Te Reo

I've already written about the Operation 8 Court appearance on March 5th. In that account I left off one astonishing fact about the way the police had pursued this investigation.

During Operation 8 the police bugged cars, houses and phones. They then transcribed these bugged conversations as part of the effort to prove that those arrested were dangerous terrorists (you may have seen snippets of these conversations on the front page of the Dominion Post). The police have to provide everything they collected as part of the investigation to the defence (this is called disclosure, and in this particular case it is ginormous).

During the lawyerly discussions on the 5th of March Annette Sykes described the transcripts the police provided. Apparently, people start talking in Maori the transcript says "conversation in Maori."

The police, despite the millions of dollars they had floating around, didn't bother transcribing, let alone translating, any Maori conversations.

It seems like a silly thing to be upset about, when the police have spent so long bugging, and basically stalking so many activists. In terms of those people's lives I think it's really awesome that those conversations weren't captured by the police. But the sheer arrogance, on the police's part, of making explicit their belief that nothing in Te Reo matters, astounds me.