By elocal magazine
Yesterday’s bombshell report from the Independent Police Conduct Authority has exposed what Public Service Minister Judith Collins starkly described as corruption within New Zealand’s police force. On the question of whether the IPCA findings amounted to corruption, Collins was blunt: “If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck”. Her assessment of the scandal was equally damning: “a total lack of leadership and integrity at the highest level.”
The whole story is an astonishing account of a police force that covers up its own extremely bad behaviour. Public trust in the police should rightly plummet. And questions about the role of all political authorities across the spectrum now need to be asked. From ministerial offices to the current top cops, there needs to be serious scrutiny about the rottenness in New Zealand’s policing.
History repeating: A Culture of misconduct and eroding trust
Observers of New Zealand policing will recognise disturbing echoes of past controversies in the McSkimming affair. The parallels are not coincidental. They represent a persistent institutional culture that has resisted decades of attempted reform.
A decade ago, I wrote an article for the Herald on Sunday titled NZ police are failing the public. In it, I catalogued a litany of failures, embarrassments and injustices that had accumulated on the police’s record. I pointed to case after case where police conduct had fallen short, and trust in the institution was eroding. From high-profile wrongful convictions such as those of Teina Pora and Arthur Allan Thomas to botched investigations and mishandled sexual assault cases, the pattern was clear: police culture and structures were not adequately safeguarding integrity or public confidence.
Arthur Allan Thomas spent nine years in prison after Detective Inspector Bruce Hutton planted a cartridge case to incriminate him in the Crewe murder. A Royal Commission in 1980 concluded that police had committed an “unspeakable outrage.” Yet decades later, in 2013, then-deputy Police Commissioner Mike Bush described Hutton as having “integrity beyond reproach” at his funeral. Such incidents sent a signal that police leaders were more inclined towards cover-ups than self-policing.
Notably, my 2015 article highlighted how the police hierarchy tends to protect itself and the powerful, often at the expense of justice. One stark example was the decision not to prosecute a well-connected Cabinet Minister, John Banks, despite strong evidence of electoral fraud – a decision that “smacked of the Establishment protecting itself.” I observed that the police’s mentality seemed “more inclined to cover-ups than rigorous self-policing.”
The McSkimming saga tragically confirms that this mentality has persisted uninterrupted. The instinct at the top has been to cover up, deflect, and close ranks around a senior officer rather than rigorously investigate the allegations. It is a modern embodiment of “the Establishment protecting itself”, with a young female staffer and the public interest on the losing side.
The treatment of women and sexual misconduct complaints has been a running sore for New Zealand Police. The 2007 Commission of Inquiry led by Dame Margaret Bazley exposed pernicious problems in police dealing with women, sparked by the heroic efforts of Louise Nicholas to hold officers accountable for sexual assault. The inquiry found evidence of disgraceful conduct and a culture characterised by strong male bonding, tolerance of sexual misconduct, and a failure to hold officers accountable.
Dame Margaret was disturbed to learn there was no enforceable code of conduct for sworn police officers. The Commission concluded that certain elements of police culture – an insular culture that distrusted outsiders and fostered protection of fellow officers over accountability to the public – had reduced police’s ability to investigate complaints effectively and impartially.
The government accepted all 47 recommendations from the Bazley report and committed to ten years of monitoring. Yet here we are in 2025, facing remarkably similar failures. The IPCA’s current report could have been written in 2007: senior officers displaying an unquestioning acceptance of a colleague’s narrative, failures to investigate serious allegations, prioritisation of protecting an officer’s career over investigating potential misconduct, and attempts to manipulate oversight processes.
The McSkimming scandal: Anatomy of a cover-up
The facts of this case are devastating. In 2016, Jevon McSkimming, then 40 years old and a Superintendent, began a sexual relationship with a woman in her early twenties whom he met at a sporting club. He later helped her secure a job within the police. After the relationship ended, the woman began making allegations about McSkimming’s conduct.
As early as 2018, anonymous warnings appeared on social media, tagged to both Police and the IPCA, warning that McSkimming had “preyed on a young female” and made threats. These early red flags were ignored, as neither organisation had adequate systems to treat social media posts as formal complaints.
But the failure intensified as McSkimming climbed the police hierarchy. In April 2023, when Police announced McSkimming’s promotion to statutory Deputy Commissioner (effectively the second-highest ranking officer in the country) further anonymous accusations surfaced on LinkedIn, explicitly accusing him of sexual assault on a police employee, misusing taxpayer-funded resources for his affair, and threatening to blackmail his victim with intimate images. These posts were ignored by police leadership.
