NZ First Leader and Northland MP Winston Peters highlighted Warkworth’s poor crime resolution rate when he spoke as a guest of Warkworth Rotary on March 10.
Mr Peters said that since 2008, there had been 822 burglaries, but only 15 arrests, which is a success rate of about a 2%. Similarly, over the same time period, there had been 98 serious assaults and only 19 arrests, and five reports of child abuse but only one arrest.
“When it comes to safer communities, National’s 880 new police will not even come close to matching the ratios of police to population that we had in 2008,” Mr Peters said.
“The Government will have you believe that 880 sworn officers over the next four years will solve everything. It won’t because it is about 1000 officers short.”
He added that most officers would go to the cities, leaving places such as Warkworth and Wellsford seriously under-serviced.
Mr Peters left his audience in no doubt that this was an election year. The veteran politician began by discrediting political polling, before hitting his stride on broken election promises, immigration, policing, political correctness and transport.
“The people of Warkworth, and indeed the North, were promised nine years ago a road of national significance or a RONS – from Puhoi to Warkworth. Not one metre of that road has been built.
“In Warkworth, there is the Hill Street intersection disaster posing as a bottleneck, which begs the question, who and what was responsible for planning this?”
On the current work on the Brynderwyn Hills, Mr Peters said there had been a massive blowout in the projected costs.
“The excuse is, ‘we’ve discovered geotech issues’, which begs the question who did the geotech due diligence in the first place when setting the $16 million contract?”
However, the speech wasn’t well received by everyone in the audience.
Several Rotary members were upset to find themselves at a political meeting when they thought they were there to listen to Mr Peters reminisce about his years in politics.
“I’m disgusted by what’s been allowed to happen,” one member said.
President Mick Fay was asked to explain, but Mr Peters responded on his behalf.
“I’m not a comedian; I’m not an entertainer,” he said. “If you don’t like my message, that’s fine, but you can’t expect someone with my experience in politics to come along here in an election year and deliver a non-political talk.”
The General Election will be held on Saturday, September 23.
After the meeting, Police Minister Paula Bennett refuted Mr Peters’ local crime figures, and provided the chart above showing crime statistics for Warkworth since 2014.
“Mr Peters is not using official crime statistics,” she said. “The numbers he refers to record Police’s initial attendance at an incident and show whether the crime is resolved immediately following a call out. Often crimes are not solved on the spot, but further investigation is required before they can be resolved.
“From the official Police statistics available online, and released publicly every month, we can see that police in Warkworth have charged 63 people in the past two-and-a-half years, well above the figure Mr Peters is referring to for the previous nine years. The relevant figures for serious assaults and child abuse are also shown in this chart, which clearly shows that Police are resolving crime significantly higher than the incorrect figures Mr Peters is quoted as using.”
