Rumbled
Here is a TV3 story from July 2012 showing Judith Collins celebrating the crime-reduction strategies in Counties-Manukau. The money quote is:
“We know where crime happens, we know where it’s more likely to be so we should have police there before it happens in numbers able to deal with things – and we’ve seen that trialled in Counties Manukau and it’s been very successful,” says Justice Minister Judith Collins.
She said this a full six months after she learned that the police in Counties-Manukau were potentially manipulating their crime statistics.
That is enormously irresponsible. She not only ignored warnings about the figures being fed to her, she went out of her way to rely on those same figures to defend government policy. She is an embarrassment.
The Herald editorial this morning is similarly underwhelemed with Collins:
Judith Collins, police minister at the time, has serious questions to answer after the Herald on Sunday’s disclosure that hundreds of burglaries were taken out of crime statistics over a period of years in part of the Counties-Manukau police district…
Ms Collins, police minister until December 2011, admits she had been told “something about the stats” but said nothing publicly. She did not even tell her successor, Anne Tolley.
Ms Collins did not pass it on to the new Police Minister, she told the Herald, because, “I didn’t have details”. Asked why she did not seek details, she said, “because it was very historical”. It was not very historical in late 2011.
If she keeps this up, something else that will shortly be “very historical” is the political influence of Judith Collins.