Police commissioner and minister say no culture problems, despite IPCA report
Police Commissioner Richard Chambers has point blank denied any broader culture problems within the police while being questioned by Parliament’s justice select committee.
This stance appears to directly contradict the findings of a scathing Independent Police Conduct Authority report that found widespread failures within the police – specifically the previous executive – in its handling of allegations of sexual offending by former deputy commissioner Jevon McSkimming, which ultimately amounted to a cover-up.
The rejection of the report’s findings also came on the same day the woman who made those allegations – known publicly as Ms Z – told the NZ Herald she believed a wider inquiry into police culture was needed.
We never talk about what a fascist little police state NZ truly is.
The NZ Police grew out of the Mounted Constabulary who were a thug force put together to protect white settlers from unruly Māori at the edge of the settlement.
The unspoken deal was white settlers would turn a blind eye to their heavy handed tactics and that mentality has remained with a Police force with no true oversight.
We turn a blind eye to lots of things and hide that behind a laid back culture.
We never talk about the abuse of Māori and theft of their land.
We never talk about the cruelty NZ meted out to conscientious objectors during the war.
We never talk about the cruel laws against Unions and the police surveillance of Unionists, Communists and Leftists in NZ.
The NZ Police spied on ‘Newsquote’, The Vegetable Club, The Howard League for Penal Reform, The Esperanto Society, The Rationalist Society, The Council for Civil Liberties and the Nuclear Disarmament Movement.
We never, ever, ever talk about what a fascist little Police state NZ truly has been.
In 1943, NZs Ambassador to America, Sir George Laking, reflected on the surprising ability of the NZ Government to pass authoritarian powers against the citizens of NZ with little to no resistance from Kiwis by saying, “Much that was accomplished in those early years was possible only because of the absence of any detailed or sustained public interest in the issues”.
We have become experts in a hyper laid back culture of turning a blind eye.
Right now the NZ Police are gaining the powers of mass surveillance and there is no debate about that whatsoever…
Congestion charge bill passes: What does it mean for you?
A Government bill to bring in congestion charging passed its third reading in Parliament yesterday. Why is it happening – and how much could drivers end up paying?
Congestion pricing, or as it’s now often called, time-of-use charging, has been floated and debated for years between multiple governments.
If implemented, the scheme, already used overseas, could charge drivers a toll at busy times for motorists to enter a downtown area, or just target busy roads and corridors.
Momentum has built in the past several years across the current coalition Government and previous Labour government to introduce congestion charging.
…it was passed unanimously by our fuckwit politicians.
It will punish poor people and the disabled, especially when public transport is a joke.
But most importantly it creates a mass surveillance state that the deep state spiders could never imagine possible. You will all have to have bugs in your cars tracking you, or facial recognition software and licence plate recognition, all being rammed through with zero debate what so fucking ever.
The Police scramble in the wake of the McSkimmings scandal to tell us it’s just a few bad apples and not a systemic problem.
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 IPCA is a joke, it is barely any power and is under resourced. 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.
There is no depression (or corruption) in NZ – we don’t know how lucky we are!
Hush now and pray for your house prices to rise.
Increasingly having independent opinion in a mainstream media environment which mostly echo one another has become more important than ever, so if you value having an independent voice – please donate here.
The New Zealand Police sure looks like a real magnet for bad apples, doesn’t it? How to prune the orchard, eh?
Mark Mitchell will fix it.
No. No he won’t Bob. He’ll be too busy explaining the tens of thousands of faked and phantom breath tests.
No, he’s in his natural home.
Good husbandry doesn’t leave any rotten stuff lying around after pruning as they act as a store for the nasties. Clear away.
bentcops.org@gmail.com
My father-in-law had been in the police in East Africa when the family emigrated to NZ in the early ’50s.
He didn’t automatically join the NZ police because he recognised it was very corrupt. More corrupt than what he’d experienced in East Africa!
The Old Boy Network goes everywhere.
