Vanessa Potini, a mother from Red Hill near Papakura, is spitting fire after armed cops allegedly turned her peaceful dinner prep into a scene right out of an action movie, with guns pointed at her terrified children.
The chaos erupted yesterday afternoon on Game Place, when the screech of tyres announced the arrival of the law.
Potini, expecting perhaps a fender bender, was met instead with a full-blown armed police squad aiming their weapons directly at her.
With no explanation given, she and her friend were commanded to exit with hands raised, thrusting them into a bewildering nightmare.
As police dogs added their barks to the cacophony, officers demanded through loudspeakers that the house surrender, accusing them of ‘mucking around’.
Potini, rousing her two daughters and stepping outside, found herself and her family at gunpoint, treated as criminals in their own home.
The situation escalated as Potini, protesting their innocence, was slapped with handcuffs for disorderly behaviour, while her friend was tackled and cuffed for resisting. Police, on a hunt for a supposed armed individual, ransacked her home, leaving chaos in their wake.
The police, sticking to their guns, claimed the raid was in pursuit of a dangerous individual believed to be hiding out with a firearm.
Despite the family’s cooperation hitting a snag, no arrests were made, leaving the Potini whanau traumatised but free.
Potini recounted the horror of being handcuffed for hours, her 14-year-old daughter in tears, witnessing a nightmarish scene she’d only ever imagined in movies.
The search left their home in shambles, with insulation from the roof scattered everywhere as cops dug around for the elusive suspect.
Despite turning their home upside down, police came up empty-handed, the suspect a ghost.
Potini and her family, treated like characters in a crime saga, were left to pick up the pieces of their disrupted lives.
Outraged and determined, Potini vows to fight back against what she sees as a grave injustice.
“My daughter has never seen a gun in her life, and to go around pointing guns at kids – I’m very disgusted with that,” she told the NZ Herald.
The police, for their part, defended their actions as necessary precautions in potentially dangerous situations, with the search for the armed individual still ongoing.
