The Government has confirmed police will be given new powers to issue move-on orders across town centres nationwide, allowing officers to direct people — including rough sleepers — to leave an area for up to 24 hours.
Justice Minister Paul Goldsmith told media many main streets had been “blighted” by disruption, arguing police currently lacked tools to intervene before behaviour escalated into criminal offending. “Many disruptive, distressing and potentially harmful acts can occur before officers have any means of intervention. It doesn’t make sense,” he said.
Police Minister Mark Mitchell said decisions about distance and support would rest with frontline officers. “They do this every day,” Mitchell said, adding police were familiar with local communities and service networks. However, he stressed homelessness responses should not fall primarily on police, saying social agencies must “step up and own those issues.”
Advocacy groups have warned enforcement-based measures risk displacing homelessness rather than addressing underlying social causes.
Image credit: Jon Tyson
In my own town (and I’m sure it will be the same in others) police have always had the powers to remove the bums from the shop fronts. They just choose not to. In fact, they have zero presence in the city centre.
So no freedom of movement, huh? These inhumane, human rights eroding laws, are the kind of thing we see in slow creep authoritarianism of the kind found in the UK and elsewhere. Time for you to go National, this isn’t only undemocratic, its inhumane. Why too are New Zealanders homeless in the first place? Neither you or Labour have served this country well.
“Go be poor somewhere else!”
The nation is blighted by the fascists in the beehive.
They have systematically impoverished people, not only by feeding international ‘investors’ but by impoverishing the population via the edjucation system, the legal system, by family destruction and by introducing racism, preferential treatment, immorality and PC nonsense.
And police is used again to govern the disgusting deeds of the political class..
Paul Goldsmith…sounds ((( )))