Perspective with Heather du Plessis-Allan: Here's what the data from police move-on orders tells us

Have you seen the data from the first nine days of police using move-on orders?

Guess how many of the 29 people police moved on were homeless. Four. Four of them.

Four out of the 29 were homeless, which means 25 of them, the vast, vast, vast majority, had homes, or at least addresses, they could go and spend their day at instead.

So all of that angst about where we were going to move people to, all of that "you can't just move them on if you've got nowhere to move them to", was for nothing. Because the answer is: we do have somewhere to move them to. Their own homes.

Turns out this law is not as cruel and disgusting as the hand-wringers in the Greens and Labour said it was. Turns out the people being moved on were not all the vulnerable innocents they were portrayed as being.

Turns out, at least according to the data, most of the move-on orders were issued to people who were drunk, intimidating, threatening, disorderly or breaching the peace. Twenty-eight out of the 29 people moved on fell into those categories.

I could have predicted that for you.

And of the four who didn't have a home to go to, police did not lock them up. They did not treat them unkindly. In at least one case, they gave the person food and took them somewhere they could eat it.

Now, here's my question for you: how many of these people would have been locked up if it weren't for move-on orders?

Because that was the go-to option for police beforehand, wasn't it? If you were causing a ruckus somewhere in town and the cops came up to you and told you to move on, and you were in a mind to be a pain in the butt and refused to leave, instead continuing to make a nuisance of yourself, it was off to jail for you.

Now, instead of jail, it's a piece of paper telling you to jog on and, hopefully, acting as a lesser punishment that diffuses the situation.

If the hand-wringers really cared about these people as much as they say they do, they would support move-on orders. Because surely a little piece of paper is better than the alternative, which is jail.

Heather du Plessis-Allan is a journalist and radio broadcaster who hosts Newstalk ZB's weekday Drive-Time Show – where this article was sourced.