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# AOS Commander Vaughan Perry, Part 2
- URL: https://goodoil.news/aos-commander-vaughan-perry-part-2/
- Published: 2026-08-30T21:00:05.000Z
- Updated: 2026-08-30T21:00:05.000Z
- Description: He is a liar, a bully and a serial kidnapper.
- Author: Guest Post
- Tags: NZ Politics, Police

**Lucy Rogers** 

In my previous post about Vaughan Perry, I detailed his involvement in my arrest, the fact that the IPCA subsequently found him to have told serious lies about me to justify it and his involvement in a previous kidnapping of someone else as covered in a 2019 IPCA report and the IPCA’s comments on the New Zealand Police’s shocking behaviour in apparently protecting him from consequences in that case, too.

However, there is another detail which I think needs drawing to the attention of the public: Vaughan Perry was the operation commander for the police response to the parliamentary protests during the Covid era. The implications are significant.

Those protests elicited over 1900 complaints to the IPCA about police brutality and wrongful arrests. At the time I paid little attention to this, having both a much higher view of the police than I do now and reservations about the parliamentary protesters and being disinclined to attribute much weight to rumours about what happened when there were reports of bad behaviour from both police and the protesters. In light of what I now know from firsthand experience about Vaughan Perry, I am now seeing events in an entirely different light.

The *Herald* has reported that Vaughan Perry’s second in command, Yancy Hawkins, was found by both the IPCA and by a High Court judge to have engaged in a “dangerous and risky” manoeuvre during the arrest of a protester. Hawkins was found to have placed his entire body weight on the head of an unresisting 17-year-old protester, Alexander Lawrence, who was lying on the ground and pushed down with a press-up position. Lawrence reported pain afterwards as well as blurred vision and deafness due to injuries to his spinal cord.

Furthermore, Hawkins was also found to have performed a similar manoeuvre on another protester, Laura Cassin, which was also found by the IPCA and the High Court to have been illegal.

Despite the IPCA’s findings and the High Court’s findings that this was excessive and a breach of the Bill of Rights, the New Zealand Police refused to prosecute Hawkins. This is despite the fact that Hawkins claimed to both the IPCA and the police investigation that Cassin was resisting when both the IPCA and the Police found that she was not resisting. This is exactly the pattern that I have faced in seeking accountability re Vaughan Perry. The police in my view have repeatedly sought to minimise his actions and protect him from consequences, in spite of overwhelming evidence that he alleged things that are not true.

The fact that Perry and Hawkins were the first and second in command of that operation respectively has permanently changed my view of the police’s response to the parliamentary protests. I, of course, make no sweeping claims about ‘the police’ as a whole during that operation. Rather, I posit the more modest premise that some officers had great fun that week. This was the highlight of their year, perhaps of their entire careers. There were so many people to arrest for their own good and in some cases use force against, in the likely knowledge that in the absence of direct video footage, proving abuses would be very difficult, especially given the public’s prejudices about the “river of filth”.

I think they knew that they could claim that the public do not understand operational realities when making decisions in a fast-paced and high tension environment, and therefore that they would be given the benefit of the doubt, because (a) when there’s a grey area the difference between reasonable force and excessive force is highly fact dependent (and proving all the facts is extremely difficult in a chaotic environment like the parliamentary protests) and (b) people, especially internal police oversight, are predisposed to believe that the police act in good faith.

Again this is precisely what happened in my case also. It is a recurring pattern.

And to cap it all it was all in the name of public welfare and saving us from Covid, so the Vaughan Perrys of this world even got a moral buzz out of it, just as the officers who arrested me claimed to have done so for my own safety.

If there’s a lesson to be taken from this, it is that in circumstances when the public make assumptions or have prejudices about the truthfulness of people alleging police brutality (as with the parliamentary protesters, whom the public were not predisposed to think well of) before so much as hearing the evidence, police essentially wield unaccountable power, because they start with an evidential advantage. And history shows that when power is unaccountable, it is highly susceptible to abuse.