A string of scandals – including ranks from the top brass to officers on the beat – is putting the New Zealand Police under the spotlight.
And for an organisation built on public trust, it’s proving a bruising experience.
The recent era of police scandal started with Jevon McSkimming, the country’s second most senior officer, who quit in disgrace and pleaded guilty to possessing child sexual exploitation and bestiality material.
Since then, other officers have been charged with similar allegations; claims of falsified breath tests have emerged; a senior police executive joined the opposition party; two ex-cops have appeared in court charged with perverting the course of justice; an officer gave his criminal son police-only access in court, and now, complaints have been made against the nation’s top police officer.
Commissioner Richard Chambers is under investigation. The complaints, which The Detail has been told relate to alleged conduct towards women, are now being examined by both the police and the Independent Police Conduct Authority.
While Chambers strongly rejects the allegations, the questions they’re raising go well beyond just him.
On today’s episode, The Detail looks at those questions, including whether New Zealand Police can rebuild trust. We start with RNZ’s award-winning crime correspondent Sam Sherwood, who has been covering the stories throughout.
“I went to the commissioner’s office as well as the Police Minister Mark Mitchell’s office a couple of weeks ago after hearing that concerns had been raised about the commissioner,” says Sherwood, who finally got the complaint confirmed last Thursday.
“What we understand is that one complaint comes from a former police staffer who raised allegations about the commissioner’s conduct towards women … and it’s understood that the other complaint is from a woman Mr Chambers dated more than two decades ago.”
Chambers remains in the top job, telling staff there was no need for him to take leave.
The Public Service Commissioner has also indicated there is no requirement for Chambers to step aside while investigations continue.
Still, questions remain.
The police minister received the complaints months ago – one in November, another in February – but the public only learned about them last week.
“At this stage we simply don’t know why it took from November until now for this to come to light,” Sherwood says.
That timing is particularly uncomfortable because Chambers arrived promising exactly what many believed police desperately needed: transparency, accountability and tougher standards.
Ironically, Sherwood says Chambers has been driving many of the changes that are now exposing misconduct.
Following McSkimming’s resignation, he ordered a rapid review of police information security.
That review ultimately resulted in three police staff being charged with possessing objectionable publications – two appeared in court in Auckland last week.
He also overhauled the executive leadership team, strengthened the National Integrity Unit and began revising the police’s code of conduct following a damning IPCA report into police culture.
Former police investigator and crisis negotiator Lance Burdett believes many of the scandals emerging now are the result of police investigating themselves more aggressively.
“My first reaction was, ‘Oh no, another one, another commissioner” he says of the allegations against Chambers.
“And then putting it into perspective, and looking at it from an investigator’s viewpoint, you can see how all of these have lined up to make us feel like there’s something wrong with police, and there’s not.”
Instead, Burdett argues, they’re evidence the accountability system is working.
“So, if we take a step right back to the last 12 months, we’ve had a series of events that have happened, that if you take each one individually, you think the system’s working. If you take them together, you think the system’s failing.
He rejects any suggestion the force is riddled with “bad cops”.
“Police don’t join to become bad people,” he says. “You spend your whole career under scrutiny – from the public, internally, and from oversight agencies. That’s exactly how it should be.”
And that scrutiny has rarely been more intense, but for Burdett, timing matters.
“Emotion moves faster than information,” he says. “When everything happens close together, it creates the perception something is fundamentally broken.”
He believes transparency, even when painful, is ultimately healthy – “nothing good happens in the dark.”
The bigger challenge may now belong to the thousands of officers who haven’t done anything wrong.
“They’re the ones who turn up every day and wear the consequences,” says Burdett, who has worked through previous police scandals.
“You’d turn up to jobs and people would say, ‘Oh great, the rapists are here.’ That’s tough when you’re trying to do the right thing.”
Despite the damage of recent months, Burdett remains optimistic and believes the force is going through a difficult reset rather than an institutional collapse.
“They’re stretched. Morale is mixed. But this organisation will come out stronger.”
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