Afternoon roundup

The tabs do pile up. A few days out at the NZAE meetings, a couple days leave, and then digging out from under the pile...

• If the government forbids asylum seekers to work, it ought to be providing them income support. Instead it bans them from working and requires them to live off of any savings they might have, and charity. It really is a kind of administrative evil. 
• Anton Howes with some fun history of freight infrastructure
• Paul Walker with some fun history of the firm
• “You’ve got this cool thing that will get you the youth market and make you look innovative. But if there’s even the tiniest chance it will lead to a big fraud investigation or AML problems, you have really stuffed up. And you can never prove something 100 percent won’t go wrong.”
• Christchurch is pretending that its sun is different from the sun elsewhere as an end-run around MDRS rules. It'll be a test of how government responds to these kinds of shenanigans. 
• Industrial and process heat is covered by the ETS. Nevertheless, central government requires councils to consider climate change when consenting industrial process heat. An ETS means councils shouldn't have to think about this. 
• National has proposed a third medical school. But it won't do a lot of good without expanding the number of supervised practice positions at hospitals. Right now, there are international doctors who could practice here, in a desperate doctor shortage, but there aren't enough of those slots, and those slots are mandatory. Some catch, that catch-22.
• There has now been an increase in clinical practice positions so that we can get more nurses. Three years into the pandemic, but better late than never. 
• The great thing about carbon prices is that people really don't have to understand what actions are associated with reducing global warming. Prices give them all the guidance they need. Good thing, because a survey of Kiwis had 'rallying behind recycling' as doing the most good for the climate. Recycling has negligible effects on GHG. But it doesn't matter, because waste is in the covered sector... 
• StatsNZ isn't likely to hit census response rate targets.
• "Since when are monopolies for private companies a good thing?" Well, they can be. But they're less likely to be when granted by statute, as they are here...
• The pharmacy guild advances implausible arguments for maintaining guild restrictions on pharmacy ownership. 
• Me, in Newsroom, with a reminder about Alchian's shipping the good apples out. 
• Police response-time targets have been curved...
• Willie Jackson wants to have a big nationalistic fight with Big Bad International Platforms to take to the election. Only sensible way of reading this. 
• Tech to reduce nitrogen runoff from fertilizer. Neat. 

Contact details

It seemed really obvious, really early, that robust privacy protections were needed around Covid sign-ins. If even some people expect, entirely unreasonably, that there's any chance that police could subpoena that data, then it needs to be bright-line illegal for anyone to hand that data over to police. 

The government can insist all it wants that the police wouldn't do that, but people who don't inherently trust police to do the right thing would rightly insist on stronger protection than that, and especially when Australian police have been up to dodgy stuff.

The people who you most need to be checking in for contact tracing are the ones who are nervous about the thing, because they may be in the cohorts you're going to have a hard time tracking down otherwise.

Newsroom's Sam Sachdeva says Labour is the only party opposing a rule change here. 

A push to provide stronger privacy protections for contact tracing data now has the support of four political parties in Parliament, leaving Labour as the sole holdout for legislative change.

The issue of how contact tracing data is used, and could be misused, has been bubbling away for some time and came into the spotlight again last week in relation to the Covid-positive woman who was refusing to share her movements around Northland with health officials.

When asked by Newsroom last week whether the Government would offer the woman immunity from any criminal charges in exchange for being candid about her whereabouts, Hipkins said public health officials did not use information gathered in interviews for any purpose other than eliminating Covid-19.

“The public health teams are not collecting information that’s then passed on and used in other law enforcement procedures, because to do so would mean that people wouldn’t provide the information in the first place.”

However, the standard of rules governing the use of contact tracing data has been called into question in the past, yet the Government has taken no new action to address those concerns.

In September, an open letter signed by over 100 lawyers, experts and academics said the public health order establishing mandatory recordkeeping had “insufficient" safeguards to protect against the misuse of data collected through either the Covid Tracer app or paper-based records.

Some are concerned that police or other law enforcement agencies could compel the release of the information through a search warrant or production order, while others have said the private sector could also misuse data collected through paper-based records.

The Government is legislating themselves the right to expropriate private covid testing labs, while insisting they won't use that right. 

At the same time, they're refusing to legislate against the use of covid check-in data, because they say that there's no need to because they wouldn't abuse the data and everyone should just trust them. 

Would it be crazy for someone who doesn't trust police or the government to conclude that the government's refusal to legislate here is because they actually kinda want to be able to use check-in data for dodgy purposes?

Police safety

The police union regularly asks to be armed. A few years ago, I included a chapter on our unarmed constabulary in a piece arguing that New Zealand really is the Outside of the Asylum. 

Policing in New Zealand is, all things considered, safe – even without firearms. Auckland University of Technology criminologist John Buttle tallied the figures for 2008–09, a high point in assaults against police. He found police reported being assaulted 2,481 times that year – out of 1,221,823 incidents attended by police. In the 123 years from 1886 to 2009, 29 officers were killed by a criminal act in the line of duty.

If loss of life at work is a measure of how dangerous an occupation is, then policing comes quite far down the list of hazardous jobs. This raises the distinct possibility that it is more dangerous being a farmer than it is a police officer.

Farmers do not carry sidearms to guard against enraged livestock.

Peter Kelley points me to an excellent OIA request he made for police injuries over the past several years. 

Injuries include not categorised; exposure to biological factors; chemical substances; contact with cold objects; sharp objects; noise; radiation; falls from height; being hit, struck or bitten by an animal, insect or spider; rubbing and chafing... there are a lot of categories. 

