Opening and closing police stations

Labour's Clayton Cosgrove is moaning that police stations are about to be closed. He is commenting on a cabinet paper he got through the OIA that is looking at cost cutting in police. He notes that already 340 cars have been chopped from the police fleet.

That`ll stop six police cars attending a smacking case then, won’t it - and stop three police cars from attending a school after someone gets smacked. Cosgrove says police minister Judith Collins has some serious explaining to do.

So she did some explaining and explained that National have opened five police stations and is opening a sixth. She also explained that Labour had dozens of police stations earmarked for closure

Pity the NZ Herald didn’t know that.Perhaps it should have looked at this media release before writing this story on the closure of police stations.Now that Collins has responded with the announcement of the opening of five police stations this year, I wonder if the Herald will just updated it with quotes from the media relase. I bet you it doesn't know that that the the new Christchurch police station is merely replacing one from Sydenham.

update The Herald has updated its story. Oh dear. Quotes from a media relase. No investigation whatsoever.

Brad Shipton and parole

So, Brad Shipton was alleged to have met co-offender Peter McNamara, a breach of his parole conditions. So noting that Shiptons lawyer provided video evidence that he was in Auckland at the time, surely police will investigate the false complaint? Lets hope the Minister will ask Barry Matthews why a Parole Board meeting was called, and why Corrections didn't even bother to find out where Shipton was. At the same time she should haul in the Police Commissioner to find out why the police contacted Corrections to do an investigation it should have done in the first place, and why Police aren't arresting people when they have all the information needed.

Given that police probably have a name and address of the person they could be after, that doesn't mean that police will make an arrest, even if the media gets involved - unless of course the cops are flying around in planes observing traffic.

There has been a huge increase in the number of cellphone calls advising of bad driving and the cops-in-the-sky will be able to follow up on complaints quickly.

Perhaps the police on the ground could respond to complaints as well as the cops in the sky - without it having to be a traffic offence.