Thread: Crackdown in Wairarapa

Originally Posted by brad

The problem is that the police don't care about rural crime. We pay the same amount of tax as everyone else, but we are the first to be overlooked.

I had two poachers on camera at 2.30 am. I rang the police straight away and then went and stalked them. I found their vehicle and got a rego and was constantly updating them through 111 calls.

When the police finally had someone to come down the 40km road to get these guy's they decided to sit and wait in town for them. It was daylight by then. Anything could have happened though. They could have dumped the animals or gone a different way or potentially there could have been an altercation with myself and them if they realized I was watching them.

Luckily they were cut off and stopped in town with me following a distance behind them. I thought this would all be a simple process from here, but instead, it got really messy.

The police asked what I wanted, and I said definitely a prosecution and then said they would handle it from there and said I could leave. After three weeks of hearing nothing, I chased it up and no one knew anything
about it. I finally found out that morning they were never arrested and were let go and allowed to leave with the rifle that was found loaded in the van. Not only that the arms officer had followed up with them and gave them a formal warning and no prosecution or suspension of license.

I had to push the police hard to put it through court and we got there in the end. But it took about 15 months. They tried to recover the rifle afterwards but no luck. Only one of the guys had a firearms license and it belonged to the one who didn't have a license.

After all of that, one of them was discharged without conviction and had already been caught poaching in the past. He also never lost his license. The other guy got a $150 fine.

The whole process was a mess and a waste of time and resources. Wairarapa police were incompetent, the arms officer letting them off with a warning was a joke and clearly the judge couldn't have cared less.





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Take your story to your MP. He's a rural bloke.