (I hope he does - we, the nation, have some operations and such to pay for)

    One of the problems here is the stupid trust system. We allow people to hide money in trusts.

    AND - sightly streching the point but - the lack of capital gains tax that the rich list guys admitted allowed people to get rich fast in NZ....

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  3. it is also stupid to have "maximum" fines (who thought of that?) that jsut means certain rich people don't need to worry about breaking the law as long as fines apply.

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  4. So Mike how is legally giving someone a ticket when they are breaking the law stealing? It's not as if the police are actively encouraging people to speed and then going "ha ha, we got you, now cough up."

    If it wasn't the police, but another agency, giving you the ticket, would that still make it "stealing"?

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  5. apart from the costs speeding tickets are a great form of revenue gathering.

    Any sort of tax take causes distortions to behavior - forcing people to do things they don’t want to do because the thing they really want has become harder to do.

    the god thing about speeding tickets is that the distortion is actually "people obeying the law more" and as a side effect "people not dying on the roads as much".

    One of the very few places you can get an unambiguously good side effect from tax take.

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