Senior officer tells the truth on police view of Mob funding

Stuff reports:

A senior police officer in the Hawke’s Bay Organised Crime Unit has let rip at the government’s funding of a meth rehab programme being run by Mongrel Mob members, which was approved by the prime minister.

The Kahukura programme, which serves up to 10 participants over eight weeks on a marae in central Hawke’s Bay, has received $2.75m from the Proceeds of Crime fund.

The programme sees participants working in a ‘’community garden’’ at the home of the president of the Mongrel Mob’s Notorious chapter, Sonny Smith. …

Stuff has spoken to numerous officers who were stunned to hear of the funding.

In a letter to the editor of the Police Association magazine, Detective sergeant Mark Moorhouse, a supervisor in the Hawke’s Bay Organised Crime Unit has put into words how he and his colleagues feel.

He said claims by politicians that Hawke’s Bay police supported the programme was “BS”.

There is no way local frontline police who battle the Mob’s drug empire supported funding them to do drug rehabilitation from the very drugs they sell.

What will have happened is the District Commander would have been consulted by the Commissioner’s office and he or she would have said, we don’t object. There is no way this would have been the view of officers on the frontline.

“My gang-focus staff have for the past two years fought tooth and nail to confront the violence and insidious harm the Mongrel Mob, in particular, have unleashed in our community. More than 30 gang-related shootings in the year to date, and they openly flaunt the wealth they generate from the poison they infuse our communities with,” he wrote.

Imagine the risk those local officers have in dealing with 30 gang shootings and then finding out the Government has given $2.75 million to the Mob.

“We are undermined by the courts and poorly served by a justice system. Corrections is a mess and we’re not sure any more who runs the prisons.

The gangs seem to. If they cause enough trouble they then get given their own block, which becomes their fiefdom.

“The only job satisfaction I have had this year is the fact that the people who work around me have seized huge amounts of firearms, drugs and assets and had an impact on these groups. While it might be a small ripple in a big pond, it is the only ray of light we have had. I am encouraged by the professionalism and tenacity of these awesome people.

“Now you want to tell us that nearly $3 million worth of our blood, sweat and tears is going to be allocated to a scheme that only allows the individuals who are responsible for causing the harm to be enrolled in it, to the detriment of more worthy causes, and then tell the country that the Hawkes’ Bay Police support it. I need to call BS on this because the bulk of us don’t support it,” Moorhouse wrote.

Poor bastards who have to endure this.