The Police have become overbearing and threatening in their dealings with Licenced Firearms Owners. They have been aided and abetted by an out of control Police Minister, Stuart Nash.
Currently, they are ramming through legislation for a gun register despite the fact that no gun register anywhere in the world has been either
A) cost-effective.
B) a useful tool in crime prevention.
On top of that, they have proven that they cannot be trusted with private data after a massive data breach that potentially exposed more than 30,000 LFOs.
Then we have the alarming statistics regarding criminal elements within the Police who are accessing existing databases and selling information to criminals. In a Stuff article this week, we read about a bent copper who spent a year selling database information from Police systems to criminals.
In May 2013, former police prosecutor Timothy John Russell Sarah was jailed for four years after pleading guilty to three charges of supplying methamphetamine, one of possessing the drug and a representative charge of dishonestly accessing the police computer – the National Intelligence Application.
Sarah had accessed the police computer system more than 80 times, gleaning information from the database, which he then passed on to drug-dealing contacts.
The crimes took place between 2010 and mid-2011 and were uncovered as a resulted of Operation Ark – a wider police investigation resulting in multiple arrests.
Data obtained by Stuff showed 89 officers misused the NIA database in the past four years.
Nearly two million people, just over 40 per cent of the population, appear in the NIA with an alert against their name.
The alerts range from flags for firearms licence holders, to warnings the person is a known paedophile.
Police can access the database from their mobile phone or via a computer.
Superintendent Barry Taylor, the national police professional conduct manager, said random NIA audits were conducted each month on around 90 users.
“The user and their supervisor review the transactions with the user explaining or justifying their actions where necessary.”
Since 2015, 184 police staff have been investigated for possible misuse of the database.
Eighty-nine of the allegations were upheld.
As of October, 33 investigations had been launched into alleged police misuse of the NIA in 2019.
Of those, seven had been upheld while 22 were ongoing.
Stuff
Until and unless the Police actually address their own criminal problem, LFOs should resist the creation of a gun register with everything they’ve got.
Right now it is bad enough that their details are already being sold to criminals, but when a gun register is established, that data will become even more valuable to criminals.
The evidence shows that the police are incompetent in how they currently store and protect their data. Until that is sorted out there should not be a gun register.
The only real alternative is that some other trusted agency be appointed to maintain such a register. Right now that organisation should not be the Police as they have proven that data is not safe with them.
