When I worked at the New Zealand Drug Foundation, I got it into my head those regular raids the cops do where they fly in and rappel down into cannabis grow ops from helicopters and then pose in front of a pile of pulled up marijuana plants1 would be more expensive to run than buying it off the streets.
So I put in an Official Information Act request like a good little bunny and I got a reply saying it would be processed within 20 business days. At 4:38 on the 20ᵗʰ business day I got an email asking for / telling me they need another 20 business days with no real reason given.
I went back asking a simple question “why?” they came back a few business days later saying the information didn’t exist in the format I had asked for it in. Which is weird, right?
If you’re running an operation you know how many people hours were used in the planning, running, and wrap up plus you would be able to figure out by looking at the cost centres for using the various resources, how much the helicopters to use per hour etc.
We live in a capitalist society that demands budgets and careful use of taxpayers dollars. Surely value for money factors into the NZ Police’s decision making when it comes to how they prioritise their policing operations. Right?
RIGHT?!
Well, I’m here to tell you that was a very naïve assumption from lil’ ol’ JJW.
It gets to the end of the extension and all I hear is: 🦗🦗🦗
I do some tweets about it and have a laugh with the Drug Foundation folks and then follow up with an email politely asking where the fuck my legally mandated response was.
They took a few more days to get back to me and then and rather than actually responding they invited me to a meeting at Cop Shop HQ in Wellington to discuss.
“Fuck it, why not” I said, so me and a colleague went along.
I did some more semi joking tweets about being black bagged and disappeared or only tweeting pro-police propaganda in approximately 1.5 hours.
The top police dog2 for drug stuff met us and immediately put me at ease by telling me he wasn’t going to black bag me lol which means the NZ Police social team were keeping tabs on me even though I wasn’t tagging them in. Perfectly normal stuff.
Then they sat us down, got hot drinks, and started to talk us through their “response” to my OIA which was — and I’m reading between the lines here:
We don’t have a fucking clue how much these operations cost because we purposely don’t track budgets in that way, we’re cops not accountants.
The guy then went on a very long digression about how methamphetamine was the real issue and started talking about the drug trade triangle between NZ, Australia, and Vietnam.
Top cop guy was incapable of saying “Vietnamese” he, I shit you not, pronounced it “Vee-it-my-knees” lol.
Me and my colleague were looking at each other the whole time trying to not laugh and asking increasingly basic questions about how drug law enforcement operations work, how they measure impact, how they measure street prices, etc only to receive ever more nonsensical answers.
The meeting concluded with them asking us to provide them our notes so they could type them up to provide to us as a formal response to the OIA lmao.
Needless to say, with back of the napkin calculations, just buying the weed and then destroying it would be like 25% of what these stupid wannabe green beret missions cost, be significantly less risky for the officers involved and would put money into the community (via gangs).
This tale was inspired by Joshua Drummond and Emily Write’s recent interaction with NZ Police about their stance of Grok and it creation of CSAM.
So it’s good to see the New Zealand Police are still incredibly incompetent, ass covering, doing the stupidest shit, and employing the worst people to make half assed uninformed decisions.
I guess “get better work stories” is the moral of this yarn.
Thanks to everyone over on Bluesky who enjoyed this thread of posts. I have fixed most of the spelling and grammar mistakes, but not all, just to annoy you. You can follow me over there, or don’t. I really do not care.
Stay safe, stay sane
<3
JJW
- They always say something like “we’ve seized $1.5m worth of weed” even though they’re calculating the monetary value by weighing the entire plant, roots and dirt and stems and all, not just the bud like your friendly neighbourhood weed dealer does. ↩︎
- I realise the use of the term “top police dog” here might be confusing because they were not an actual dog/canine (disappointing). Sadly, it was (presumably) an old human male who was the head of the unit, the “top dog” so to speak. ↩︎
