Lucy Akatere, Tania Vini, and Krishla Fuataha were jointly convicted of attacking and robbing a 16-year-old schoolgirl of $10 in August 1999. At the time, Lucy Aketere was aged 15 and the other two 14. They were sentenced in August 2000 to between 18 months and two years in jail. The three young women spent seven months in Mount Eden Women's Prison before being released on bail after a private investigator and lawyer hired by the Vini family forced police to reinvestigate the case.

On October 16, the Court of Appeal quashed their convictions after the prosecution's principal witness, aged 13 at the time, retracted her evidence. She said that police pressured her into confessing and implicating the three. "They kept saying if you don't say it we're going to get you another way. In the end I said it because I wanted to make the whole thing go away," she said. The young women are now seeking compensation from the police and are planning to resume their interrupted schooling as soon as possible.

As police prosecution methods have come under criticism following the case, Police Commissioner Robert Robinson blamed overwork and staff shortages and called for "more reasonable expectations from the public."

Meanwhile, police violence and intimidation in the city of Whangarei has been spotlighted by a number of recent court decisions critical of police. The New Zealand Herald reported October 19 that seven assault complaints have been made against Whangarei officers this year, and lawyers in the city have formed a group to "monitor police behavior." The group is offering free consultations to people who say they have been assaulted by the cops.

In October a Whangarei district court judge dismissed a case against a teenage couple accused of assaulting police. Instead he found that the pair had acted in self-defense after the young woman was assaulted by a cop.

Also last month a district court judge threw out the confessions of two young women, ruling that they were obtained by police use of threats and inducements. They had been charged with stealing a safe from a Whangarei pizza shop. The judge criticized police interrogation methods highlighted by the case.

One of the women, Sharlene Seymour, was interviewed for more than three hours without her statements being recorded--what police called a "rapport-building exercise." Police threatened that social welfare staff would take her son unless she confessed. The cops then turned on a video recorder for 32 minutes to record her statement. During seven hours of questioning the other young woman--Shannon Nord-strand--the cops threatened to implicate her mother in the theft and to charge her sister with a drug crime. Seymour is pursuing a civil case against the police for damages. "I want them to pay for what they put me through. They're getting away with too much behind closed doors," she said.

Other complaints of police violence being raised in the district include the pepper spraying at pointblank range of a handcuffed man being held in a police cell, the beating and strip-searching of a 14-year-old boy, and the punching and kicking of a teenager after a traffic accident involving a cop's fiancee.  
 
Police defend conduct
With an internal police inquiry underway, the Whangarei police have reacted defiantly to these charges. At a public meeting in late October, Area Controller Paul Dimery blamed "lax parents" and the media for the criticisms, and accused the lawyers' group of trying to drum up business.

The head of the criminal investigation branch, Martin Ruth, who had also been criticized by a judge in 1999 for his interview methods, defended police tactics. "We're not changing a god-damned thing.... There is no written rule that says you have to frog-march someone in and make a movie," he said. "I've used excessive force, I'm human...but a lot of guys are running around with their brains full of meth [methamphetamine] wanting to fight. This is not the cafe set in Ponsonby.... It's a bloody zoo."

Police are also calling for a law change to give special rights to cops facing prosecution. This follows a ruling in the Auckland High Court October 26 lifting name suppression for Keith Abbott, the cop who shot and killed 23-year-old Maori student Steven Wallace in Waitara in April 2000. Abbott was exonerated by an internal police inquiry last year but is facing private prosecution for murder in a case brought by the Wallace family. Abbott has not been widely named in the media until now, despite the fact that an original court order suppressing his identification had been overturned on appeal.

In another case, a young Thai woman, Pimthong Udompun, has filed a suit against the New Zealand government for NZ$500,000 (NZ$1=US 41 cents) for "cruel and degrading treatment." She had been held at Auckland airport for 11 hours and in police cells for 42 hours after being refused entry into the country. During this time she was unwell and menstruating and was refused access to sanitary towels and medication.

On the West Coast of the South Island, 55-year-old coal miner John Menzies has been speaking out after he was severely assaulted by four cops. He was pepper sprayed, clubbed, kicked, and needed 20 stitches. He was then arrested and charged with assaulting a cop, but a jury threw the charges out of court. Menzies was outraged when one of the cops who assaulted him, Terence Hunt, received a commendation from the police for his actions.  
 
 
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