Mike Johnson: Assistant Police Commissioner on the Government cracking down on street racing

Drivers who participate in street races will have their vehicles destroyed or forfeited in the majority of cases under new legislation announced by the Government today.

On Sunday, Transport Minister Chris Bishop said the current penalties “aren’t strong enough to deter this appalling behaviour”. He said police reporting found the frequency of anti-social road events was increasing and “enough is enough”.

Presumptive sentences are coming, meaning more power for the police to monitor and close areas like roads.

Assistant Police Commissioner Mike Johnson talks to Mike Hosking about the crackdown.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Another crackdown on the boy raised. His presumptive sentences are coming,

(00:02):
meaning automatic crushing. More powerful the police to monitor and
close areas like roads. You're pinged if you run or
fail to identify. Assistant Police Commissioner Mike Johnson with US Mike,
very good morning to you, morning, Mike. How real Is
the boy raise a problem? Or is this just a
Sunday headline for a government?

Speaker 2 (00:19):
No, not at all. Our staff are seeing this most
weekends or every other weekend around the country. You do
read about it gathers a lot of a lot of attention.
I suppose we had a lot of calls about it.
It disturbs the public, and there is absolutely a safety
aspect to this.

Speaker 1 (00:38):
Is this hard core or just a collection of buffoons
who were bored and if you told them not to
do it again, they probably wouldn't.

Speaker 2 (00:46):
Mike. I think that's a very good question. It's a
mixture of both. We certainly see hardcore organized events which
react badly as the way I'll put it, or illegally
when our staff turn up and look to disperse them.

Speaker 1 (01:04):
Is it a laws thing, in other words, you're getting
what you want? Or is it a resource thing? Even
if you had the laws, you don't have the people.

Speaker 2 (01:11):
No, we believe we can do this with the people
we've got. We're already sending staff and to these events
in sufficient numbers. We're always looking to plan, but the
nature of these things is the people organizing them are
trying to keep them out of our eye so that
we can't organize a response.

Speaker 1 (01:30):
So that was my next question. How much of what
you do is anticipatory versus you having to go afterwards
and clean up because you didn't know.

Speaker 2 (01:38):
It's a mix of both. When we hear about these
we attend obviously, and they usually Friday Saturday nights to
be honest, or public holidays, as we've seen in a
number that have been advertised. Get where we're aware of them,
we put an operation into effect. We had one of
those last weekend in the Belly and Wire Wrapper, which

(01:58):
was particularly effective. But we try to get on the
front foot mic as you'd expect, but there's times where
we've got to react and respond a.

Speaker 1 (02:06):
Lot of people texting Section one two nine of the
sentencing Actors. The problem it's not you guys rounding them up,
it's the judges letting them out. Is that fair?

Speaker 2 (02:14):
Look that's a matter for the courts. Were really what
I can say is we are please to have some
more tools than the toolkit to deal with this issue
that's growing from our perspective.

Speaker 1 (02:25):
Good stuff, go well with it. Mike Johnson, who's the
Assistant Police Commissioner.

Speaker 2 (02:29):
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