By VERNON SMALL, ALISON HORWOOD and NZPA
Maori protesters burst into police national headquarters last night and set fire to a flax bag containing copies of the report into the Waitara shooting.
The burning bag was then hurled down a liftwell.
Police arrested the woman who lit the bag and tried to charge her with arson, but a scuffle broke out and she was hustled away by fellow protesters.
Superintendent Steve Fitzgerald said it would be difficult to pursue the arrest.
"There's a great deal of heat in this issue so we're not going to do anything precipitate."
The official police report, released on Wednesday, cleared a Waitara constable of blame in the shooting of Steven Wallace on April 30.
Prime Minister Helen Clark has been accused of avoiding parliamentary scrutiny of her comments on the shooting.
The National Party claims that last-minute arrangements were made to keep her away from the House yesterday.
Helen Clark has come under fire for raising the race question in the days after the shooting of Mr Wallace.
National's Tony Ryall said the engagement that kept the Prime Minister away yesterday - a midday visit to her old primary school at Te Pahu, west of Hamilton - was set up at short notice and was not in her diary for the week.
Helen Clark denied ducking question time. "I can assure you it had nothing to do with Mr Ryall's questions."
She had first seen the invitation to Te Pahu last weekend, and accepted it in place of another meeting that had not been properly established.
But Mr Ryall's reaction was scathing: "Oh yeah, and I vote Labour."
The Prime Minister has avoided media queries about the police report this week.
In the days after Mr Wallace was killed, Helen Clark said the incident must be seen against the background of the police attitude to Maori.
She was criticised for accusing police of racism.
Finance Minister Michael Cullen fielded questions on her behalf yesterday, denying she had ever accused the police of being racist.
In Whangarei yesterday, about 60 protesters marched through the streets to the city police station in protest against the report on the shooting.
Senior Sergeant Mike Henehan said the mostly Maori protesters carried placards referring to the Waitara incident and Treaty of Waitangi issues.
Earlier, about 100 people had gathered at Laurie Hall Park, he said.
"They weren't there to eat their lunch ... There was an anger there."
Meanwhile, a beefed-up police presence remained in Waitara last night to safeguard against fallout from the report.
Early yesterday, members of Mr Wallace's family yelled abuse outside the police station and several youths walked down the main street with golf clubs, but later left quietly.
Police are investigating an incident the night before when a Wallace family member walked into the police station armed with a golf club and made threats.
The police report says the constable who shot Mr Wallace at close range mistook his victim for a similar-looking Maori man.
The 44-year-old constable called Mr Wallace the wrong name when he tried to negotiate with him during the tense 64-second standoff.
As Mr Wallace advanced towards him on the town's main street early on April 30, the constable said, "Dave, I am armed" and "Dave, what's going on? Can we talk?"
He believed that Mr Wallace was a man known to police, Dave Toa.
Mr Wallace, a 23-year-old lapsed architecture student, was shot after advancing towards the constable in a menacing way armed with a softball bat.
Two other police officers were present and the shooting was seen by two members of the public.
In his statement in the report, the policeman, known as Constable A, says: "I still believed it was [Mr Toa] who was approaching me. This is the reason I carried on talking to him.
"I thought I had a rapport with him. I had no reason to believe [he] was a dangerous person and had not found myself in conflict with him before."
The constable told a colleague at the Waitara police station after the shooting that he believed the man was Mr Toa.
Mr Wallace's identity was revealed after a registration check on his car, identification was found in his pockets and when Constable A was eventually shown a photograph.
During the criminal investigation into the shooting, the relationship between Constable A and Mr Toa was scrutinised. Police concluded there was no evidence of ill-feeling between them.
Mr Toa is understood to be shaken by the mixup.
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