TOP STORY: Car-surfing craze sparks fears

The latest international boy-racer craze of car surfing is spreading around the world - and police here are anxious to ensure it does not grow.
In the past year more extreme forms of car surfing, including "ghost-riding the whip", where a driver puts the car in neutral, gets on the roof and dances to hip-hop music while it moves forward, have emerged in the United States and Australia.
Car surfing has been celebrated in song and performed in several homemade videos posted on internet site YouTube - worrying police that New Zealand youths are taking up the stunt.
In November 2005, Te Puke teenager Boydie Roberts died while attempting to "roof surf".
Mr Roberts was killed as he attempted to climb out of a rear passenger's window of a car travelling 100kmh on State Highway 2.
In November last year, a West Coast woman was committed for trial for the alleged manslaughter of her flatmate after a car-surfing incident went horribly wrong.
Jessie Jayne Leigh Scott, 28, was accused of manslaughter by failing to take reasonable care to avoid danger to her flatmate, Jamie Angus Mackay, who suffered serious injuries near Greymouth on March 9.
Mackay was car surfing on the car Scott was driving.
He died in Christchurch the next day.
Canterbury road policing manager, Inspector Derek Erasmus, said there had been car-surfing incidents in recent years although they were not yet rife.
"I would be a bit naive to say it hasn't happened," he said. "It is absolutely something that we don't want to see at all.
"There is only one end, and that is at the undertaker's.
"A lot of what we see among boy racers is an imitation of acts that occur overseas."
The officer in charge of traffic in the Western Bay, Senior Sergeant Ian Campion said he did not believe the issue was prominent in the region.
"I'm not aware of roof surfing or anything like that being an issue here, what does concern me though is the number of people that we see riding on the rear of utilities."
Mr Campion said he was also concerned about passengers who sat on car window frames while cars were travelling.
Police who caught passengers doing either could lay charges of riding in a dangerous position.
The craze has not been seen in Tauranga by car club enthusiasts - and they hope they never do.
Lee Brown, the secretary of Simply Sideways Custom Machines, said it was dangerous and put lives at risk.
She has heard all about the craze, but in all the times they have headed out, including to the popular destination at the Mount, she has never seen the stunt performed.
"It is definitely not something that happens all the time around here."
Ms Brown said she has seen people who have had too much to drink sitting on window sills but never standing on the roof.
She said people were aware of the car-surfing incident that went horribly wrong on the West Coast in November.
Simply Sideways was all about performing in a safe and controlled environment, she said.
Slippery Digit Racing president Tyron Patterson has likewise never seen the stunt performed in Tauranga.
He said Tauranga's so-called boy racers had too many brains than to do that.