The one that is most obviously something that might be avoided by being armed would be "Hit, struck or bitten by person (Assault)". But they helpfully list the proportion of assaults among the other categories as well. Unfortunately, it looks like they didn't count being spat at until 2017. And I'm not sure that that's something where an armed response makes the most sense anyway. 

It's hard to see any obvious case in here for arming police. Or at least there is no surge in injuries from assaults. Thomas Lumley put together some charts on it:

Ok trying that one again with the right cutoff date for 2021. It has 2013 and 2021 scaled pro rata to full years, and with uncertainty intervals (95% Poisson confidence intervals) pic.twitter.com/1DzlF8qbCl

— Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) August 19, 2021

Afternoon Roundup

Egads the browser tabs. Enough! I haven't shut down the computer in a week in hopes of giving each of these its proper due; time to give up and move on. 

The worthies that each deserved a proper post:

• Ending the pandemic is worth between 5-15% of total wealth. For one potential sense of the gains in NZ's having ended the pandemic, here. 
• Trump likes to hate on immigrants. Unfortunately, there's a lot of it in NZ as well, except the ideological positioning of it flips. In the US, everyone rightly recognizes Trump's racism for what it is. And Kiwis recognise Trump's racism for what it is. But NZ does love itself a bit of discussion about banning "low skilled" migration. Ilya Somin had a nice roundup of migrants' contributions to the development of the Covid vaccines - worth 5-15% of total wealth. The Pfizer vaccine comes courtesy of the children of two Turkish guest workers who moved to Germany. 
• Robert MacCulloch is blogging! He's Prof of Econ at Auckland Uni, and one of the country's most-cited economists. He posts on the Northland Tooth Fairy - a woman in Northland who's been helping locals to fix their dentures. Newshub reports she's been doing a great job; unfortunately, she hasn't the appropriate licences, so folks in Northland can go back to using pliers to pull out their own teeth if they can't afford a dentist. 
• One reason we can't have nice things: the police can't be bothered to help out a guy whose mobile ice-cream shop was stolen. They still have plenty of time to go out hunting for people growing cannabis though. 
• Wellington's pipes are very leaky

Police and guns

If this is right, it looks like New Zealand needs better police rather than stricter firearms laws. 

Here's Derek Cheng at the Herald:

The man accused of the March 15 terror attack was supplied 2300 rounds of ammunition by using a police mail order form that also revealed to police he had an AR-15, a parliamentary select committee has been told.

The information was part of a submission from licensed firearms dealer Paul McNeill to the finance and expenditure committee, which is considering the Government's second tranche of gun law reform.

McNeill, who is also director of the Aoraki Ammunition Company, appeared before the committee on Friday via video link, but his submission was quickly taken offline in case it might affect the accused's right to a fair trial.

He told the committee he received a police mail order form from the Dunedin arms officer in December 2017 to supply the accused with 2300 rounds of ammunition.

"At the time, Brenton Tarrant was issued with a 10 year [firearms] licence, expired 8 September 2027, indicating he was issued a licence in September of 2017, which from my information was only a matter of five or six weeks after he arrived in the country," McNeill told the committee.

"This time, he has no family, no partner, no job, no footprint in the community, yet he was vetted as being fit and proper and obviously given a full licence which allowed him to arm himself."

McNeill said the mail order form also said the accused was in possession of a Norinco semi-automatic rifle as well as an AR-15 - the type of military-style semi-automatic firearm the Government made illegal in the aftermath of the March 15 attacks.

"So the police were aware he had these firearms," McNeill said in video footage that was removed from the Parliamentary website, but was later posted on social media.

So. The police granted the guy a 10-year firearms licence on minimal background check. They approved his getting 2300 rounds of ammunition. They knew or ought to have known that he had an AR-15.

I don't think the problem here at all is the lack of a gun registry. The problem instead seems to be that the unit in police that dealt with firearms checking stuffed up.

And I wonder how much police pushing for tighter gun control is to distract from that.

In last week's Insights newsletter, I noted some related problems: 

Policing by Consent

New Zealand’s basic bargain around firearms ownership and policing always seemed rather sensible. It was very much a feature of New Zealand’s general “Outside of the Asylum” approach to policy.

Background checks on potential firearm owners limit access to firearms in the interest of public safety. The police then have no need to be routinely armed. It seems a far more sensible approach than America’s, where a heavily armed public has increasingly led to a militarised police force.

New Zealand’s bargain seems to be breaking down with an increasingly armed police force coinciding with far tighter restrictions on civilian firearm ownership. It puts at risk basic principles of good policing dating back to London’s Metropolitan Police Force in 1829.

New Zealand is one of the few countries that has maintained an unarmed constabulary. Police Commissioner Mike Bush put things well in 2009 after a rare shooting of a police officer led to calls for arming the police. He described our unarmed constabulary as a unique and cherished feature of New Zealand policing, and warned that routine arming of police would make community policing considerably more difficult.

The fundamental relationship between police officers and members of the public changes when one of them has a sidearm at the ready. The trial of roving squads of armed police ready in case of armed incidents has already led to their use in more routine stops.

Sir Robert Peel outlined the basic principles of policing that have stood for almost two centuries as the foundation for policing by consent. Those principles recognise that policing and good order depends on the public approval of police actions and the willing cooperation of the public, and that both of those are diminished when police are too quick to resort to force and shows of force.

Policing is challenging. But there has been no surge in violent or property crime involving firearms; police statistics going back to 2015 suggest a flat or somewhat declining trend in court action. And restrictions on private firearms ownership have strengthened considerably over the past year.

