Ban Thompson & Clark, Change Police SOP.

As several of my friends and a number of newspaper and other media reports have pointed out,Thompson and Clark ( who claim to be "New Zealand's leading security, corporate intelligence and protection agency with "an impeccable record", are in fact complete buffoons who know less about security and intelligence than a moderately interested amateur like myself, and whose idea of "intelligence" is to repeat almost verbatim the press releases of those they are reporting on, with a few unsubstantiated editorial comments added. In fact, it sounds like they operate exactly like the KGB used to in the seventies. Based on their methods, one has to wonder who trained the people at Thompson & Clark?

People who work for them have also been publicly documented conspiring to commit a crime. It may be a bit much to ask the Police to actually do their job for a change and charge the relevant members of that company with those crimes (see below) , but can't we at least have Thompson & Clark removed from the list of companies that the New Zealand government is allowed to employ?

There is a point that I haven't seen raised so far in the reporting of the robbery of the dairy in Auckland in which an Indian shopkeeper died. The police, who prevented the ambulance officers from reaching the dying man, claim, via police spokespeople that they were following Standard Operating Procedure or SOP. New Zealand Police Standard Operating Procedure does not, it seems, contain any requirement to actually confirm the presence and location of an armed perpetrator before sitting down and waiting for armed response units. This, despite the fact that members of the public were still wandering into the shop.

It was correct of the police to condemn the man caught on camera stealing from the shop after the shooting and while the shopkeeper was lying bleeding on the floor, but if it was obviously safe for a cowardly thief to walk into the store, why didn't the police even try to verify whether there was an armed perpetrator in the area?

Does this mean that if there is a report of an armed perpetrator in a city, but the police don't know where they are, all except armed police city-wide will hide in their cars and offices until a member of the public can find the perp for them? Because that's what it sounds like. Surely the very first thing any standard operating procedure should contain is a need to verify the actual presence and if so, the location of, any armed perpetrators?

The fact that the police were faffing around obviously believing, or at least acting as if they believed, that the perpetrator was still in the store, means the actual location of the perpetrator was not being looked for, and there was a criminal with a gun running / driving thru Auckland without the police looking for him.

I obviously don't know the full facts, so it's quite possible that the police on the scene were doing what they believed they should have been, but with the information that has currently been presented, it seems that New Zealand Police SOP needs some significant reform to bring it into line with standard police tactical response world-wide, around verifying the presence and location of armed perpetrators before applying armed response procedures. If, however, it turns out the SOP already contains this obvious requirement, then someone in the police is at fault, whether it is the responding police, their controllers, or the people who trained them in the SOP.

Observations on the News

It's about time the commerce commission started thumping Telecom for pretending that DSL is broadband ! Seems Christchurch has the country's worst internet (another reason to move love!) Here's an excerpt from the Executive Summary of the REPORT FOR THE COMMERCE COMMISSION ON NEW ZEALAND BROADBAND PERFORMANCE (pdf) prepared by Epitiro-IDC :

• TelstraClear Cable exceeded the industry average by between 22% and
41% on key measures affecting speed, time-to-connect and browsing.
• TelstraClear's DSL performance was between 6% and 14% better than
the industry average on key metrics. However its DSL performance was
highly variable: strong results in the three main centres were offset by the
lowest outcomes in Hamilton and Dunedin. Epitiro-IDC believes this
reflects where TelstraClear has its own cable or DSL network capability
and where it resells Telecom services.
• Orcon achieved consistently good results, particularly in metrics that
affect browsing such as synchronisation speed, time taken to access
local and international content (cached and non-cached HTTP download
speeds) and retrieving web addresses (DNS). A lower email score offset
this for Orcon this quarter.
• Telecom, Vodafone and Slingshot all scored average to below-average
outcomes on both geographic and key performance metrics. Of the main
ISPs, Telecom scored the lowest outcomes in Auckland, Wellington and
Christchurch, but was slightly above average in Hamilton and Dunedin.

Heather du Plessis-Allen, (who was in most of this evenings local news reports, but still hasn't got her picture on the One Network New Team page!) is totally trying to look like jenni_talula playing Polly Perkins !