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Minutes wasn’t going to be good enough.

Wormald: Yes.

Questions about the landing of the helicopter in the courtyard — sending stones rattling off cars and mansion windows — and officers smashing their way into the bedrrooms, with the likelihood these would have alerted the mansion’s residents, didn’t budge Wormald.

“What we did proved successful,” he said. The proof was the apparent lack of destroyed evidence and the abandonment of “two destruction devices we found in his bedroom . . . when he fled”. The devices he referred to were an iPhone and a laptop.

“But they were not destruction devices were they?” said Davison.

“What did you expect?” responded Wormald. “A box with a red button on it?”

Then Davison asked about the iPhone left in Finn Batato’s pocket for 40 minutes after the raid: “So the potential destruction device had been left in his possession?”

“That’s no reflection on the plan that we had,” said Wormald. “The plan was to ensure they were all secured. It just happens to be something which probably shouldn’t have happened at the time.”

Davison challenged Wormald over the procedure used to activate the STG’s involvement. According to the police processes, the use of the STG was to be authorised by the Commissioner of Police, Peter Marshall, one of the Deputy Commissioners, or the then-Assistant Commissioner (Operations) Nick Perry. But the officer who had signed the document authorising the use of the STG was Assistant Commissioner (Investigations) Malcolm Burgess — also the head of the Organised and Financial Crime Agency of New Zealand (OFCANZ), the very unit seeking permission to use the STG.

“If Ofcanz is making the request,” Davison asked, “it’s just going to come around in a big circle, isn’t it? He’s both the applicant and the approver, isn’t he?”

Wormald assured Davison it was a rigid process and “it wasn’t a signature he gave lightly”. He told the court he “suspected” the use of the STG was debated in police headquarters among the country’s most senior officers. As to why one of those people hadn’t signed it, in accordance with the procedure, Wormald described the police executive as a “flexible environment”.

No, he told the court, he didn’t actually look for Perry before asking his boss, Burgess, to sign it. However, of Burgess, he said: “He wouldn’t have signed it if he didn’t believe he was appropriately qualified or justified or sitting in the right chair to do it.” The police process document could be taken too literally, he said. It mattered little that

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