New Zealand’s experiment with roving armed police should end. It is an unneeded show of force. And it is contrary to Peel’s dictum that the best test of police efficacy is the absence of crime and disorder rather than the visible evidence of police action in dealing with them.

Liquor Vogons

Looks like the Vogons are going to wreck Petone's excellent La Bella Italia.

An Italian-born restaurateur living in Wellington is upset the law is preventing him from continuing to offer Kiwis a little slice of his home.

Antonio Cacace​ owns two hospitality and grocer businesses in Wellington: La Bella Italia in Petone, which he opened 17 years ago, and Bel Mondo in Rongotai, which he opened in 2016.

Both his businesses were designed to offer an authentic Italian environment, allowing patrons to dine while sipping on a glass of wine, and then shop in the food store for Italian food and wine to take home afterwards.

However, when Cacace applied to renew his liquor licences last year, he was told he was operating outside of the law by holding an on-licence and off-licence under the same roof.

High end shop, good restaurant, not causing anybody any problems. Except the Vogons don't like that. Vogons like process for the sake of process, sitting on elegant and beautiful gazelle-like creatures on Vogsphere with the express purpose of snapping their backs, smashing beautiful jewel-backed scuttling crabs for the pleasure of killing things, and ruining perfectly good restaurant shops that aren't hurting anyone, precisely because they are beautiful.

It's amazing that a police department that makes so many noises about under-resourcing has so much time to lodge objections to liquor permits.

"Before the law, people, customers were trying something different, and if they liked it they could walk over to the shelf and buy the bottle," Cacace said.

"Now they can't do that anymore."

Wellington City Council spokesman Richard MacLean said the Sale and Supply of Alcohol Act had "some quite specific limitations about what a grocery store with an off-licence can and can't do".

"Running a cafe and a grocery store in a single operation didn't fit within those limitations.

"The end result was that in order for Bel Mondo to hold both an off-licence for the grocery business and an on-licence for the cafe, the two businesses needed to be physically separated and the takings from the two parts of the business to be kept separate," MacLean said.

"Antonio achieved this by placing permanent shelving to ensure that it isn't possible to move directly between the cafe and the grocery store."

When Bel Mondo applied to renew the grocery store off-licence, the licensing inspector and police raised concerns about how the two businesses had been separated, he said.

"[This included] whether the situation could be considered as a 'store within a store'. The application is still in progress."

Resistance is futile. 

HT: Louis Houlbrooke

We don't know how lucky we are: unarmed constabulary edition

The third installment of The Outside of the Asylum over at The Spinoff lauds New Zealand's unarmed constabulary as compared to the kinds of excesses that Radley Balko has been documenting in America. 

A snippet:

Balko contrasts SWAT strategies – no-knock drug raids in the middle of the night – with Winston Churchill’s (possibly apocryphal) quip, “Democracy means that when there’s a knock on the door at 3 a.m., it’s probably the milkman.” Culosi’s case attracted a reasonable amount of media attention, partly because people don’t expect peaceful, unarmed, middle-aged optometrists to be shot and killed by police for answering the door.

But police in America shoot and kill people all the time: 991 in 2015 and 963 in 2016; 2017 is on track to match those figures. Police officers are rarely charged; those charged are rarely convicted. While crime dramas feature situations where the best course of action for police really is using deadly force, they rarely feature cases like Culosi’s. Or Brian Claunch: a double-amputee, in a wheelchair, in a group home for the mentally ill, shot in the head by police because they found his pen threatening.

If the instructions on the side of a packet of toothpicks (see chapter one) are a sign of a civilisation gone mad, what should we think about American policing?

New Zealand has so far remained outside of the American policing asylum. From 1941 to 2015, police in New Zealand shot and killed 29 people. Adjusting for population size, police here take about 37 years to kill as many people as American police kill every year.

This is largely due to New Zealand’s unarmed constabulary. When police do not have immediate access to firearms in situations they view as threatening, they must use other methods while seeking armed assistance – if it is necessary.

I still love Police Commissioner Mike Bush's statement, after an officer was shot and there were calls again to arm the police:

The death of Senior Constable Len Snee was deeply felt by police officers of all ranks, all over the country. Our data on risk has been improved under my watch and it shows police frequently deal with people with weapons.

In Len’s case, the weapon was a gun. This has, quite rightly, led to public discussion about whether all field officers should be routinely armed. The majority of commentators say ‘no.’ That is in line with the public feedback Police received when we consulted on the Policing Act 2008; it’s also in line with the sentiments of police officers themselves.

Being unarmed is a unique and cherished feature of the policing style adopted by New Zealand Police – a style for which we are held in high regard internationally. Routine arming of the police would not erase this style of policing, but it would make the job of being a community police officer considerably more difficult…

So our strategies rely on officers’ good judgment. They are trained to identify risk and if they encounter an armed situation, to withdraw, cordon and contain until appropriately armed officers can be deployed. If the situation is equivocal, they have arms at ready resort with which to equip themselves.

This tactic has worked very well for over 40 years.

International evidence gives me no cause to think it is outdated. Literature on police experience and practice points to a high risk that officers can have their own weapons turned against them, having been overpowered in otherwise innocent situations.

There is also concern about the number of officers shot because they didn’t want to fire their weapons. People tend to join the New Zealand Police because they want to help people, not shoot them. 

But there are worrying signs on the horizon. The asset forfeiture rules that, in America, have driven perverse outcomes have gotten worse here - and could yet push in the same direction.

