On this, the morning of Len Snee’s funeral, I would like to offer my sincere condolences to the Snee family – especially to Joe who is a great friend of my son Mac. Mac and a number of Joe’s friends are flying in to be with Joe and the family at this time and I think that is just neat – that is what friendship and respect is all about.
And of course our thoughts are with those who were so badly injured and their families. We can only hope that their prospects brighten.
The police did an amazing job of resolving the situation on the hill with no further loss of life and no further serious injuries. And of course they weren’t without their critics.Â
I was in Christchurch on Monday morning and the letters to the editor of The Press, included one from Waimarie and another from RD6 Christchurch. These fellows were expertly able to decide from rural Canterbury just where the police went wrong – how they could have handled the situation so much better and how the situation could have been resolved so much sooner.
In Napier we had some of the top policemen in New Zealand. We had the Special Tactics Group – the SAS of the police. We had the Armed Offenders Squad – a highly trained group of professionals. We had a specialist team from the army. We had psychologists and specialist negotiators. And yet scores of people from one end of the country to the other thought they knew a better way of handling the situation. They had no knowledge of the difficulty of access to the site – no knowledge of the background of the offender – no knowledge of what the police were being told by the offender and his associates and yet – they knew it all.
I wonder how keen these self styled experts would have been, for the police to throw caution to the wind and storm the building as they were suggesting, if their eldest son was an Armed Offenders Squad Officer in the front line.
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