Police are to link with forces in New Zealand and Japan, who will face the potential millennium bug chaos a few hours before the SAR, in an effort to establish an early-warning system. And a team of 'runners' and vehicles will be placed on stand-by to pass information between police stations in the event of a force-wide computer shutdown. The measures, announced yesterday, are among a raft of Y2K preparations being made by police for New Year's Eve and New Year's Day. Assistant Commissioner Peter Halliday said the force would exchange computer hardware and software information with police forces from Wellington and Tokyo. The aim was to obtain an early warning of possible Y2K-related problems. He said enough runners and vehicles had been reserved to carry messages within the force if communication systems failed. The force has said 95 per cent of its 14,000 uniformed officers will be on duty for the millennium changeover. The public will be able to make reports at police stations or deal directly with beat officers if the 999 hotline fails. But Mr Halliday said all mission-critical systems had been made Y2K compliant by the end of June and the force, which had spent $40 million to rectify any problems, passed the Y2K-sensitive date of September 9 without trouble. 'We face December 31 with confidence.' Mr Halliday said any Y2K-related computer failure was expected to be fixed within hours. He said a serious but non-Y2K-related system problem had occurred at one of the three command and control centres several months ago and it took just two hours to fix.