And there's the ongoing mess of police interfering in local bar and bottleshop licence renewals, and the joint mess of policy being happy to ask banks to 'voluntarily' produce records without a warrant and the banks just handing it over (and not the first time, though it's unclear when this newly revealed instance happened - it could have been around the time of the first one). Would happily flip my accounts over to whichever bank took a stronger line on only handing stuff over to the police if they were legally compelled to do so.

For those so inclined, The Spinoff's comments sections are over on Facebook [First installment; second installment; third installment]. Folks there seem to have liked the first two installments more than the third. Oh well.

Ending appeasement

Blackland's produced the best summary of the demise of the Wellington 7s that I've yet seen. Bottom line: the only outcome that would appease the critics was the death of the Sevens, so attempting appeasement was not a great strategy.

From their summary:

The organisers acquiesced to, and collaborated with, the “moral panic” (an imbalanced, hyper-sensitive reaction to non-extraordinary normal events) among the City establishment, including the Council and Police.

It was driven by non-attendees who disliked the behaviour, and campaigning media, but gathered strength when it was allied with anti-alcohol and social disorder sentiments. This gave moral imperative and opportunity which meant establishment and elite figures felt obliged to agree that “something must be done” to change the behaviour.

The changes made by the Sevens organisers and the City establishment directly affected the “party” atmosphere. This experience also relied on large crowds – the joint and mutually reinforcing experience. When attendance began to decline in response to the changes, it quickly gathered pace. Each fall affected the experience, which deterred future attendance.

The lesson is that acquiescence to value signalling of noisy people on contentious subjects can disadvantage those most important to your organisation or event; customers, staff or shareholders.

It is instructive that the Police finally praised crowd behaviour and declared themselves satisfied over the 2017 event, when effectively no one turned up and was a fiscal disaster.

The Police and the City establishment had killed a “golden goose” event enjoyed by tens of thousands of everyday New Zealanders, and the Sevens organisers collaborated.  

They conclude:

Conceding that there was a behaviour and alcohol problem tacitly accepted the need for curbs on these factors. That meant conspiring with the moral panic to suppress factors key to the event’s success. When they did, the event lost popularity.

Because the event was an alcohol-imbibing outrageous party, these factors would be a feature. If you remove these features, you remove the Party. You remove the party, you remove the event.

A common response recommended by public relations “experts” is to concede some ground – accept criticism and modify.

This was the first route tried by the organisers. It didn’t work. It accepted that alcohol consumption and behaviour was out of the ordinary and therefore a problem.

This emboldened and legitimised critics. Without the organisers’ backing, no one was standing up for the event’s punters.

Without any defence of the relatively innocuous and common standard of drinking and behaviour, the complaints were not challenged and moderated.

The next route was total collaboration with critics. The organisers introduced rules and components to the event pandered to the idea that it was possible to create a new product and attract new customers.

The critics had no skin in the event. The success or failure of the event would not be their responsibility, and would have no direct impact on them. Their objectives were different. They were motivated by factors such as changing alcohol consumption or attitudes, undermining rugby, signalling virtue to peers, or gaining political advantage or media airtime.

Read the whole thing, as well as their excellent recommendations that follow on from the conclusion.

HT: Stephen Franks.

Previously:

• Let's make everything like the Sevens 

Police and Local Alcohol Policy: I Am The Law edition

Radio New Zealand reports today on the Police and Medical Officer of Health's shenanigans in Wellington alcohol licensing. Here's my piece from last week on it.

None of this is new. Wellington Council last year warned the Police about overstepping the mark. The cops were then also trying to impose one-way door policies by hassling publicans at licence renewals.

I'll be hitting this a bit more in this week's column at the National Business Review. It's getting to be time that the Police Minister has a word with Police about their behaviour.

Police priorities

In today's Dominion Post we learn that Wellington area police have an ongoing investigation against a euthanasia group.

They've arrested an elderly woman who'd imported drugs that could be useful in euthanasia, and confiscated another elderly woman's helium balloon kit.

It is understood a second elderly woman was also involved in the October 7 raid, part of what police are calling Operation Painter, and that one of the women spent the night in a police cell. 

I wonder if they took any lessons from Arlo Guthrie's Officer Obie in making sure that the cell was safe.

Meanwhile, some of the War on Meth has become self-financing courtesy of New Zealand's asset forfeiture legislation.

A $15 million boost for anti-drug initiatives is not an admission that the Government is losing the war on P, Prime Minister John Key says.

However, Key acknowledges methamphetamine has become "the drug of choice" for some Kiwis, while police must do more to stop P coming into the country through remote areas like Northland.

The Government has announced the funding for 15 anti-drug initiatives, coming from money and assets seized from criminals, as part of its Tackling Methamphetamine Action Plan.

The war may be lost, though.

Earlier this month, Radio NZ had the Police Association telling us that meth is now purer and cheaper than ever before. Remember that half-billion dollars' worth of meth seized on 90 Mile Beach? No apparent effect on the price of meth. There is so much meth out there that the biggest seizure ever in New Zealand has had zero effect on prices.

And I still need to stock up on working pseudoephedrine-based cold medicines whenever I go back home to Canada - all in the futile fight against meth.

The police actions on meth will be futile, but help build a pool of seized assets. I don't know what the police think they're achieving in raids on elderly people who want to be able to end their lives painlessly should need to.

Not even wrong

Some policy proposals are just so end-to-end nonsensical that it's hard to know where to start.

Today's example:

Tagging booze products with "irremovable stickers" to track where problem drinkers get their grog is being debated for Wellington.

The city's district licensing committee mulled over the idea as police and alcohol industry groups debate issues around booze-fuelled crime, litter, and disorder.

