New footage obtained by 1 NEWS shows police visiting a Wellington home to accuse the occupants of distributing anti-Muslim material, following complaints from the public.
The clip, which comes as police crackdown on offensive material in the wake of Christchurch terror attack, shows two officers questioning a man and his mother about the religious flyers.
The material claims Islam is a "deception with a hidden agenda", that the Quran calls Muslims to "kill the unbeliever" and that there is a campaign to "infiltrate and subject New Zealand to sharia law".
The officers are filmed admitting no crime or offence has been committed and at one point ask the woman what she "stand[s] for". An officer goes on explain a complaint had been laid and that "people are concerned about this kind of thing".
The pair do not admit to distributing the material but do engage the officers, defending free speech, before slamming the door and advising them to come back with a warrant.
Police wouldn’t comment on the specific case today but the Deputy Commissioner for District Operations, John Tims, told 1 NEWS they have been "following up" on reports from the public.
"We've got some experts, high tech crime, absolute experts in their field who are looking at social media, trying to identify who those people are that are concerning to us," he says.
'We've got experts for that, they've very, very clever people, so they're doing exactly what we need them to do and we can reassure the community of New Zealand that we're doing everything we can."
The president of the New Zealand Muslim Association, Ikhlaq Kashkari, found the leaflet drop concerning.
"It's important to ensure that people don't take advantage of our freedom of speech and use that to incite hatred and violence for a community," he says.
"The Quran very clearly states if you kill one human being, you kill the whole of humanity, if you save one human being, you save the whole of humanity, it doesn't talk about Muslims or non-Muslims so that statement is completely incorrect and taken out of context."
AUT history professor and free speech expert Paul Moon says there’s currently no specific hate speech legislation in New Zealand but police can investigate under the Human Rights Act.
"The flyers clearly attack a religion, a religion which in New Zealand most members belong to a narrow range of ethnic groups, so I think you could argue that while it's an attack against some ideas and beliefs, it's really a fig leaf to disguise the fact that this is more racist in intent," he says.
While a Government review into hate speech legislation is currently underway, Mr Moon believes giving police more power would be dangerous.
"There are huge risks if the state suddenly says we can control what you say, because history is absolutely clear on this, that if the state starts to control speech - what they call hate speech or bad speech or whatever - those sentiments behind that speech don’t go away," he says.
"They just get driven underground, they mutate, they fester. It's not a good way of dealing with it at all, and every example in history where governments have tried to legislate speech have ended up very badly."
The two people shown in the video did not respond to requests for an interview. A person approached at their home in Porirua declined to comment.
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