Public Address - Hard News (Home)

Spectacular but useless | Jun 24, 2008 08:38

The Herald has had two bites at the new New Zealand Drug Harm Index developed by Berl for the New Zealand Police.

The first is a fairly plain NZPA story that appeared yesterday on the paper's website. The second is the one headed $1.3b drugs bill we're all paying that takes the front page this morning.

As you might expect, the vanilla version, based on a story in the police Ten One magazine, is closer to the truth. It quotes National Crime Manager Detective Superintendent Win van der Velde as saying the index "will help reinforce the value of police enforcement activity and the work with our partner agencies."

The front-page version, on the other hand, is a torrent of scary numbers.

The idea of a drug harm index isn't necessarily a bad one. In Britain, the Drug Harm Index does actually seek to measure social harm caused by illicit drug use -- and to assess harm reduction measures. Its harms "include drug-related crime, community perceptions of drug problems, drug nuisance, and the various health consequences that arise from drug abuse." It is actually possible to measure -- and, on the evidence, improve -- policy outcomes with the British model.

Indeed, the British index is specifically geared towards harm reduction targets laid out in 2004:

• Reduce the harm caused by illegal drugs (as measured by the Drug Harm Index encompassing measures of the availability of Class A drugs and drug-related crime) including substantially increasing the number of drug-misusing offenders entering treatment through the criminal justice system.

• Increase the participation of problem drug users in drug treatment programmes by 100 per cent by 2008 and increase year-on-year the proportion of users successfully sustaining or completing treatment programmes.

• Reduce the use of Class A drugs and the frequent use of any illicit drug among all young people under the age of 25, especially by the most vulnerable young people.

Unfortunately, Berl has followed the Australian model, which is more or less explicitly, a public relations tool for police. (As the Aussies put it: "The index represents the dollar value of harm that would have ensued had the seized drugs reached the community. In the five years from 1998-99 to 2002-2003, the AFP and its partners saved the Australian community approximately $3.1 billion in harm through its disruption of illicit drug importations.")

Harms as very widely defined in this model include the costs of policing drug laws by the police and Customs. So if we were to follow the urgings of Mike Sabin and throw huge additional resources into stamping out drugs, the Drug Harm Index would go up. And every drug seizure made by police would be accounted as preventing harm to an even greater value. The more money they spent, the more money they'd save us. Cool, huh?

As you might expect, no attempt is made model the harm caused by the fact of drugs being illegal; or, to phrase it another way, to assess the relative harm generated by different policy approaches. This is, after all, a report created for the police rather than as an measure for heath or social policy.

The model also coughs up some spectacular, and meaningless, figures: "The most damaging drug per kilogram was LSD, which cost more than $1.05 billion a kg," reports the Herald story. (To be fair to Berl, its report does acknowledge the pointlessness of this figure.)

The other thing that makes the Drug Harm Index fairly useless is that it specifically excludes the legal but harmful drugs alcohol and tobacco. The shortcoming was identified in a meeting of the Inter-Agency Committee on Drugs last April. From the minutes:

9. DEVELOPMENT OF A DRUG HARM INDEX

The MCDP Chair had raised the question, on why the drug harm index did not include tobacco and alcohol, at the MCDP meeting held on 14 March 2007. Police commented that with a lack of resources this is as far as they can take it. It was also discussed amongst the Committee that a more useful approach would be to ensure that the on-line drug information database was structured to collect and present information on alcohol and drug related harm.

Action:

Committee agreed to rename the index the "Illegal Drug Harm Index."

Neither the name change or the proposed "more useful approach" have come to pass. The index also misses a huge opportunity to shed light in not modelling the economic and social costs of legal "party pills" alongside illicit drugs.

And we're left with an index that is spectacular but fairly useless in policy terms. Jim Anderton is proud of it.

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Google Trending and MGMT | Jun 23, 2008 09:16

The new Google Trends for websites provides some intriguing results. For instance; the other website most visited by readers of The Listener's website is this one -- by miles.

There's a similar correlation with the Radio New Zealand site, and we sneak into the top 10 "also visited" sites for Scoop readers.

I'd be wary of placing too much faith in the "daily unique users" count -- ours is notably lower than either our Google Analytics (which is supposed to be used in the Trends reporting) or Nielsen, and the counts on sites like Amplifier are plainly wrong. As Mashable put it: Google Trends Adds Another Way to Inaccurately Track Website Traffic.

But in theory, Google should be able, over time, to produce far better data than Alexa (whose sample is Windows users dumb enough to run Alexa's spyware toolbar) and already the likes of the comparison of tv3.co.nz and 3news.co.nz is quite nice. It looks like the news site will overtake total traffic via tv3.co.nz any day now.

Google is quite upfront about the provisional nature of the information. And there are shortcomings: it only works at the domain level, so your blogspot or WordPress URL won't show up with anything. And if you do operate a site big enough to be noticed by Trends, you can't stop Google reporting it, and even using your Google Analytics data. Unless, of course, you are a Google-owned site; in which case, no one else gets to know your business.