Let's start by assuming the thing could be done. Should it?

Suppose you found that people who go on to litter or cause other trouble primarily buy their liquor from Retailer X. The best you might then hope for would be some checks that that retailer is upholding standards on not selling to drunk people. But beyond that, what do you want them to do? Refuse to sell to people who they think might go on to litter? How should they judge that?

Look at it from another perspective. Everybody knows, but nobody can show, that at least some opposition to new liquor licenses comes from agents of those who have existing licenses. What happens if a licensee knows that it could get its competitor in trouble by leaving some of that competitor's bottles lying around in playgrounds. Might be tempting.

This really seems a "if you could push a button to magically implement the policy, it still wouldn't be a great idea" thing.

And then we start thinking about practicability.

Stephen Palmer, Medical Officer of Health, said the idea emerged at a licence renewal process for Liquor King in Kent Terrace.
...

Palmer said a neighbour objected to the Kent Terrace licence renewal, using photos of littered booze products at a nearby school.

Both the retailer and Lion queried suggestions that any particular outlet could be blamed for the garbage.

"It's very easy to put a sticker on things at the point of sale ... that seems to me to be the most simple thing," Palmer said.

It might seem simple to people who've never, say, bought a case of beer or seen anybody else ever buy a case of beer or seen a case of beer at a store. Everybody else in the world might recognise that the retailer would have to open each case and label each beer, either at point of sale or when it's stocked.

A couple other notable problems:

• In my cupboard at home is a beautiful bottle of a Garage Project beer that's wrapped in paper, tied at the top. Would the retailer put a sticker on the paper that might be discarded before point of consumption, or on the bottle underneath? Would they have to rip open the packaging for the useless label's insertion?
• If the labels are put in at time of sale, that causes queues. If it's done when the product's received at the store, you lose flexibility: stores can shift product across outlets if something sells unexpectedly quickly at one shop rather than another.

The Police figure that the labelling could be done by the producer:

Wellington Police alcohol harm reduction officer Sergeant Damian Rapira-Davies said it was important to understand the "causal nexus" connecting liquor retail, consumption and abuse.

People breaking alcohol laws or bylaws were often committing "gateway offences", which led to fighting, sexual assaults or domestic violence.

"It's about looking at a range of things that create a lot of problems we've got."

He was confident brewers or distillers could comply with any requirement for tracking labels. "If there's a demand for particular packaging, then the industry will meet it."

The only way I can imagine this working is numbered bottles and cases, with a back-end database matching bottle numbers to case numbers through to distribution. And where the producer sells directly to a retailer, that might work. But you'd then be requiring that all the distributors keep logs on which batches wind up where. It really quickly looks like an administrative nightmare.

But it's all simple, so long as you don't start thinking about it too hard.

Even if we assume this mess could be done, to what good purpose could the stickers really be put? And if it's such a great idea, why not:

• Tag houses with the last real estate agent who sold it, then have the cops lean on any realtor who sells to somebody who uses the house for selling or making P.
• Tag cars with the car dealer, so that cars bought by dangerous speeders can be tracked back to the real criminals: the person who sold the car to somebody who went on to speed.
• Tag police officers with the name of the university that gave them a sociology degree, so we can appropriately assign approbation when things like this came up.  

Fortunately, there's no way that Wellington Council would go for this. 

Unfortunately, given the police's recent behaviour, we may reasonably expect that the police will start leaning on off-licenses to 'voluntarily' sticker their products as part of license renewal processes.

The happiness of lowered expectations

The police and medical officers of health seem to be trying to block alcohol licence applications, not because of any fault or deficiency of the licensee, but because they just don't like the idea of anybody selling alcohol.

And so in a victory measured against lowered expectations, the police only managed to reduce the hours of the new Countdown supermarket's alcohol sales. They can only sell beer and wine from 7am to 8pm.

We usually do our grocery shopping after the kids are to bed, so around 9pm. I'm very glad that Khandallah's New World grocery isn't under similar restrictions.

There can be real nuisance caused by drunken students. Sprawling suburban campuses can internalise that by having halls of residence away from the university's borders, with ample on-campus drinking venues so the students don't stray too far. That's harder for urban campuses.

If Kiwi students are anything like we were in Manitoba 20 years ago, well, an 8pm closing time for beer and wine won't make a whit of difference.

The campus bar was connected by underground tunnels to the residence hall where I lived for my first two years at the University of Manitoba; it was rather convenient when it was otherwise -40 outside. The closest place to buy beer was about a 20 minute walk up to Pembina Highway, and who wants to carry a couple of 24s that far? You pretty much had to drive if you wanted to find liquor. But whenever a big weekend was coming up, somebody would drive over to the liquor store in the afternoon and buy a ton of booze. And a guy on our floor did home wine-making in one of the closets; he had a five gallon bucket of fermenting fruit. Occasionally, somebody would do a run down to North Dakota to come back with Everclear, which made absolutely no sense but seemed like a good idea at the time.

I think a lot of people are engaging in a lot of wishful thinking about how an 8pm closing time for one beer and wine outlet will prevent students' drinking. Do people forget that quickly what being a student is like?

Police muzzles?

There's a strong academic freedom case against the kinds of restrictions that the New Zealand Police, and other government agencies, put on the use of data. But it's not quite as clear-cut as it might seem.

Jarrod Gilbert is New Zealand's leading expert in crime and gangs. Between him and  Greg Newbold, there's not much the Canterbury sociology team don't know about crime. Gilbert's having trouble getting access to police data on crime that he needs for his research, though, because his research has meant he's spent a lot of time with gangs.

