A video recorded at the Target Road Primary school fair shows police cars doing figure eights and ‘doughnuts’ on the North Shore school’s grass.
While the idea of cops providing a thrill for the local kids may seem like good community fun to some, David McGregor who recorded the video on his mobile phone says he was pretty upset by the display.
For a small donation, officers took kids for a ride. At one point, the cars were sliding right up alongside a bouncy castle.
Mr McGregor says he was outraged.
“When I realised they were offering rides to the kids I found it quite unsettling, because of the proximity of the kids and in the field and having no barriers, no safety equipment – it just struck me as being a little reckless.”
Mr McGregor says he thinks it was incredibly poor judgement on behalf of the police and the school.
“Although it looked like loads of fun, anything could have happened.”
North Shore Area Commander, Inspector Les Paterson, says the police attend school fairs when requested – around two or three times a year.
Mr Paterson says the driving in the footage was neither dangerous, nor unsafe.
“We’ve spoken to the officers and they say they weren’t driving at a dangerous speed,” he says.
Mr Paterson denies any comparison to boyracers.
“I didn’t actually see them doing any doughnuts, but I guess we leave these things up to the individual discretion of the officers – they’re quite insistent that they did not drive in a dangerous manner,” he says.
Mr McGregor argues the driving was not safe, and says he expressed that view to one of the organisers.
“I was asked to keep a lid on it and not be a spoil sport.”
Mr Paterson did not condone the officers’ driving and says he will be investigating further.
“I’ll be having someone carefully analyse the footage,” he says.
The incident happened in November 2008, but Mr McGregor says he only learnt how to upload pictures from his phone recently – so he posted the footage on YouTube and Tweeted about it.
He says some of the comments have been particularly harsh.
“The response has been pretty dramatic, I’ve had to turn the comments off on YouTube because they’re quite unpleasant,” he says.
Mr McGregor says he fully supports the police – but the incident was not properly managed.
“If there is some lessons to be learned from this around safety we will learn those and, I’m sure, be very receptive to implementing them,” says Mr Paterson.