Meanwhile, congratulations to Seth Wagoner and the Interclue team in Christchurch. Their "Personal Link Preview Multitool" is a prominently-promoted add-on for the Firefox 3.0 download. It's pretty cool too.

And a gripe. A little belatedly (but in time with the rest of the world) I've fallen in love with MGMT, largely courtesy Hype Machine. I'm cool with keeping the handful of remixes and mash-ups I downloaded via Hype Machine, but it's only decent to buy the actual album, Oracular Spectacular.

But where? I'm pretty much on strike with the iTunes Store unless it's iTunes Plus (ie: it's on EMI or an indie label) -- at 128k the file quality's just not good enough, and aren't we over DRM yet? Digirama is even worse: they only have the album as 128k WMA files I can't even play. Emusic has only one early indie EP, which I have purchased. (BTW, if you feel like joining Emusic, let me know -- I'd get free downloads for recommending you, and I wouldn't mind some of them.)

This isn't the fault of either service: it's because Sony BMG isn't allowing a high-quality non-DRM version to be sold via download -- except on Amazon, whose MP3 store isn't available in New Zealand, and likely won't be until the end of the year.

Yes, I could actually go to a record shop and pay 50% extra for a CD, but in 2008 I shouldn't have to burn fossil fuel to buy buts. If they can do it with one large digital retailer in a few large territories, why not just make the change, and stop making the customer the meat in the sandwich in a political battle with iTunes?

PS: In this week's Media7, we're talking about the BSA, with a panel comprised of Lyndsay Freer and Oliver Driver (who have respective, and quite separate, beefs with the regulator) and the BSA chief executive Dominic Sheehan. If you'd like to join us for the recording, at The Classic early tomorrow evening, hit "reply" and let me know.

PPS: I didn't get Hadyn Green's guest post about the unresolved matters the the England rugby tourists leave behind until after I sent out this morning's email, but I've posted it today as a matter of currency.

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Travelling Gravely | Jun 20, 2008 10:41

I often use Auckland Co-op Taxis' voice prompt system to call a cab from home. It's quicker and, it would seem, no less reliable than talking to a human. The system is now even sophisticated enough that you can use it to forward book a taxi.

Now here's the thing: I had assumed that when you booked a taxi in advance, it would turn up at about that time. I didn't expect to be standing on the street outside my house 25 minutes after the specified time wondering whether I was going to make my 9am flight.

Actually, I strongly suspected I wouldn't make the flight. I had called the Co-op operator who told me that they didn't have a car for me. When I explained I'd booked at that time not just for a laugh, but because I needed to catch a flight to Wellington, she switched me to the travel list -- as opposed to the "whenever you're free" list -- but it still took another quarter of an hour for a car to turn up. A further, major complication was the news from the operator that there were 22 minor accidents between us and the airport.

My driver certainly did his best for me, at one point inviting the ire of other road users by barrelling up the median strip of Mt Albert Road. We even tried a detour via Hillsborough Road, but it seemed that for several kilometres around the entrance to the south-western motorway, all the streets were gridlocked. Thousands of Aucklanders, and their kids, crawling along in resignation.

In the end, what can be a half-hour journey took 70 minutes and cost $90. Fortunately, I the person I was meeting in Wellington phoned through while I was still in traffic hell and managed to get me a new seat on the 10.30: the last seat on the plane, as it turned out -- and that was before the 10am to Wellington on Qantas was cancelled. Lord knows when those people got where they were going.

Along the way, I was a captive listener to Newstalk ZB: Hosking's brisk, breezy breakfast style and unabashed way with the ad-libs for advertisers; Hawkesby's mannered newsreading style. And then the talkback. Kerre Woodham must struggle to contain herself sometimes. The talk all morning had been of crime and South Auckland, and her first caller was a cracker: he demanded "zero tolerance" policing, which, he explained, meant that the police should subdue, handcuff and arrest anyone who was who did not "respect" them. "We don't have enough respect for authority in this country," he raged.

He did make an exception for Bruce Emery, who, despite having allegedly pursued and fatally stabbed a young man, warranted only sympathy and something approaching an apology from the police for wasting his time. You can read much more of this in the fetid depths of the Herald's 'Your Views' column, which has roiled all week with the latent sadism of the good folk of suburbia.

Actually, scratch the "latent" part. Over at Blogging it Real, dc_red notes the guy who thinks torture and fatal beatings in prison is the answer. On this page of Your Views, Lou from Rangiora proposes that anyone sentenced to five years or more in jail should be castrated. While here, Otto of Pt England takes a more moderate view: criminals should only be put "on crutches for life". Andy from Wellington calls for the government to "introduce reproduction licenses for those who want to have kids. This is to stop patently incompetent people from having children." Frequent admiration is expressed for the way they do things in Singapore and Saudi Arabia. And, yup, here's someone who wants the state to amputate the hands of thieves and taggers.

As my producer, Phil Wallington, noted, there seems to be quite a groundswell for sharia law in New Zealand.

(On a related note, I've posted all the links to this week's Media7 programme about perceptions of policing and crime here in the discussion thread that's been going on all week. It was a very useful panel discussion.)

