Heather du Plessis-Allan: The police are already stretched thin enough

Heather du Plessis-Allan Drive

I'm very much on the side of the cops over whether they should be pinging people for smoking in cars with kids.

You'll have caught up on this by now - we've found out police have not been enforcing the law since it was passed three years ago, they haven’t issued a single fine over it, and it's deliberate.
And the Police Union says the reason is because, frankly, cops are busy. And this is not a cop problem, this is a health problem.

I could not agree more. We know police can only do so much, so let's prioritise it. I would personally prefer they were preventing crimes, catching bad guys and putting them in jail, getting stolen stuff back, putting pressure on gangs and keeping our roads safe with booze buses and drug tests.
I could go on and on with my list of priorities for what I want the police to do, and I would go on for a very long time before my list ever hit - stopping stupid parents smoking in their cars with their kids inside.

How is that a police job?

Frankly, if parents are that dumb that they're hot-boxing a car with tobacco while their kids are inside, they're doing that at home as well.

Having the cops come round and give them a crack about the car thing might make the rest of us judgemental drivers feel better, but it’s not going to save the kids. They’re getting that smoke anyway from somewhere else.

This was always a dumb law, simply because it would take up a huge amount of resource for a cop to chase down a car over a ciggie when they could be using that time to prevent a crime from happening.
I actually think Mark Mitchell's done the wrong thing by stepping in and forcing the cops to start enforcing this. He knows they’re stretched already, he's just made that worse.

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