Wow!! Thank you Joy. Take note readers.
Let’s not get too caught up in the petty stuff.
Why were Police not doing more breath tests than they have historically, despite idiotic orders to impassively increase the number they did? I’m sure, for some officers, this was just laziness (which is not in itself corruption). For many, they were simply policing ‘with the consent of the governed’ who actually would have reacted very badly if the idiotic two-drink limit was being enforced.
My work Christmas do is today. I don’t drink- besides any religious obligations, it impairs your ability to talk trash. It’s a safe bet that some of my colleagues will be driving home early by 6 or 7pm after drinking three or four beers. If I have a couple of mocktails and stay out until 10 or 11pm, I’ll have been awake for 17-18 hours.
My reaction times will likely be more impaired than these older fellas who grew up when NZ had scientifically-based laws around the consumption of alcohol while driving. Which is not to say that I’ll be dangerous- no- I’ll simply drive far more cautiously than I might after crawling out of bed. You know, the same way that people who’ve had a few beers do.
So no… I’m not bothered at all that cops filled in some fake paperwork while failing to request new consumables for their breathalyzers and getting caught as a result. Their support for violent repression of peaceful protestors like John Minto on foreign orders, and their excusing the rapists shot throughout the force? That’s a bit more of a problem.
Filling in fake anything, is corruption. Laziness in an environment where protocol is everything will 100% lead to corruption. Hypothetical potential manslaughter, because it’s motivated by cultural alignment, doesn’t matter? Yeah, that’s corruption. Are you AI?
Me thinks these two protest too much and there are more bad apples to fall off the tree and they know it. Who checked chambers fitness to be commissioner because they are making sure all his detractors have either resigned or been sacked . What about these emails it appears they have fallen off the radar of our right wing press.
yes Mitchel and Luxon are being let off the hook by the piss weak media
The very fact that Chambers denies in the face of what has been exposed
(and who knows what else hasn’t) is a real red flag. Warning warning!!!he wants to defend those, probably majority of cops, types like say Arden’s father who are trying to do their job honourably without corruption but it is clear something is terribly wrong when the corruption reached the very top level seen in nice guy Coster….and the fraud of the breath testing coppers widespread thruout the land. Something is rotten no question. Also McSkimmings el who used their work devices, how dumb is that? Or bold?
“The IPCA is a joke, it is barely any power and is under resourced.”
For IPCA, you could substitute the Ombudsman, Auditor-General, the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment, the Commerce Commission, the Human Rights Commission, the Privacy Commissioner, and the Serious Fraud Office.
They are all under resourced and have little to no power, by design, to allow corruption to run rampant in this country.
As Martyn repeatedly reminds us, sleepy little Hobbits too dumb and lazy to care, or perhaps worse, even notice.
You only need to look what happens to such countries who have no government transparency, but plenty of surveillance, Somalia, Syria, South Sudan, Libya, North Korea, soon to be NZ.
Our only saving grace is that corruption is measured as perception and not reality, so NZ ranks highly due to extreme naivety not actual lack of corruption.
Clearly, corruption is rife within NZ especially under this horribly greedy and dishonest CoC mob. They are so fixated on money/wealth/power that every ‘so called policy’, however badly researched and never transparent, is fraudulent except, maybe some that benefit landlords, gas, tobacco, or hide important facts from the public, by either introducing them at inopportune times or dressing them to look less formidable. Of course they have had to do this to pay back the huge number of pre election bribes – and the joke, they don’t consider this corruption? Next election, take note of who gives what, to whom, and for what reason. How dumb and easily bought are the RW enablers many with no moral turpitude. Countries ie Peru and Fiji have recently convicted corrupt politicians – bring it on. Time for a new ‘Morality, Anti-corruption’ Bill which also insists on absolute transparency and honesty – it’s well overdue but of course it won’t happen under this deceitful CoC-up!
Well if the “top cop” said it, it must be true though! The “top cop” is surely beyond reproach. I mean where do you go from the “top cop”?
