Sent by a reader, edited by moderator N.
More than 99,000 dog bites in ten years (WTF)
Dog bites are causing increasing numbers of people to be hospitalised every year, according to a new study.
More than 99,000 dog bites were reported in New Zealand in the last 10 years, according to data released at the New Zealand Association of Plastic Surgeons annual scientific meeting. http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=11490903
Correction: A French and a British tourist receive official NZ welcome
Two male tourists were attacked at the Vagabond Backpackers Hostel in Christchurch.
Blood covers the driveway at a central Christchurch backpackers where two tourists were attacked by a group of people.
The tourists were attacked by up to eight people in the driveway of the Vagabond Backpacker Hostel on Worcester St between 2.30am and 2.45am on Saturday.
Both men have been admitted to hospital. One suffered a broken jaw, while the other has serious eye injuries.
The tourists were believed to be from France.
A Belgian tourist who is staying at the hostel, said he was asleep last night during the attack but had heard what happened from other backpackers.
He said a French man had been waiting for a taxi outside the hostel when a group of locals walked past.
“The guy was getting harassed and yelled and his mates came out [of the hostel]. They tried to help him, but I think they didn’t helped.
“There was a lot of blood this morning.”
Another French tourist said “a lot of people were talking about it this morning” at the hostel.
It is not known what nationality the other hospitalised tourist was. http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/crime/70746770/tourists-assaulted-by-up-to-eight-people-at-backpackers
Freedom campers terrorised at Caroline Bay, Timaru
Two French tourists have been harassed by strangers as they slept in their campervan at Caroline Bay.
Francois* and Fanny* spent eight months travelling around Australia without incident. They arrived in Queenstown on Tuesday and stopped in Invercargill and Dunedin before making their way up to Timaru on Saturday. Everything went smoothly until they parked their campervan at the Timaru freedom camping spot overnight on Sunday.
“Only here we have a problem,” Fanny said.
At 3.45am they were rudely woken by someone opening the side door of their campervan and screaming at them to wake up. http://www.stuff.co.nz/timaru-herald/news/70550344/freedom-campers-terrorised-in-caroline-bay-timaru
Police car rolls after third car chase of the night in Northland
Three police chases in Northland ended with one patrol car sliding off the road and rolling, police said.
Police said the first chase began at 12.25am on Sunday when a car failed to stop for officers on Western Hills Drive in Whangarei.
The chase was abandoned for safety reasons but police began chasing the car again after it was spotted in Hikurangi, 20 minutes north of Whangarei.
The driver fled on foot at Waiomio Rd, 36km north of Hikurangi, but he was soon located by a police dog handler.
At 1.10am, there was another pursuit of a car stolen from Marsden Point, on the coast south of Whangarei.
The third dramatic chase occurred about 2.20am when an officer from Dargaville, who had been assisting with the second chase, spotted a 4WD vehicle towing a trailer without tail lights. http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/70750597/police-vehicle-rolls-after-third-car-chase-of-the-night-in-northland
Credit: MAARTEN HOLL/The Dominion Post. The new police car came to an early end as the driver wrapped it around a streetlight in central Wellington August 2009. Figures issued to The Dominion Post under the Official Information Act show that 734 police cars crashed in 2009, including 61 that crashed while pursuing speeding vehicles… About 100 police cars were written off in the five years to January 2010 at a cost of more than $3 million.
A death a day from police chases
In the U.S., more than 5,000 bystanders and passengers have been killed in police car chases since 1979, and tens of thousands of others were injured as officers repeatedly pursued drivers at high speeds and in hazardous conditions, often for minor infractions, a USA TODAY analysis shows.
“The bystanders and the passengers in chased cars account for nearly half of all people killed in police pursuits from 1979 through 2013, USA TODAY found. Most bystanders were killed in their own cars by a fleeing driver.”
In the state of Arizona [pop: ~ 6.8 million,] some 354 people were killed in police chases between 1979 and 2013, about 3 percent of the 11,506 deaths nationally, according to the report.
Based on information acquired from various sources, the blog moderators believe that the rate of kill in police chases is probably higher in New Zealand than in the U.S.
Do the authorities cook the casualty figures?
At least 11,506 people, including 6,300 fleeing suspects, were killed in police chases from 1979 through 2013, most recent year for which [National Highway Traffic Safety Administration] NHTSA records are available. That’s an average of 329 a year — nearly one person a day.
But those figures likely understate the actual death toll because NHTSA uses police reports to determine if a crash was chase-related, and some reports do not disclose that a chase occurred.
Kansas, Michigan and Minnesota state records all show more chase-related deaths than NHTSA shows for those states.
“It’s an embarrassment,” said Geoffrey Alpert of the University of South Carolina, a leading researcher on police pursuits who has done numerous Justice Department studies. NHTSA records “are the only national database we have on these fatalities, and it’s been consistently wrong.”
The number of innocent bystanders killed is impossible to pinpoint because hundreds of NHTSA’s records fail to show whether a victim was killed in a car fleeing police or in a car that happened to be hit during a chase.
Analyzing each fatal crash, USA TODAY determined that at least 2,456 bystanders were killed, although the death toll could be as high as 2,750. The newspaper found that 55% of those killed were drivers fleeing police. They ranged from armed-robbery suspects to a 10-year-old boy chased as he drove a pick-up truck 85 mph on a county road before hitting a tree, killing himself and his 7-year-old passenger.
“Injuries are even harder to count because NHTSA keeps records of only fatal crashes,” said the report. http://www.azcentral.com/longform/news/2015/07/30/police-pursuits-fatal-injuries/30187827/
Zombie Democracy - Apartheid Fort NZ 