High voltage crims leave no room for civility

I wish I could be pals with civil libertarians. Their hearts are in the right place, but when they talk they lose me fast.

The taser issue isn't going away. They're hot on the subject of letting the police be armed with them, which the police want, and last week Council for Civil Liberties chairman Michael Bott supplied their argument to newspapers. He cited some notorious American examples of misuse, what looked like over-reaction by police there, and on the ill-effects they can have on some people, notably epileptics and people on certain psychiatric drugs.

The Keith Abbott case came up again. Some people argue that Steven Wallace wouldn't have died if Abbott had been armed with a taser instead of a gun, but Bott dismissed that idea. If Abbott had waited till the dog team got there, or just sat patiently, everything would have been hunky-dory, he seems to think.

And there I switch off. The police are paid to act, not to sit on their backsides while offenders run rampant. Nobody knows what Wallace might have done next that night. He might have killed the next person who crossed his path, and a cop who sat quietly and smoked a fag while he did it would have been in just as much trouble as Abbott ended up in. People, civil libertarians among them, seem to forget that Wallace was acting crazy, not just having a childish fit of vandalism. He provoked the situation that tragically ended in his death. And actually, he could indeed be alive today if he'd been tasered, not shot. Why fight it?

A different angle interests me. If I were Bott I'd be wondering how come so many police seem to be armed these days, despite our police force being nominally unarmed. The recent droll incident where a group of cops were all shooting at a rottweiler dog, and all missing, had me wondering where so many guns came from. The fact that the police were all such lousy shots might have been some comfort to Bott, but didn't impress me. If they're going to be armed they should be properly trained, and if they're not going to have guns they should get tasers, surely, because the kind of people they deal with are becoming ever loopier and more unpredictable.

Who knows how many are high on drugs and impossible to communicate with, how many are mean drunk, or which are psychotic? Who could make that snap judgement call with confidence? Do civil libertarians think such people are all owed the right to act up without restraint? Have they been out on the streets lately? A taste: last week two men were jailed in the New Plymouth High Court over an incident in Eltham. They'd been shouting, swearing, and smashing letter boxes, and had pushed over a neighbour's fence. The neighbour said that if they held the fence up for him, he could put it right with a few nails. For this attempt at mild mediation he was viciously beaten, lost an eye, had his jaw broken, and suffered brain damage. Neither this victim nor his mate - both beaten senseless by these thugs - can even remember what happened.

Doubtless they were in the wrong, in Bott's view. They should have realised the men were blind drunk, and let them go on their merry, violent way. But the judge saw it differently, sentencing one offender to 12 years' jail, and another to seven years and eight months. I guess he deals with the aftermath of mad and dangerous activity regularly in his line of work, and doesn't have Bott's luxury of contemplating it at several removes.

In Wellington, trouble with cabbies continues. There has been a series of court cases in which women claim they'd been sexually assaulted or raped by them. One such rape case was in court last week.

When I was a kid, you stood no chance of being taken seriously if you protested over a cabbie's antics. It took several bouts of being groped and slobbered over by drivers before I realised you really do have to sit in the back of the taxi, and little seems to have changed.

Taxi drivers are in a position of trust; our basic civil liberty is to be unmolested in their cabs, surely. That's why I was startled to see, last week, that a Wellington driver who'd done time for burglary and breaching multiple protection orders had been given back his taxi licence. He'd initially been disqualified for 10 years, following convictions for his conduct towards women passengers in the 90s, but had that cut to three.

Wisely, he hung up when journalists asked him for comment. But I think I can predict, with some irritation, what Bott's reaction would have been.