Police reveal 'go easy on P labs' order

By BRIDGET CARTER

Police in some parts of the country have been ordered not to hunt for illicit laboratories making the drug P.

Several officers who spoke to the Weekend Herald said there was an unwritten message not to go after gangs and drug labs because dealing with the labs was too difficult and because police chiefs did not want crime statistics to look bad.

High-ranking police officers and Police Minister George Hawkins have dismissed the claims.

But one officer from the North Shore/Waitakere/Rodney district said he was told by a supervisor not to target gang-related activities so the district would not feature badly in crime statistics.

"Our boss has decreed that we don't target gangs specifically," he said.

"They have buried their heads in the sand, saying that if we don't target it, we don't create a statistic and therefore we don't look bad."

The officer said the addictive and destructive drug pure methamphetamine, or P - mostly made and sold by gangs - was "the most serious thing around" and now staff were allowed to follow it up only if they came across it.

P has been linked to some of New Zealand's most horrific crimes in recent years, including the 2001 triple murder at the Panmure RSA by William Bell, and Steven Williams' killing of his 6-year-old stepdaughter Coral Burrows last year.

North Shore/Waitakere/Rodney police district crime manager Detective Inspector Kevin Baker said Class A drugs such as methamphetamine were always actively policed.

And Mr Hawkins said allegations that drug labs were being ignored were "absolute rubbish".

Police Association president Greg O'Connor said the claims were true, but the orders would never be found written in a memo.

Policing was a "statistics game", he said, and district commanders wanted police to concentrate on the volume items, including burglaries and vehicle crash reduction.

"Every frontline officer knows that the gangs are becoming very powerful and more entrenched in our society," he said.

"This is a direct outcome of the methamphetamine party drug scene. They have owned that whole growth."

Mr O'Connor said the association was concerned, but he did not blame the district commanders, whose performance was measured by crime statistics.

"If I was a district commander, I would be doing the same thing because that's where the imperatives are."

A police officer from a small North Island town told of a case this year where an informant had given details about the location of P labs.

But the officer in charge of the case was told police did not have the resources to raid them.

"They had to get special permission to raid them. The bosses weren't interested in the labs. They were interested in dishonesty offences."

The officer said a huge amount of work was involved in processing P labs, and the police did not have the resources.

He said that when dealing with the laboratories the police had to call in the armed offenders squad as there was a firearm in most labs.

Institute of Environmental Science and Research staff had to be called in to handle the dangerous chemicals involved, and the man-hours involved in gathering the police exhibits were extensive.

"The bosses want to put the resources into focusing on things like burglaries. When we say these offences are all connected, they are not interested. It's all traffic and dishonesty offences."

The drug P exploded on the scene in the late 1990s, and until this year Environmental Science and Research staff have been struggling to keep up with the workload generated by the P laboratories.

Police have discovered 134 laboratories this year, down slightly from 149 for the same period last year.

But a senior sergeant in the wider Auckland area said that despite the statistics, the problem had not stabilised.

He said police "tripped over" P laboratories because there were so many.

The police ability to target gangs had dropped, he said, because such operations were not encouraged.