Police are congratulating themselves today after an 11-month investigation that resulted in the arrest of a man for threats made to contaminate baby formula with deadly poison 1080.
But they are also expressing disappointment in the public for remaining what police commissioner Mike Bush referred to as “too calm,” and not panicking.
Bush scolded the general populace at today’s press conference to announce the arrest, saying that if the public had panicked, been suspicious of people in their immediate environment, and had wildly hurled accusations at one another, police may have had “more to go on.”
“As it happened, information was quite scant for the first two months after we made the investigation public,” he told media, “which is obviously not what you want when you put this kind of thing out there.
“We think we made it quite clear, back in March, that this was a serious situation, that no one was safe, and that there was absolutely no cause to be calm. And yet for a long time the phones were dead.”
Detective Superintendent Andy Lovelock, who was present at the press conference with Bush today, said that it “must be emphasised” that “if the public doesn’t accuse anyone, doesn’t engage in the kind of hysterical witch-hunting you usually see with terrorist plots, then there’s going to be no one to investigate, now, is there?”
Lovelock noted that there were a “substantial number” of Muslims, hippies and “probably rogue scientists” in New Zealand, and that you “couldn’t tell me” that no neighbour of these individuals didn’t have a “sinking feeling” at one point or another.
A sinking feeling was “perfectly sufficient” to call 111, he insisted.
Despite a lack of frivolous leads, police were finally able to make an arrest today, and blamed the time it took squarely on the public’s “lack of cooperation” in “promoting a climate of hysteria.”
Asked if public accusations and witch-hunts may have led to the wrong individual being charged, Bush said it was ultimately immaterial.
“An arrest’s an arrest,” he said. “We’re not even sure we got the right man, anyway.”