Posts by Matthew Poole
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Hard News: Moving from frustration to disgust, in reply to Matthew Poole,
my experience with people from the “upper social classes” is that there isn’t really significant social stratification in Auckland.
One thing I do wonder about is how much blunting effect Dilworth has on the rise of real social stratification in Auckland. After all, by definition a Dilworth boy comes from a disadvantaged background. However, they socialise with the Dio girls (which school is literally over the back fence) and thus gain entrance into the elevated social circles in which those girls move. Auckland is also very much more ethnically mixed than Christchurch, so sports players will encounter their stereotypes on the pitch regularly (and probably lose to said stereotypes several times during their school lives) as well as encountering them socially.
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Hard News: Drunk Town, in reply to Steve Barnes,
And if said person happens to aspirate and die, the Police will be held responsible. There's a reason they don't take people to places where they will be alone.
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Hard News: Moving from frustration to disgust, in reply to Kumara Republic,
I suspect it’s not much better in Auckland, where it’s the same but with the Nouveau Riche instead of the 1st Four Ships.
I'm not sure about that, TBH. Maybe I'm just not rubbing shoulders with "the right people", but my experience with people from the "upper social classes" is that there isn't really significant social stratification in Auckland. There's absolutely financial stratification, and probably some degree of internal snobbery at places like Kings, but being socially mobile across "classes" is entirely possible.
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Hard News: Drunk Town, in reply to Keir Leslie,
A constable must have reasonable and probable grounds to think you have committed an specific offence.
They have discretion over who they arrest, but they can not arrest people in the absence of reasonable and probable grounds to think a specific offence has been committed.
Oh picky bloody picky. I hoped that went without saying, but obviously you needed to see it spelled out in writing. And what constitutes "reasonable and probable grounds" is quite open to interpretation, it seems, given the behaviour we've seen with policing of things like student protests. That looked extremely arbitrary to me.
The police should not be allowed to dispense punishment; that is not their role.
hmm. What, exactly, are they doing with traffic offences, then?
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Hard News: Drunk Town, in reply to Keir Leslie,
What you guys have missed is that the police can already arbitrarily lock someone up for the night.
Not legally they can’t (s22 BORA for those playing along at home.)
They have full power to decide to arrest someone, or not, and decide to release them without charge that night, or in the morning. That's pretty bloody arbitrary in my book, NZBORA notwithstanding.
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Hard News: Drunk Town, in reply to vangam,
Just admit it Mathew, you cant seriously defend the ‘arrest more people’ as a solution to this perceived problem. Just as ‘suspend more liquor licenses’ wont work – unless of course you want to lock young people out of bar work. Expecting 19 and 20 yr olds to ‘police’ 40yr old and 50yr old patrons is not only unworkable but also very unfair.
It's not a long-term solution, but nor is doing nothing. And when the narrative is about how people feel unsafe after dark because of alcohol-fuelled violence, it's got to be worth discussing ways to make it easier to deal with violent drunks that stop short of having to take them all the way through the court system - which is a great way to tie up police resources on the night, and later on. At present the only choices for the police are arrest, warn, release, or arrest, charge, release, prosecute.
If it's not feasible for young people to enforce licensing requirements, perhaps there needs to be a conversation about their suitability for that work? "It's too hard" is not, IMO, an acceptable response to talking about dealing with intoxicated patrons. The law exists for a reason. If it can't be enforced, dispense with it or work out how to make enforcement possible.
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Hard News: Drunk Town, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
Maybe the availability of a hospital encourages people to present with ‘trivial complaints’ and an even more convenient triage facility would just exacerbate this?
Unlikely. WFA started the triage facility because they were having so many ambulances tied up taking people to hospital for alcohol-related issues that didn't have to be treated in a hospital but did have to be treated. If you're proposing that we cease to provide emergency medical resources to drunks I might be tempted to agree with you as a Darwinian solution, but I could also see it going quite horribly wrong. In the absence of making that happen without a lot of political pain, putting a resource near the problem in order to keep the valuable resources available for "real" emergencies is a much better solution.
WFA were triaging about 13 people a weekend at their facility, which frees up somewhere between 13 and 42 ambulance hours depending on the busyness of Wellington Hospital. -
What you guys have missed is that the police can already arbitrarily lock someone up for the night. Or ignore them. I'm not proposing that they arrest everyone, just that anyone they do arrest for fighting in public be locked up for the night instead of just being warned. This was, Russell, alternative to reinstating the offence of public drunkenness precisely because of the huge can of worms that that would present.
Ultimately, we're not seeing clear results from the behavioural campaigns ("How we're drinking", etc). When the age was lowered, we were told that would be accompanied by strict enforcement. It's pretty obvious that the enforcement ain't as strict as it ought to be when it requires four breaches to have a licence revoked. If you'd rather that we pretended that raising the age to 20 will change a single thing, say so, because I would rather that we got the promised enforcement and made it a bit easier for the police to get intoxicated persons who cause trouble off the streets for a short period.
Nobody has presented any ideas on what to do to try and address the issues. Putting first aid resources onto the streets is a band aid, if you'll pardon the pun, it's not addressing the problem. Nor is providing punitive resources, but we don't have the luxury of ignoring the problem.
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Hard News: Drunk Town, in reply to Russell Brown,
you could send in a little non-coercive support – first aid people, for instance.
Wellington Free Ambulance is seeking funding to run a triage centre in Wellington CBD on Friday and Saturday nights to deal with intoxicated punters, instead of tying up an ambulance taking someone with a trivial complaint to the hospital. That’s off the back of a trial they’ve been running for a while. It’s a better idea than having first aid volunteers walking the streets, vulnerable to the whims of drunken fucksticks who think it’s fun to attack random passers-by. After all, assaults on ambulance officers are an ever-increasing problem.
The challenge with getting something like that going in Auckland is getting the funding to pay for St John’s resources. Their operating model is not the same as WFA’s.
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Hard News: Drunk Town, in reply to Keir Leslie,
I am not particularly in need of a refresher course on being left wing here
No, you were in need of a refresher on precisely what constitutes voluntary participation. Nobody forces anyone to sell alcohol as their way of making a living. Nobody forces anyone to sell alcohol to minors (anecdotes about gang intimidation notwithstanding). They're completely voluntary choices, and not just in a strict libertarian "If there's not a gun to your head, it's voluntary" kind of way. Your objection to people having their liquor licences revoked for breaking the law smacks of "The state forces people to make a living selling alcohol".