This part seemed especially concerning:

The degree of control the police sought over research findings and publications was more than trifling. The research contracts demand that a draft report be provided to police. If the results are deemed to be "negative" then the police will seek to "improve its outcomes". Both the intent and the language would have impressed George Orwell.

Researchers unprepared to yield and make changes face a clause stating the police "retain the sole right to veto any findings from release". In other words, if an academic study said something the police didn't like - or heaven forbid was in any way critical of the police - then the police could stop it being published.

These demands were supported by threats. The contracts state that police will "blacklist" the researchers and "any organisations connected to the project ... from access to any further police resources" if they don't abide by police wishes.

I worried about this kind of thing in Ministry of Health RFPs a while back.

But we have to balance it too against the following kind of scenario. Suppose that you're a government agency who's contracted with some researchers to do some work for you. Somewhere along the way, things go off the rails. The researchers' drafts don't look good, the statistical analysis doesn't line up, and it's starting to look like they're trying to grind an axe rather than provide you with a down-the-line assessment of results.

Worse, they've started shopping around their working draft at conferences [legit!] and putting out press releases about their working draft [uh-oh], touting their initial results, using the Ministry's funding as imprimatur, and calling for policy change based on it. You know they've missed a pile of important stuff in their analysis and that the results really aren't sound. What do you do?

In an ideal world, academic freedom prevails. The researcher presents their results, but the Ministry puts out contextual information noting what the researchers have missed and why the results are only tentative and preliminary. But there's a lot of risk that's then come in. The opposition might have latched onto the preliminary work and called the government cowards for not having changed policy, or, worse, bought out by "Big Industry Interests". Or, even worse, the preliminary wrong results conform to the Minister's priors and the Minister won't even let you put out a contradictory note because they've already tasked you with formulating policy based on it.

I'm not saying muzzle clauses are justifiable, but rather that this can be where Ministries are coming from.

It is interesting, though, that the University of Canterbury in general is happy to sign contracts for government funding that put strong muzzles on its researchers. I suppose the presumption is that government contracts are always wonderful and that the restrictions are always for the best in this the best of all possible worlds. On the other side, it doesn't seem to matter how rock-solid the academic freedom provisions are in an external funding arrangement if industry's involved - somebody's going to object to it. Again, the one-sided scepticism problem.

Sideloading supermarkets

Suppose that there were a problem with kids drinking in a supermarket parking lot in Wellington.

Among the things that the police can already do about it:

• If the supermarket is within the liquor ban area*, which this one is, then the police could enforce the existing ban on drinking there;**
• If the kids are disorderly, they could be arrested for disorderly behaviour;
• If the supermarket were selling to those underaged, or to those who are intoxicated, the supermarket could be sanctioned for each instance.

Instead, the police are opposing the supermarket's liquor licence renewal. 

I suppose that eventually having a ban on all downtown alcohol sales barring pricey craft beers could help the police to keep their rostering costs down. 

* The default in NZ is that you are allowed to drink in public unless there is a ban in place on open liquor in those specific public places.

** The story notes that the police did have one blitz on public drinking in that supermarket. I doubt it would take many of these to stop the problem.

Police benefits

More evidence that the elasticity of crime with respect to police numbers is around -0.3.

Klick and Tabarrok previously used terror alert status changes to identify the effect of police numbers on crime in Washington, DC. This time, MacDonald, Klick and Grunwald use a geographic regression discontinuity design to identify effects where, on one side of the line, you have only regular policing and, on the other, you also have policing by the University of Pennsylvania.

Their result?

Personnel estimates from both the Philadelphia Police Department and the UPPD indicate that approximately twice as many officers patrol the Outer Penn Zone than the surrounding University City District. The area covered by Philadelphia Police in the relevant area is twice as large as that covered by the Penn Police, suggesting an effective increase in police presence on the order of 200 percent. Our estimate that UPPD activity is associated with a 60 percent reduction in crime suggests that the elasticity of crime with respect to police is about -0.30 for both violent and property crimes. These elasticity estimates are strikingly similar to those found in the modern literature on police and crime. Chalfin and McCrary (2012)'s recent paper provides a helpful summary of these previous estimates. Klick and Tabarrok (2005), Draca, Machin, and Witt (2011), and Di Tella and Schargrodsky (2004)—all of which use an exogenous shock in police deployment resulting from terrorism-related events—find an elasticity of approximately -0.30. Our results are also similar to those presented in Berk and MacDonald (2010) who examine a police crackdown in Los Angeles and find similar elasticities. The results from our investigation respond to concerns that short-term gains from police crackdowns are not sustainable. Instead, our results suggest that these crackdown studies may be generalizable if increased police presence becomes a permanent tactic in specific areas. 

A ten percent increase in the number of police reduces crime by about 3 percent. I expect that the American estimates would be a lower bound on the elasticity of crime with respect to police presence in New Zealand. If crime reduces with policing but at a decreasing rate, then places with fewer officers (per population) will see stronger effects from additional hiring.

The back-of-the-envelope estimates I'd run for my current policy issues class a few years back had a dollar in new police expenditure saving about two dollars in crime costs.

I expect you could find similar benefits in shifting police out of policing cannabis and into policing real crimes; it looks like that may already be under way.

The Health Veto

Police and DHB objections to individual liquor permits seem to be turning into a mechanism for the cops and the docs to impose their policy preferences more directly. Where the alcohol reform legislation didn't give them everything they wanted, and where local alcohol policies don't always give them what they wanted, the potential to hold up a licencee's permit can give them that power through the back door.

