Dialogue: Queen St clean-up duty of the police

The proposal to set up a business-financed "private army" to patrol Auckland's Queen St on Friday and Saturday nights had better be strangled at birth. There is no room in this country for groups of vigilantes trying to do what is properly the job of warranted police officers.

If this plan is allowed to proceed - and it seems that it has the blessing of the Auckland City Council and the police themselves - it will be the thin end of a very nasty wedge indeed.

It is incumbent on Police Minister George Hawkins to pull the plug on it right now, certainly to demand that the police have no part in training a private militia.

Because if Queen St has become the sordid, lawless, dangerous, drink-sodden hangout of hooligans it was portrayed to be in Monique Devereux's first-hand account in the Weekend Herald, it is most surely up to the police to clean it out once and for all. Mr Hawkins should instruct them to do so forthwith.

Don't try to tell me that the eccentric Alex Swney's so-called private army is necessary because the police don't have the manpower to do the job. They do - as you can see on Friday and Saturday nights when dozens of policemen and women man breath-testing roadblocks all over the city, bringing frustration and inconvenience to hundreds of law-abiding citizens in the interests of picking up fewer and fewer over-the-limit drivers.

Or as you can see at events such as the Auckland marathon, where police by the score watch over the runners and their route.

All that is needed is for the police to mount a major operation over several weekends along the length of Queen St on Friday and Saturday nights for the hoons to be hounded out of the centre of the city.

If these young punks are driving unregistered or unwarranted vehicles, issue them with offence notices and impound their vehicles. If underage youngsters are drinking alcohol, throw them in the lockup for the rest of the night "for their own protection." If boom boxes are putting out more than the legal limit of decibels, confiscate the equipment.

And if all else fails and the riot shields and long batons have to be dusted off, then so be it.

According to Devereux, the beat cops have no answer. She quotes a female officer as saying: "There are so many and half those cars probably don't have warrants. But unless they do something serious, we can't really stop them. We just keep an eye on them."

Yet in the same article we are given a graphic description of a drunk being bludgeoned into bleeding unconsciousness by a bunch of teens, some of whom have chains wrapped round their fists.

What, these days, is "something serious?" Is a chain wrapped round a fist not an offensive weapon? Is carrying an offensive weapon no longer something serious?

But all that aside, why should the centre of the city, home to an increasing number of law-abiding citizens, be held to ransom every weekend by a bunch of mindless louts?

What on earth do we have a police force for? Have its senior officers completely lost sight of why it exists - for the protection of the law-abiding by the suppression of the lawless?

Mr Swney's vision of his vigilantes is nothing short of hilarious. They would have no powers of arrest, he said, "but often you don't need to." A gentle word and a flourish of a cellphone might be enough to move them on.

Oh yeah? Has Mr Swney ever confronted a gang of drunken, angry, don't-give-a-damn teenagers? Considering the nature of many of those creatures, both male and female, it is more likely that his vigilantes will end up flat on their backs and bleeding, with their cellphones stuffed down their throats.

But that is not the point. The point is that there is no room in this country for a private police force of any sort, irrespective of how plausible the arguments for it might be. It would establish a highly dangerous precedent but, worse than that, it would seriously damage the public's perception of the integrity and effectiveness of the police.

And it would prove beyond question that the Government is unable to carry out one of the few sacred duties of a democracy - the maintenance of law and order by a properly constituted arm of the state, in our case the New Zealand Police, for whom until lately I have had the highest regard.

If the Heart of the City's private army is ever allowed to take to the streets, it will be a tragic day for the rule of law in this nation, and one we might well all live to regret.

And it's all so unnecessary. A Blue Squad and a Red Squad would clean out Queen St in no time at all.

* garth_george@herald.co.nz