Auckland Not Wankers

I stopped first by the New Zealand Police Headquarters in Auckland. The police in NZ are all national police officers. They are state, federal and local officers all-in-one. That has to be nice not having to get in pissing matches over whose jurisdictio a case is or is not.  It's all on them alone.

I was quickly credentialed so I could go up to their Intelligence Center but, just after a rookie officer, Josh, was ready to take me upstairs a little incident happened only a block away which had everyone running to it. I followed. A garbage truck had caught fire, was well involved and smoking up the whole downtown area.  The Fire Services were quickly on it and we got back to the station.

Josh, 6 months on the job.

The Intell Section, I think they called it something else, was a very advanced monitoring and resourse distribution system that was extremely advanced.  They didn't dispatch cars or officers, rather they monitoreed activity through calls for service, incidents, video cameras all around the city, location of all untits and officers, public news channels and other sources. It would put any NCIS or other TV show police command rooms to shame.  They recomend deployment and advise command and dispatch of events as they occur and where issues are likely to occur.

I wish I could show you but, naturely I wasn't allowed to photograph in the interior. Let's just say, the future is here.  They also had up and running car tag licence-reading set up all over so there is no where to hide a stolen vehicle or known suspect to hide.

They don't carry firearms on their person but, have rifles available in their cars.  They do carry tazers. They also use iPhones for their communications and they love how works for them. They can call in incident reports, do accident reports with photos on the phone and be done with them.  They can do suspect, contact and CI cards on their phones. They can also live stream video feed from their cameras around the city to their phones.

With all this tech they still have the same probles we all have: shortage of proper manpower, politics and agressive people. "P" (Meth) is a major problem here too. One of their sergents was telling me many young officers have their heads down in their phones, say taking a suspect's picture, and you can see from the photo that they are way too close to be safe and their attention is drawn away from a potential threat. The police are all under one department but, one can tell, although they would absolutely never tell anyone this; the Auckland officers are far better and more professional than those wankers down in Wellington.