Get-tough cop's clean-up mission

Bruce Horne

It was called the battle cry of the Rotorua Police.

"Death to the hot offenders!"

The email, obtained by the Weekend Herald, was from area controller Bruce Horne, signing off a staff memo about targeting the city's 52 worst offenders.

"What's behind that comment is passion," he said this week. "It was a little bit of an in-house joke ... It was just saying we're on a mission, really. It is not actually about killing people who commit crime."

Mr Horne and the Rotorua Police are still on a mission.

This week he was the driving force behind an officer's idea to get the Rotorua District Council to give police the power to issue trespass notices to people with five or more dishonesty convictions who enter the central business district.

The council voted in favour and is awaiting legal advice before implementing it, with the Council for Civil Liberties and defence lawyers already lined up in vocal opposition.

Mr Horne is relaxed about the outcry; he believes the trespass order "is quite conservative".

He describes himself as a police officer passionate about making the community safer.

The Weekend Herald has also learned of an out-of-work incident Mr Horne was involved with this year when he confronted a pair of teenage boys on a suburban street after they gave him back-chat for riding his bike on the footpath.

"That incident was nothing to do with me and my passion," he said. "That incident was to do with a couple of teenagers whose parents were pretty concerned about the attitudes that were developing in them and I was subject to some of that attitude. I said to those guys 'that is not acceptable behaviour' and the parents said 'we share your concerns'. End of story."

A senior police officer later visited the parents of one of the teenagers and they said they did not want to take any further action. That family did not want to comment when contacted by the Weekend Herald this week.

The CBD trespass order is not the first tough measure in Mr Horne's three-year reign: liquor and truants have been banned from the town centre.

He has also backed the breath-testing of alleged criminals for alcohol while on bail checks, and described opposition by defence lawyers to the Taser stun gun as no surprise, given "[they] have spent their professional lives defending people who inflict violence on members of the community".

Mr Horne said: "I don't want this to turn into a story about me and not the issues".

Statistics show overall recorded crime in Rotorua fell by 3.5 per cent in 2004 and 10.7 per cent in 2005.

Mr Horne said the move to ban the criminal group from the CBD, while only presented to the council last week, was part of an overall strategy that was working.

"This is not tough policing. It is smart policing."

Mr Horne did not go into further detail of how he would like the trespass order to be applied further, but compared it to Anti-Social Behaviour Orders in Britain, which have been successfully used on people to stop them making racist comments putting graffiti on walls.

He was pleased that if the trespass order is knocked back, the council has undertaken to go to the Government to change the legislative framework.

"This is not my decision, but I would like some of our policy-makers and law-makers have a look at some of these [Anti-Social Behaviour Orders] and use them over here."

Until then, Mr Horne will continue to focus on other methods of eliminating crime in Rotorua.

"I joined the police at 18 ... Making the community safer is what drives me. That's why I'm still here, 26 years later."