While it should come as a surprise to no one that the boys and gals in blue regularly take to the road in their shiny highway patrol vehicles every school holidays, a reminder – in the form of a veritable posse of police cars – was spotted in Brunswick Heads yesterday.
A reader forwarded this photo of the off-duty vehicles which got together outside the Bruns police station yesterday (October 8) while their usually attendant humans were dining nearby.
Just two days earlier, on Saturday (October 6) Tweed/Byron police and the highway patrol command conducted a joint operation targeting drink and drug drivers in Murwillumbah. After testing a total of 496 drivers for alcohol and 56 for drugs, just one driver was charged with mid-range drink driving while six tested positive to prohibited drugs. One driver was issued with an infringement for unlicensed driving.
If you haven’t spotted one of these vehicles on the road in recent days, expect to soon. The school holidays continue until Sunday (October 14).
A pity the Echo seems to have abandoned it’s origins which started as a Police watch and fight for justice under it’s founder Nick Shand. If the Echo were paying proper attention it would know the invasion of Police this week has nothing to do with school holidays. This is becoming a permanent $100,000 minimum weekly cost Police activity with the large squad of about 10 cars & vans, many unmarked, plus 20 Police terrorising Northern Rivers towns. In the last 4 weeks the large squad has done over Mullum twice, Bruns twice , Lennox once, . Casino and Lismore many times, Byron and Nimbin regularly with various numbers and also raided sundry other settlements.
High speed chases have in urban areas have occurred. If the total haul was only 1 drink charge and 6 drug charges then the exercise is not recovering more than a tiny percentage of cost.
Nowhere else in the Western world is there a Police presence on this scale and the tame population and the Echo just lets this roll all over them without comment. Importantly the drug charges were probably all about “presence” of cannabis and not actual impairment. This injustice passes without protest. Maybe it is revenge for the local protest stopping fracking.
Nick would truly be rolling.