The woman in the lead photo is the most corrupt of the three .She has spent decades covering up the abuse and torture of children and adults in state care .Now she is preventing and enquiry from looking into the failure of the family court around the Tom Philips case .This is because the failed current setup was put in place by her in the Key era .Now she is lurking around the latest shit fest .If judith is any where near there will be corruption .
There are obviously cultural and corruption problems in the Police. The fallout from the McSkimming affair and other matters which have been recently highlighted in the news highlight these problems.
Starting from the top, the McSkimming affair has raised deeply troubling questions about the conduct and priorities of some of our most senior police leaders.
The weak IPCA, claims there was no cover-up, but that just does not make sense at all. Instead of ensuring that a young woman’s allegations of sexual misconduct by McSkimming on her were properly listened to, assessed, and investigated, it is plainly obvious that very senior police officers focused their efforts on pursuing retaliatory action in the form of criminal charges against her. Why – well because those senior cops wanted to close this off because they supported McSkimming in his run for the top job and in doing so wanted to protect their own positions for future advancement. The effect was that the young woman’s attempts to be heard were met not with support or due process, but with retaliation, i.e., criminal charges being laid against her. If this is not a cover-up, which is indicative of serious cultural problems and corruption then I don’t know what is.
You don’t have to be an expert to know that public confidence in the police relies on trust including the basic expectation that allegations—especially those involving potential abuse by police officers against vulnerable young women —will be handled with fairness, transparency, and independence. It is clear that the very senior officers who conducted themselves in a most appalling manner in the McSkimming affair, acted in ways that shielded and protected him and at the same time themselves. In my opinion, when they felt their positions were or could be threatened through their support for McSkimking, they turned on the young woman and charged her with serious crimes because it was easy to do so and it made McSkimming look like the victim here.
One aspect of the IPCA report that causes real concern is reference to one of the senior police officers involved in this scandal. He is/was an assistant commissioner in charge of criminal investigations, who was involved in this matter by intentionally putting a halt to any investigations into the young woman’s allegations. According to the IPCA report, he told the IPCA that he was new in the role, that his “head was spinning,” and that if he had his time again, he would do things differently. This explanation is nonsense because it sits uneasily with the fact that he was the assistant commissioner responsible for criminal investigations—someone who, at that level, would be expected to know precisely how and when to commence an investigation, including the basic step of speaking directly with the person bringing the complainant – in this case the young woman, referred to as Ms Z, and direct that this be done. He did not. Instead, when a senior and very experienced detective inspector said that she was concerned that the terms of the investigation did not include speaking with Ms Z, the assistant commissioner demanded to know from her, where in police investigative protocol does it say that the victim has to be spoken to.
I think the IPCA was wrong to mitigate the assistant commissioner’s conduct on the basis of being new to the job. In my opinion, the assistant commissioner’s actions illustrate that his decisions were not the result of inexperience but of deliberate choices that he made to protect McSkimming and, in so doing shore up his own current and future position in the police.
The issue of producing false breath tests is another example of the cultural problems in the police. My father’s friend who is a retired police officer told me that it was most likely because the police are set targets and given funding by NZTA for traffic policing and they have to stick to the targets to get the funding. This is now confirmed by the recent press release that NZTA is freezing funding because of the false breath tests – https://www.rnz.co.nz/national/programmes/checkpoint/audio/2019015518/nzta-pauses-millions-in-funding-over-false-police-breath-tests
The significance of this is that the false breath test readings and the freezing of funding by NZTA raises the issue of police manipulating statistics to not only satisfy the government but also to fool the public into believing that certain crimes are on the decline. This in turn makes it look good for the current coalition government, especially the national party, which operates on the basis of generating fear in the public that crime is on the increase and it is the only party/government that can do something about it.
So yes, in my opinion there are cultural problems and these problems are indicative of a level of corruption which does exist within the police and which should be a matter of concern for all of us.