McSkimming’s and the fallacy of a ‘few bad apples’ in the NZ Police

Police watchdog scathing of former top cop Andrew Coster on McSkimming case

Other allegations about Jevon McSkimming include he misused a police credit card, made use of police property to further a sexual relationship, and threatened to provide an intimate visual recording to other people if the woman made a complaint about him

Jesus wept, it just gets worse…

Former top cop Jevon McSkimming admits having child exploitation, bestiality images on work devices

…and worse…

Damning report into police ‘rot’ leaves uphill battle to restore trust

During his nearly five-year stint as police commissioner, Andrew Coster made much of the importance of policing by consent.

“We rely on the support of most of the community to be successful, and that depends on the way we operate and on the extent to which people feel that they can trust us and that what we’re doing is appropriate,” Coster told E-Tangata in a 2023 interview, having previously sparred with opposition MPs in defence of the concept.

It is darkly ironic, then, that Coster’s tenure will now be defined by the serious damage that he and his leadership team have done to public trust in NZ Police, after a scathing report into how the force handled claims of sexual offending levelled against disgraced former deputy commissioner Jevon McSkimming.

When the alleged victim lodged three formal complaints through an online reporting portal in April 2024, she would have hoped to have her concerns taken seriously and investigated.

Instead, as the Independent Police Conduct Authority concluded, the police response was “characterised by inaction and an unquestioning acceptance of Mr McSkimming’s narrative of events” – that of a consensual affair that had ended badly and led to a campaign of harassment against him.

Not only were the woman’s allegations not properly investigated, she was herself arrested and charged with violating the Harmful Digital Communications Act, with the case only dropped in September this year.

Among those criticised by the Police Conduct Authority is Coster, who failed to disclose his knowledge of McSkimming’s relationship with the woman and the misconduct allegations when part of a panel that ultimately appointed him as a statutory deputy commissioner in 2023.

After a senior officer raised concerns in September 2024 about the failure to investigate the allegations against McSkimming through the usual police complaints process, Coster brushed them aside as anonymous and “sent from a variety of email addresses with made-up names”.

…Coster hid details of all of this from Mark Mitchell the Police Minister FFS!

McSkimming’s bestiality and child sex porn was only exposed after he was investigated for the complaint made against him, if there had been no investigation, that may never have come to light.

The cover up and the bewildering attempt to prosecute the woman who made the complaints just compound this nightmare.

The current move now is to claim, ‘a few bad apples’, but with a wider investigation of police using work devices to watch porn alongside the case of police falsifying breath tests…

Extent of police falsifying breath tests ‘unfathomable’ – employment lawyer

One of New Zealand’s leading employment lawyers says she’s never seen anything on the same scale as the investigation into 120 police officers who were involved in falsifying alcohol breath tests across the country.

Employment lawyer Barbara Buckett says the number of staff and the fact it occurred across the country points to wider problems within the organisation.

“There must be something there that police have to look to in terms of its own leadership and its own culture within the organisation, because it needs to ask some hard questions about accountability, consistency and environment which contributed to the behavior, if it’s to this extent.

“That’s what seems to be unfathomable, the number and the geographical spread of it.”

RNZ earlier revealed about 120 staff were under investigation after 30,000 alcohol breath tests were “falsely or erroneously recorded”.

…there is a real problem inside the NZ Police.

We have pretended for a very longtime that there was no corruption in our Police Force, that illusion has been shattered this week.

I have seen Police corruption in this country, time and time and time again but even I’m surprised by the scale of this.

The danger is that we now have Cartel linked organised crime in NZ and they specialise in blackmail and using these very types of abuses of power to gain leverage over Police and Detectives.

The NZ Police force grew out of the Mounted Constabulary, their job was to protect white settlers by beating the snot out of Māori at the edge of the settlement. NZ has always turned a blind eye to heavy handed police tactics because these heavy handed police tactics kept them safe at night, but with so little in the way of genuine oversight over the cops, corruption quickly follows.

The IPCA is a joke, it is barely any scrutiny and the only reason this has exploded in the way  that it has is because the cover up is so extreme there is no way for even the IPCA to fuck it up.

Real independent oversight with powers of investigation is way over due.

This is a reckoning.

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