Motorist gets no response to 111 calls to police over drunk driver

A former volunteer ambulance driver wants to know why police failed to act on five 111 calls made as he followed a suspected drunk driver from Coromandel to Auckland.

Alan Coombes, 58, said he followed a vehicle from Tairua to Auckland on Sunday, March 13 and witnessed the driver swerving over the road, "in the gravel one minute, well over the centre line the next".

Mr Coombes said the first cellphone call to police was made not long after the driver cut him off by pulling out from a side road in Tairua township at 8am.

"He was all over the road."

Mr Coombes said he and his wife Robyn made a further four 111 calls - from a service station at Kopu; at Waitakaruru on the Hauraki Plains; north of the Bombay Hills; and when the driver exited the Southern Motorway at Mt Wellington.

They passed a marked police car travelling towards Tairua on the Kopu Hikuai Rd but Mr Coombes said it may have been too soon after his call for the patrol car to act.

He said the driver was at the Kopu service station when they stopped for petrol.

Mr Coombes said he looked for the keys to the car - a vehicle registered to an Auckland company - but the driver had taken them into the service station shop.

"I asked the attendant if he thought this guy was drunk. He said 'sure is, he told me he had been partying all night'."

Mr Coombes said the third call, made at Waitakaruru, lasted until the vehicle turned off towards Auckland at the junction of SH25 and SH2.

Mr Coombes said they then passed an unmarked police car parked at Mangatawhiri. The officer was giving out a ticket at the time, he said.

"This guy was heading through Mangatawhiri and Maramarua, one of the most dangerous areas in the country, and there's a cop sitting there writing out a ticket for someone else."

Mr Coombes said each phone call lasted 10 minutes and involved him or his wife giving police a "running commentary" of the man's driving.

"Each time they said 'thank you very much' but then nothing [would happen] so we'd make another call.

"You try and do something and get no response at all. They were probably sitting in that control room waiting for a big bang or something, then they'd probably have 10 cars there."

Mr Coombes said the final 111 call was made when the car turned off at Mt Wellington.

"We were going all the way to the North Shore, so we couldn't keep following him forever."

Mr Coombes has written to police Commissioner Rob Robinson seeking an explanation.

Mr Robinson said his office was investigating the complaint.

"The matters he raises are of concern and I'll try to establish the facts and we'll deal with him and see what we have done there, whether it was appropriate or if we haven't been able to dispatch a patrol car to intercept the motorist he was reporting ... to ensure that all efforts were made to do that," said Mr Robinson.