Anyway, so I eventually made my meeting in Wellington and repaired thereafter to the Quest on Gilmer. I've promised the Wellingtonista a proper review, so suffice to say that Wellington's newest apartment hotel does not look like the pictures on its website, and if that's four-star accommodation then I'm Richie McCaw.

The evening was passed most pleasantly Chez Che, or, rather Che and Mary's inner-city pad, where the big man fed us pork belly, polenta and sauerkraut.

After a visit to Scoop in the morning, I hailed one of Wellington's Green Cabs to the airport. The driver was most felicitous, and called through to Auckland to arrange a pickup. I like the Green Cabs (comfortable, well-priced, quiet, low-emission), but, as the Wellingtonista have discovered, certain competing firms don't.

While we're on the social diary tip, shout-outs to Matt Nippert and Michelle Lafferty for a wonderfully warm and funny wedding last Saturday, and to my mate Andy for an excellent birthday party the night before, which involved a trip a few doors down to the Backbeat bar to hear Jed Town's new band, in which a stellar lineup (Jed and Matthew Heine on guitars, Gary Sullivan on drums, Tom Ludvigson on keys and Chris Orange on bass) plays Jed's back catalogue. I missed my earplugs a bit, but particularly liked the lurching funk of 'Backbeat', 'What's Going On' (where Heine's guitar part was gorgeous), 'Helter Skelter', and the finale, where Orange belted out 'Never Been to Borstal'. Choice.

Elsewhere, Poneke greets the solstice and Keri Hulme chimes in nicely, Andrew Clifford has an interesting post on Firefox's world-record bid for downloads, Chris Bourke pays tribute to Sam Freedman, "New Zealand's Irving Berlin" and the author of such standards as 'Haere Mai (Everything is Ka Pai)', who passed away this week at the age of 96, and my boy Leo has been having tons of fun with the Spore Creature Creator. Can't wait to see him play the full game, actually. But that will mean getting the kids' PC fixed again. Why is it that the only machine capable of reliably running Windows in our house is my iMac?

PS: The Dunedin Public Address readers' meet-up has been set down for 5.30 Wednesday, July 2 at the Craft Bar in the Octagon. Let Grant McDougall know if you'd like to go along: he's krautrockboy@hotmail.com .

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Tragedy into Crisis? | Jun 17, 2008 09:35

I wasn't there, but I suspect a gambling god could run yesterday's dreadful events in a Manukau car park over and again and fail to produce something as heart-rending as what is described in the Herald's report.

A failed purse-snatching, a woman who wouldn't let go, a 4WD suddenly a weapon, a child left standing in a void, watching and screaming. His mother has now died. It is horrible.

Michael Laws might have declared on Sunday that "South Auckland is the badlands of New Zealand … not a place that you choose to live. It is a place that you end up," but most days Manukau City mall sees no more than the orderly consumer activity that takes place at any other mall in the country.

Three bungled, callous crimes in little over a week in a city nearly the size of Christchurch were always going to be grimly greeted as a "wave", but something else has bloomed since the first of them. The police's apparently inexplicable failure to render timely aid to Navtej Singh as he lay fatally wounded on the floor of his liquor store has moved the usual suspects -- Laws, Garth George, Jim Hopkins -- to announce the constitutional cowardice of the police.

It was left to Rosemary Mcleod in the Star Times to sing out of key:

… the real blame for Mr Singh's death lies with whoever cold-bloodedly shot him, not with the police. Focusing on what the police did is a distraction, the kind of distraction we go in for in this country, as if the police have to not only do their job, but compensate for the harm done by criminals as they go about it. We turn our attention invariably to them, holding up high expectations, while for criminals we make nothing but excuses. There will be people who by now half believe that the police and ambulance services caused Mr Singh's death, then, not the robbers at all. That's how we think here. I'm not sure why.

It may just be because a couple of years' worth of indictments of the force -- some of them starkly contradictory -- came to a head in Manurewa that night.

The three recent failed prosecutions -- one undone by a family conspiracy of silence, one by compelling medical evidence, and one undoubtedly by the stupidity of the Sensible Sentencing Trust.

The over-reach of the "terror raids", the discomforting return from history of police rape allegations, the confusion of the stolen war medals, even -- if you're Jim Hopkins or Stephen Franks -- corruption implicit in the failure to find a criminal, or even a crime, in the matter of Don Brash's emails.

They have all gone into what is, if not a crisis amongst the police, then at least a crisis of confidence amongst those who comment on them.

That's what we're looking at in Media7 this week: have the police lost the PR battle? Why? Can they recover? How? Has something happened that was not triggered by the waterfront strike in the 50s, the fabrication of evidence in the Crewe murders and the brutality of the Springbok Tour?

Our panel for tonight's recording is Phil Kitchin, the man who opened the lid on the festering secrets around Louise Nicholas; Dominic Andrae, a longtime police reporter and now academic; and former policeman Graham Bell.

If you'd like to join us (with a friend, if you like) at tonight's recording at The Classic in Queen Street, hit the "Reply" button below and let me know asap. If you can't join us, I'd like to hear your thoughts. Data and experience are, as ever, particularly welcome.

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