Year's work to clear P lab backlog

By KEVIN TAYLOR, political reporter

The backlog of forensic work needed on methamphetamine labs will take another year to clear, police say.

But Police Commissioner Rob Robinson told the law and order select committee yesterday that discoveries of new clandestine labs appeared to be levelling off.

"We are not getting the exponential growth that we have had in the past two to three years."

He said during the police's annual financial review that Environmental Science and Research (ESR) was hiring more scientists and technicians to cope with the backlog.

Last week Acting Police Minister Paul Swain told Parliament there were 132 suspected clandestine labs being investigated by ESR, and the oldest case dated from July 2002.

Mr Robinson said that with new ESR workers being hired, managers there said they would be able to process the volumes of labs the police were now dealing with.

"We are probably still a year or so away from not managing a backlog," Mr Robinson said.

"We have something in the order of probably six months worth of labs in that backlog."

Questioned by National Party police spokesman Tony Ryall about the risk of losing cases because of the ESR backlog, Mr Robinson said: "Those risk are always evident."

Describing methamphetamine as a "scourge", he said the drug had been embraced by young people who had created a profitable market for organised crime to exploit.

"If we deal with methamphetamine simply as a law enforcement problem, we will never solve it."

A more comprehensive partnership between Government and community was required and the Government's methamphetamine "action plan" launched this year was achieving that.

The recent reclassification of methamphetamine to a Class A drug was a very significant step, but strong policing was required and fighting organised crime was part of that.

The police had received an extra $6.8 million over four years to fight the drug and were recruiting staff for a clandestine methamphetamine lab response team in Auckland.

Police operations such as "Choker" in Auckland significantly disrupted organised crime in and around Auckland.

"Other operations up and down the country both during the past year and ongoing, simply seek to do that - hold people accountable and disrupt those criminal enterprises."

This month the police union, the Police Association, said delays in testing speed labs meant drugmakers were being freed on bail to reoffend.

Association president Greg O'Connor said he knew of cases in which methamphetamine cooks reoffended while they were on bail.

Others had been freed because it was taking up to two years to go to trial because of the ESR backlog.

Fighting speed

* There are 132 suspected clandestine methamphetamine labs under investigation by ESR with the oldest active case dating back to July 2002.

* In the Budget the Government gave an extra $6.8 million over four years to process methamphetamine cases. Two seven-member clandestine lab response teams were set up, and an extra $700,000 went to ESR for 100 lab investigations.

* In the year to June the number of labs discovered rose to 154 - 88 more than the previous year.

Herald Feature: The P epidemic