On the night of June 15, 1974, six separate incidents involving violence occurred in Auckland. Four of these incidents took place in the inner city and involved Maoris or non-Maori Polynesians. Suddenly all the prejudices and racist fears of the European community came into the open and demands were made for more police with more powers to deal with this menace. The Labour politicians hesitated briefly, but hysterical newspaper editorials and frantic outbursts from the National MPs of Auckland (representing the conservative white suburbs) made up the Government's mind and the Prime Minister gave the go ahead for the police to form a Task Force to patrol the inner city.

In their eagerness to 'clamp down on Polynesian violence' the white politicians and police chiefs conveniently forgot the other violent incidents which occurred on the night of June 15. One was a combination of fights and assaults on the North Shore and the other a brawl in New Lynn, both of which involved only Europeans. Yet no Task Force was set up to patrol these suburbs, or to arrest the drunken people in and around their pubs and taverns. All that the Task Force was interested in were a few inner city pubs and taxi ranks patronised almost exclusively by Maoris and other Polynesians.

This wasn't the first time the Labour parliamentarians responded to the law-and-order-cry—in November 1973 an earlier Task Force was set up as a result of hysteria in the press about 'inner city street violence'. One notable victim of that Task Force was an innocent 14 year-old Rarotongan schoolboy who was arrested while simply standing on a street corner. He was locked up in Mt Eden Prison and then a Boys Home for a total of four weeks, and had to go through four court appearances over a 2½ month period before he was acquitted of a single idle and disorderly charge. Already it was clear, as Nga Tamatoa had predicted, that the Task Force was concentrating its attention selectively on Maoris and other Polynesians.

The present Task Force was set up within a fortnight of June 15, again with the aim of 'cleaning up the streets'. It is now clear that in its operations to date, during which time at least 80% of all arrests have been of Maoris and other Polynesians, 'cleaning up the streets' has been interpreted by the police as cleaning Maoris and other Polynesians off the streets and into the cells, innocent or not.

ACORD members monitored the Auckland Magistrates Court every Saturday morning for the first six weeks the Task Force was operating. We were able, therefore, to gather data about one sample of the Task Force's victims, those arrested on Friday nights.

These included more than a quarter of the total of 403 people arrested by the Task Force during that period. The six-week monitoring period also covered three weeks before the new national Duty Solicitor Scheme started in Auckland and three weeks after. The aim of this scheme is to provide legal help and legal aid to all defendants in the magistrates courts and childrens courts, and we were interested to see how effective its early operations were.