Soundings

Press, Volume CXIII, Issue 33189, 31 March 1973, Page 6

Soundings

6y

DENIS McCAULEY

If, as Chief Superintendent G. Tait says, the police handling of the demonstrations at Weedons and Harewood last Saturday is the type of police response all demonstrations will face in future, it will be disastrous. My first impression—and that of many others who saw or took part in the demonstrations—was that the police were using the whole affair as a training exercise in case the Springbok tour does take place. Perhaps it’s optimism on my part, but I’d like to think that despite Mr Tait’s comments it was a training run and not an example of police response to all demonstrations. There were some features of the affair that suggest it was—at least in part—a training exercise. For one thing, the size of the police force was utterly out of proportion to the number of demonstrators, outnumbering them about three to two. The only feasible explanation is that the police wanted as many men as possible to put into effect what they had been taught in recent months. Also, there appears to be some substance to demonstrators’ arguments that the police created a situation in which they could use crowd control techniques they have developed. Mr Tait stated to “The Press”: “It is apparent .chat if police planning had not been so* thorough, more injury and damage could have occurred.” But it appeared to me that injury and damage might, yery well have stemmed from the police’s tactics. The demonstrators were peaceful at Weedons in the morning, i It was in the afternoon that the trouble started, when police -blocked the road to Christchurch Airport. The leaders of the demonstration had given police an outline of their plans long before Saturday and these included a walk past the United. States. Navy buildings at Harewood. At no stage until the demonstrators arrived to find a roadblock stopping their access to the airport were they told they couldn’t follow their plans as outlined to the

police. There was nothing in the behaviour at Weedons that could have given the police cause, considering their large numbers, to expect any great trouble at Harewood, yet they acted like they were guarding Fort Knox. The whole roadblock business appeared to me (an observer), in the light of what had gone before, a dubious restriction of the demonstrators’ right to protest peacefully in a public place. Mr Tait’s explanation that the action was taken to keep access to the airport open is a strange one. The United States facilities are on side roads and not on the main road into the airport. As it was, the police roadblock caused more blockage than the demonstrators could have achieved on their own (taxi drivers I’ve spoken to who were driving on Saturday afternoon all said it was chaos for airport passengers). As I said before. I’d like to think the whole thing was a training run, but even if it was, Mr Tait has, with his comments, put the police in an invidious position. Whether or not police plan to act like this in all demonstrations, the next demonstration will be planned on'the assumption that they do, and this will leave the police with the option of continuing the mass-response approach or pitting smaller groups of police against much more hostile groups than they have encountered until now. I fear that Mr Tait’s statement that all demonstrations will be treated in the same way could very well become a self-fulfilling prophecy. If the police action was just a pretour exercise, Mr Tait should say so —the H.A.R.T. people are working on that assumption anyway, so he wouldn’t be giving away any secrets. If it was not, he should stop verbally patting himself on the back for something that could very well prove to be the worst blunder the New Zealand police have ever made.