Here in Wellington, the police and DHB stopped opposing a new bottle shop when it promised only to sell the expensive stuff. 

Beer snobbery has reached a new height in the capital, with a proposed bottle store granted a license only if it sticks to selling top-shelf brews.

And approval could signal a big change for buying a drink throughout the capital, as regulators seek to clamp down on selling cheap alcohol and "nudge" people away from binge drinking.

Plans to set-up a new off-license, to be known as Capital Craft Beer Co, on Manners St in Wellington were initially opposed by Police and Regional Public Heath during a district licensing committee hearing this morning.

...

However both the police and regional public health agreed to drop their opposition after the bottle store owner, James Tucker, agreed to sell only high quality alcohol and close at 9pm.

Were this to become a trend, it would be minimum alcohol unit pricing via a rather dubious process.

And if the allegations here are true, that's also rather worrying:

A bar owner fighting to keep his licence believed he was targeted by police because of his opposition to stricter alcohol laws, the Dunedin district licence committee heard. 

Dave Goosselink provides some relevant context.

The latest on this front comes from @Feminoptimal. Auckland DHB is opposing the liquor licence at a maternity hospital that caters to the posher end of the NZ market. Here's their current menu. Guests can come in and share a meal with the new mother and have a glass of wine. Very nice.

Feminoptimal writes:

So why is Birthcare maternity hospital having to fight to renew its liquor license?

An Auckland District Health Board spokeswoman said:”The medical officer of health is bringing this appeal because the evidence is clear that the consumption of alcohol harms unborn and newborn infants and considers that the decision to grant the licence to Birthcare is inconsistent with the alcohol legislation whose object is to minimise harm.”

So people having a meal at a maternity hospital – which could safely include new dads or other family members, as well as new mums that cannot breastfeed – can’t be trusted to drink responsibly. After all, responsibility is the core tenet of the liquor licensing guidelines:

Now the Auckland District Health Board has announced it will appeal the case further, to the High Court – despite police and the district licensing committee’s inspector expressing confidence that Birthcare is a responsible licensee.

In fact, decisions about licensing are supposed to be guided by potential impacts on the wider community, not just costs to the individual alcohol consumer. Could it be that Birthcare is already taking steps to ensure its patients are informed about the risks?

Birthcare general manager Ann Hanson defended the hospital’s longstanding policy of offering alcohol with meals.

“There’s a very big highlighted sign on the menu saying we recommend that those breastfeeding don’t drink alcohol,” she said.

So Birthcare is doing its bit to give its patients the best possible care and information (which is, in fact, its job as a hospital). The Police and licensing authority have done their bit in assessing any risks to the community from the hospital’s liquor license. But Auckland DHB just can’t leave it alone: a Message Must Be Sent about the evils of drinking, regardless of whether the law provides grounds for doing so.

Interesting that the police aren't supporting Auckland DHB's push in this case.

DHBs and Police have very large budgets, relative to any individual licensee, to tie things up. The threat of extended processes, or of extra-vigilant enforcement, gives them power to dictate licensing conditions just as the Presidential veto gives him power over some of the composition of the budget. Veto power is legislative power, within bounds.

Disclosure: I was expert witness on bar closing hours for the hospitality association in Wellington and in Tasman.

User Pays Policing?

Dave Armstrong offers a reductio ad absurdum considering what would happen if we took user pays for police services too far to argue against user pays for police vetting. I'm not sure where I stand on this one; I can see arguments both ways. But one example in Dave's reductio did not seem so absurd to me:

When you finally get home, you discover that you have been burgled. Two police turn up immediately. One brings out a glossy folder. "Would you like to pay for our beginner, `We'll Have a Go But Probably Won't Find the Burglar' plan or our slightly more comprehensive `We'll Raid a Fe Houses and Ask Around' plan, or our deluxe `We'll Nab the Bastard No Matter What' plan?"

Exactly this idea occurred to me a couple of years ago, when my house was comprehensively burgled. We had left the house for a couple of days and a night to have a floor relaid, leaving the key with the contractors. When we came back, the place had been done over with no sign of forcible entry. The police came and took fingerprints, and we gave them the names of the contractors, who had to be the prime suspects. After a few days, I called the police to see if any progress had been made. I was told on the phone that they hadn't followed up with the contractors yet as they were waiting for information to come back from the fingerprint matching. That day in the mail (posted the previous day) was a form letter saying that they had been unable to find the culprit and so had closed the case!

The truth of the matter is that in Christchurch,with so many people temporarily vacating their homes for EQC repairs, there are simply too many burglaries for the police to be able to undertake a serious investigation, even, apparently, when given the names of the prime suspects.

So, I wondered, why not have a two-tier police system, just as we do with health. The theory for two-tier funding in health goes something like this. We would like to have a publicly funded comprehensive system of health care, but given the high demand for health care in a wealthy society, coupled with the arrival of ever-more-expensive possibilities for care imply that public provision at high levels would require counter-productively high rates of tax. So instead, we offer a base level of care, and allow those with a greater preference for health or higher incomes to supplement their care out of their own pocket. This enables us to get more money into the health sector without raising marginal tax rates, and still providing a base level of care that we think consistent with the levels we consider a basic human right. Of course we can debate where that base level should be, what is the cost of increasing marginal tax rates, etc. but that doesn't change the logic of a two-tier system.

