A good cop
The Herald profiles former country cop Gavin Benney:
Gavin Benney has always liked to do things his own way, rules or no rules. When a beach house on his Northland patch was burgled, he knew the thief was a local man who had moved to Tapu, 19km north of Thames.
“I rang the Thames police and asked them to try and find this guy and it was just too hard for them,” says Benney.
“So I drove down there, went to this guy’s house, knocked on his door – no search warrant, nothing. He opens the door, couldn’t believe it, didn’t know how I’d found him. Got the stolen gear, which he had in the house, and took him to the Thames police and locked him up.
“And I did get in a little bit of shit for that because I didn’t get permission. But if I’d asked for permission to go, they’d say no. You’d send it to Thames, some cop would get it, they would sit on it … And the cops are busy, but to me that’s the important stuff to go and do.”
We need more cops like this.
In 2010 he got a call from a man whose boat had been stolen from Whananaki 12 years earlier. The owner said the boat had turned up on Trade Me in an auction. Benney located the advertiser north of Kaikohe but found the local police “unhelpful”, so he drove north with the original owner and reunited him with his boat. He got an official bollocking for that too, he says. Another time he and a dairy farmer tracked down stolen stock outside his area without notifying local police. He got a search warrant but got told off again.
How dare he not get permission to solve crimes.
He is proud of the crime statistics that show he solved between 60 and 65 per cent of all reported crime, compared with the 50 per cent average for all New Zealand, and 50 per cent of burglaries, compared with only 10 per cent nationally.
Excellent.
In fact, even some of the villains rate him. The book’s foreword, by an anonymous local drug dealer and small-time thief, calls him “hard but fair”. It describes Benney walking into a room of “pretty serious crims” in his customary policing uniform – shorts, T-shirt and Jandals – and being treated with respect, partly because most of them played rugby with him.
Love it. Small town NZ.
This approach may have endeared Benney to locals but not to some of his bosses. Benney says he had regular run-ins over his slack dress code, using the police-issue 4WD for crayfishing trips with his friend Roger Ballard, the author’s husband, while he was on call, and often not answering his phone immediately because he was busy playing tennis or hockey.
Crayfishing is an excellent use of his vehicle!