Police Commissioner Andrew Coster there was not widespread looting in areas affected by cyclone damage Photo: RNZ / Angus Dreaver
Police in cyclone-hit regions have an accurate picture of what is going on in the communities they are patrolling, Police Commissioner Andrew Coster says.
Prime Minister Chris Hipkins downplayed claims of a crime spike, despite road workers telling police they had guns pulled on them.
That was until he told a news conference on Tuesday that the information he had received from police was out-of-date.
The information was misrecorded, Coster told Checkpoint.
"It was a very unfortunate set of circumstances, we attended the incident on the night, the particular one where we provided incorrect information to the prime minister, but we didn't record it in the normal way."
Coster said he apologised to Hipkins and this apology was accepted.
"We need to do better than that and we will do better. We have absolutely had incidences of theft and burglary, we do not have widespread looting across the area.
"But absolutely, we've had incidents of despicable people taking advantage of the situation and we are actively dealing with those."
Residents of rural communities around Napier and Hastings told officials at a community meeting on Monday night that locals were scared, sleepless and armed.
Coster said he understood the community was scared and this was why there was a large deployment of police in the area.
It was a very large area affected by the events, he said.
"We are very active in those communities, we are establishing a 24/7 police base in the Bay View community, a mobile police base so that people can come and talk to us about things they're seeing, things that are concerning them."
He was "very pleased" with the work police had been doing in most places.
"I absolutely accept that observations about what was happening with crime was unhelpful for those communities."
Police superintendent Jeanette Park told Morning Report crime data was tracking the same as it was prior to the cyclone.
However, there had been a spike in reports of suspicious activity since the cyclone.
Officers on the ground were not telling a different story than what statistics showed, Coster said.
National Party police spokesperson Mark Mitchell said Coster made "a big error" in telling Hawke's Bay residents crime had not risen, he said.
"At the public meeting that I attended last night, they asked for a show of hands of people that had had some form of looting or intimidation or some type of incident and hadn't reported it, over a third of the people there put their hand up."
Mitchell claimed gangs had been very active in the region.
One woman at the community meeting said it was disconcerting patched gang members were walking up her street.
"A lot of them had established their own patrols and road blocks because they'd found that there was looting starting to happen, people coming onto their properties, the gangs were very active - they were terrified, the people in the Hawke's Bay are terrified of the gangs to the point in the meeting last night that they don't even want to mention who they are."
Mitchell said gang members did "not deserve the same consideration" as other members of the community and should not have been at the community meeting.
He had concerns people were arming themselves because "they shouldn't be in a position where they feel they have to take up arms to protect themselves and their families".