So imagine the same approach to police services. There is a minimum level of police protection that we all receive (e.g. violent crimes are investigated thoroughly), and then for petty burglaries w have the option of buying hte `We'll Nab the Bastard No Matter What' plan. I suspect that insurance companies might well be prepared to pay for that plan consistently, putting more money into policing without requiring increased taxation. Of course, many people will feel quite uncomfortable with something that looks like "one law for the rich and one for the poor", but against that consider two things: First, at the moment, we are pretty much all put on to the `We'll Have a Go but Probably Won't Find the Burglar' plan (actually, that sounds better than the plan we were forced onto after our burglary), so my scheme doesn't actually reduce the level of service for anyone. And second, there are massive negative externalities from allowing a social norm to develop in which petty crime goes uninvestigated. If even only a fraction of burglaries were investigated thoroughly, the apprehension of serial burglars would confer benefits on others, particularly if it helps petty crime become denormalised.

But that still leaves the question of why the police are devoting resources to evicting law-abiding spectators from cricket games in order to enforce the ticket issuers private terms and conditions. If ever there was a case for user pays for police time, this is it.

A safe and proper tournament

The practice, also called courtsiding (it first emerged in tennis), is not illegal, but the gambling markets it serves, mostly in India, usually are. The International Cricket Council (ICC) prohibits it in the fine print of its match tickets and would rather avoid the unsavoury association.

Police help the ICC make sure of it. Specially-trained plain-clothes officers are patrolling New Zealand matches through their mandate with the ICC and the Government to help deliver a safe and proper tournament. Essentially it is the same powers they have in evicting a drunk person, but it speaks of the seriousness with which pitchsiding is treated. All the men kicked out of Hagley Oval on Saturday were banned from other World Cup matches and face arrest if they try to gain entry. Past this, however, they are not in criminal trouble.

So says The Press.

The fine print on the entry tickets to my house note that, as condition of entry, if the guests are there as we put the kids to bed at 7:30 pm, the kids will likely ask them to sing bedtime songs. Some guests have been reluctant to do so, and we've not pressed the issue. But now that we know that the police are happy to enforce general Terms and Conditions of entry, well, that guests sing for their supper will be better enforced.

Seriously, though: what specifically authorises the New Zealand Police Force to go around looking for breaches of ticket terms and conditions? Why did anybody think this was an appropriate use of police resources?

The police lament their resourcing issues when they argue that all the bars should close at ridiculously early hours: Basically, nobody should be allowed to be out late because it makes rostering too hard for the cops. And yet they've time to send plainclothes detectives out to stop people from telling other people that a bat hit a ball?

If the ICC were running the nightclub-bouncer part of the operation, then asking the Police to enforce trespass orders against those they didn't want at the matches, I could understand it. But sending in cops to watch for breach of ticket terms and conditions?

Stat Juking revisited

I'd reckoned you'd need a bit of stats-fu to find evidence of police juking of the crime statistics. Turns out there was an easier way. Bevan Hurley reports that the Herald on Sunday got a copy of a report showing that Counties Manukau police had been fiddling the burglary numbers by recoding burglaries as less serious offences. 

About 700 burglaries were “recoded” in the Counties Manukau south area over three years, an internal police investigation has found. It found that about 70 per cent of the time, the offences should have remained burglaries.

The revelations will be an embarrassment for Police Commissioner Mike Bush, who was district commander of the area at the time, although he was not responsible for overseeing the coding.

Police have not said why the statistics were altered, but say staff were not under instruction to do so. Tolley denied police were under political pressure to reduce burglary statistics.

You don't need overt political pressure to get this kind of outcome, just KPIs with strong enough incentives. On the plus side, they were caught. On the down side, I can't see how lower level staff doing the coding would have any incentive to muck the stats around unless they were getting pushed by those whose KPIs did provide such incentive. It would be really interesting to read the full report.

The review listed dozens of examples where break-ins and attempted burglaries were downgraded, including one case where police failed to follow up after a witness gave them a burglar’s registration number.

The review found the burglary recoding rates in Counties Manukau south at the time were 15 per cent to 30 per cent whereas other areas typically recoded about 5 per cent.

So where last week's rumours were about failing to pursue charges, which wouldn't have mattered for stats based on recorded complaints, downgrading the complaints to less serious offences would matter.

I'd be curious to know what kinds of lesser offences were artificially inflated to keep the burglary numbers down.

I hope that the Police stats units have informed any researchers who'd been using the incorrect figures of the updated and corrected series. Anything that relied too heavily on 2009-2012 Manukau data is now going to have to be re-done.

The Herald on Sunday broke the story on the 13th. Their version is gated. The Stuff version, which notes "It was reported" rather than crediting the Herald, is here.

A mild superpower

Matt Nolan's convincing demonstration of the superiority of economists over Jedi reminded me of Scott Adams's useful description of economics:

When you have a working knowledge of economics, it’s like having a mild super power. For example, I use my knowledge of economics to avoid speeding tickets. I assume the local law enforcement agencies have limited funding and can’t be everywhere at the same time. That tells me, fairly reliably, when I can speed without detection and when I can’t.

I think his analysis there misses the important technological innovation that comes with speed cameras: the road to the airport is exactly where I'd put speed cameras rather than actual police: they extract revenues from folks who are scared of missing their flights but without generating the kind of political backlash that might come from making too many people miss their flights. I hope Scott Adams has a decent radar detector and a speed camera overlay on his GPS.

It's often safe to speed, and failing to speed can also get you pulled over.

Back to Scott Adams:

My reason for majoring in economics in college was to understand how the world works, so I would be more equipped to navigate in it. I think it was a good choice. Has your college major given you any mild super powers?

This ought to be front and centre on our Economics Department enrolment handbook. Take economics, get a mild superpower. Dilbert says so, so it must be true (Jedi mind trick hand wave...).