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Protest singer’s court victory angers police
By SANDRA COX - The Press | Saturday, 5 May 2007
A West Coast man who staged a singing protest outside a Greymouth policewoman’s house has won his appeal to New Zealand’s highest court.
The majority Supreme Court decision overturning the disorderly-behaviour conviction of Allistair Brooker has angered the Police Association, which says it opens the way for officers to be harassed in their own homes.
But civil rights lawyers say it is an important reinforcement of free expression under the Bill of Rights and could prevent disorderly behaviour being used as a “flag of convenience” by the police.
Brooker, who represented himself in the court battles but received legal help at the Supreme Court, was reluctant to say much on his victory yesterday.
At his Rutherglen house, near Greymouth, he said the decision showed individuals could still make a difference.
Brooker staged his protest outside Constable Fiona Croft’s home on the morning of March 18, 2003, after objecting to her executing a late-night search warrant at his house.
He knocked on her door to make sure she was home, knowing she had been on duty the previous night.
When told to “p… off”, he went to the grass verge outside her house and played a guitar and sang a song he had composed himself.
It had lyrics such as “You just don’t know when to quit – no more 3am visits, Fiona”.
He held a placard that read: “Stop the Bogus Warrants.”
Brooker was arrested and charged with loitering with intent to intimidate. The charge was amended to disorderly behaviour by a judge.
Brooker was convicted in the Greymouth District Court and fined $300. The High Court and the Court of Appeal upheld the conviction.
But in the Supreme Court’s majority decision, Chief Justice Dame Sian Elias found the courts had applied the wrong standard for disorderly behaviour and did not consider the key question of whether Brooker had disrupted public order.
She said freedom of speech should be restricted for public order reasons “only when there is a clear danger of disruption rising far above annoyance”.
In Brooker’s case, she said, the protest did not last long, occurred in the daytime, and the song was delivered in a “normal singing voice”, without alarming or threatening messages.
Police Association president Greg O’Connor said yesterday the decision was ludicrous.
He said it would invite people to stand and yell outside officers’ homes, making them vulnerable, especially in small towns.
Police officers were now asking how Supreme Court judges would react if similar protests happened outside their homes by people they had sentenced, he said.
“Supreme Court judges, fortunately for them, tend to live behind nice big walls in leafy suburbs, and police officers are encouraged to live in the communities they police,” O’Connor said.
“Supreme Court judges would be very quickly demanding action if people they had sentenced started protesting outside their houses.”
Brooker’s wife, Sheryl, said the saga had been stressful on them and left her husband feeling he was unemployable.
“It’s been a challenge. There are costs that you end up paying when you stand up to continued (police) harassment and the view that some people make of us in the community,” she said.
“The important thing was for us to try to do things lawfully and Al believed it was his lawful right (to protest).
“When the proper channels fail you, what else can you do but protest?”
Wellington barrister and Council for Civil Liberties chairman Michael Bott said the case was a turning point in the courts’ appreciation of the Bill of Rights.
Often people were arrested with no proof that public order was being disturbed, but rather because it was causing an inconvenience to the police, he said.
Council of Civil Liberties president Tony Ellis said it was a remarkable triumph of justice that a self-represented person could go before the highest court in the land and get a decision that he had been convicted improperly.