Assault:

• There were very few cases of assault heard during our survey. One which will become another statistic of 'street violence' was this:
• A seventeen year-old Maori girl was arrested by police for lightly kicking her boyfriend in the bottom as he was getting into a taxi. She was arrested and charged with assault. The next day she was convicted and fined.
• We have for some time been highly critical of the lack of interpreters in the courts, and our experience in the past weeks when very many non-Maori Polynesians have been appearing confirms this view. But one magistrate had a novel approach to the problem. He didn't bother to ensure that competent, paid, interpreters were present in his court, he did it another way:
• A Samoan was convicted and fined $5 for drunkenness. The next defendant was also a Samoan, but one who couldn't speak or understand English. The magistrate then called back the first Samoan and had him sworn in as an interpreter, after which his $5 fine was deleted for his services to the court.
• Another magistrate tackled the problem a different way. A Samoan defendant was charged with drunkenness. He could not understand English and as before, no interpreter was present. This magistrate, not bothering about the need for interpreters to be impartial, invited a Samoan police constable to act as interpreter, which he willingly did.

These cases are typical of dozens. In many cases non-Maori Polynesian defendants were remanded with re-porting clauses explained to them in English by the Magistrate. They were all liable to arrest if they did not report precisely as instructed, yet no-one bothered to ascertain whether or not they understood what those instructions were. We found that obvious difficulties in understanding English, and therefore the conduct of the hearing, were apparent in at least half of the Task Force arrest cases.