I see NZ Police have missed the legal deadline for this request. I hope you will complain to the Ombudsman about this unacceptable and unlawful behaviour.

Basically just telling you "we haven't finished yet" isn't really a very informative response to the question of "why isn't this finished yet?"

This is interesting. NZ Police's response to your OIA request was over two weeks unlawfully overdue, and in their response instead of providing you with copies of the documents you have requested they provided you with links to where the have been published on the NZ Police website.

I receive automated notifications when new content is published on that section of their website, and I can see that NZ Police published five new documents on the same day as they responded to your request:

- Crash scene photography
- Clandestine drug laboratories
- Categories of surveillance with a device
- Surveillance device warrants
- Agencies investigating incidents

The "Police Manual Chapters" page says "The current policies are published on this website and are proactively disclosed by Police to provide transparency and openness". However, I see that three of these five documents were requested by you under the OIA here on FYI (and all of them were referred to in NZ Police's response).

I see NZ Police has chosen to redact some information from the "Clandestine drug laboratories" document that you requested, stating on the page they have linked you to that "Some parts of this chapter have been considered not appropriate for release and, if requested, would be withheld under the Official Information Act 1982". However, because you already requested this information under the OIA, you should already have standing if you would like to complain to the Ombudsman about this decision to withhold information.

Over the past several months, NZ Police have often added Police Manual chapters to this section of their website shortly following them being released under the OIA. But in this case it appears as though NZ Police may have unlawfully delayed their response to your OIA request so they could appear to have proactively published these documents first.

If you decide to lay a complaint to the Ombudsman regarding the unlawful delay, you may want to also bring their attention to this aspect of NZ Police's response.

Hmm, in their response NZ Police say that the "Categories of surveillance with a device" and "Surveillance device warrants" chapters were last updated in 2018, and next due to be reviewed in 2021 - two years ago.

However, NZ Police has released two different versions of the "Surveillance device warrants" chapter under the OIA, one was extracted on 12 July 2021 and the other was released on 2 November 2022.

This implies to me that this chapter was revised between July 2021 and November 2022, but NZ Police's claim in their response to your request that the current version of this chapter came into effect on 2 October 2018 is inconsistent with that information.

Unfortunately, the two versions were released in slightly different formats that makes it difficult to tell exactly what has and hasn't changed. I reviewed them thoroughly for differences when I added the latest document to policepolicy.nz but don't have a note of what was changed.

Having reviewed them manually again today, admittedly less thoroughly, the only difference I found was that on page 12, the acronym "TSU" has been changed to "TOG". Perhaps Police did not consider this minor change to count as a new version of this policy.

As I understand it, "TSU" is an acronym for "Technical Support Unit" and "TOG" is an acronym for "Technical Operations Group". It seems likely for me that this is essentially the same group within Police, but its name changed and the policy was updated to reflect that.