By late 2023 and into early 2024, the complainant sent over 300 emails to McSkimming’s police address, copying senior officials including then-Commissioner Andrew Coster, Deputy Commissioner Tania Kura, Prime Minister Christopher Luxon, and Police Minister Mark Mitchell. The emails detailed allegations of physical, psychological, and sexual abuse.
Here is where the scandal becomes most egregious. In February 2024, an internal report by the Police’s Fixated Threat Assessment Centre noted that the woman’s messages raised clear concerns of criminal conduct and Code of Conduct violations by McSkimming. The report sensibly recommended referring the matter to the Police National Integrity Unit and the IPCA for investigation of McSkimming.
Instead of heeding that advice, police leadership chose to make the whistle-blower into the problem. No investigation of McSkimming was launched. Instead, police initiated an investigation into the woman herself for allegedly harassing McSkimming. In May 2024, police charged the complainant with causing harm by digital communication, effectively putting the alleged victim in the dock while positioning McSkimming as the victim. This move sent a clear signal: the priority was to protect a senior police executive’s reputation at all costs.
The woman’s lawyer, Steven Lack, describes what happened with devastating clarity: “At every stage, the Police had the opportunity to engage with her, to properly assess what she was saying, and to investigate her allegations. They could have viewed her as a traumatised victim. They chose not to. They accepted Mr McSkimming’s denials without meaningful inquiry and placed the full weight of the criminal justice system on my client for more than a year until the charge against her was withdrawn.”
Andrew Coster: The Commissioner who looked away
The IPCA report makes abundantly clear that this institutional failure reached the very top of the police force. Then-Police Commissioner Andrew Coster was informed by McSkimming of the affair and was receiving harassing emails. Yet Coster’s response was to protect his deputy rather than investigate the allegations.
In 2023, while serving on the interview panel for McSkimming’s appointment as statutory Deputy Commissioner, Coster failed to disclose to the Public Service Commission his knowledge of the relationship and the allegations. This failure, the IPCA found, “clearly fell below what a reasonable person would have expected.”
When the matter was finally referred to the IPCA in October 2024, Coster attempted to influence the investigation’s nature, extent and timeframe. As the IPCA report states, these attempts “were perceived by some others within Police as designed to bring the investigation to a rapid and premature conclusion so as not to jeopardise Mr McSkimming’s prospects of being appointed as the next Commissioner of Police.”
One participant at a meeting Coster convened described the pressure: “it was quite clear that he was very invested in Jevon becoming the next Commissioner.” Another officer with moral courage, Officer D, told the IPCA: “this looks like a cover-up.”
Audrey Young of the Herald offers an insightful observation today: “Coster doesn’t strike you as a bad person. Integrity is extremely important to him. Yet a good man can do bad things, even if he doesn’t comprehend it at the time.” This assessment captures something crucial about institutional failure: it is not always about individual malevolence but about a culture so deeply embedded that even well-intentioned leaders become instruments of institutional self-protection.
Luke Malpass, political editor of The Post, is more pointed in his assessment today: “Coster’s move from top cop to the top bureaucrat at the newly created Social Investment Agency now looks over. He has been placed on leave, ministers are refusing to comment, and if the tone of yesterday’s press conference was anything to go by, he no longer has the Government’s confidence. Realistically, the only conversations left will be about his exit terms.”
Collins herself said that if she were named in such a report, she would be “deeply ashamed.” The IPCA report, she noted, “speaks for itself.”
A Horrifying discovery
What makes this case even more disturbing is what investigators eventually uncovered. It was only during a belated vetting process for McSkimming’s bid to become Commissioner that the allegations surfaced more fully, leading to his suspension in late 2024. During the subsequent investigation, police discovered objectionable material on McSkimming’s work devices: child sexual exploitation and bestiality images that he had been accessing for at least five years.
Last week, McSkimming pleaded guilty to three charges of possessing child sexual exploitation and bestiality material. The Deputy Commissioner of Police, entrusted with national law enforcement responsibilities, had been secretly accessing some of the most abhorrent criminal content imaginable while police leadership actively worked to shield him from accountability for the original sexual misconduct allegations.
This raises devastating questions: How did a senior officer access such material on police systems without detection? The entire police executive, in their unquestioning acceptance of McSkimming’s denials, never seized or forensically examined his devices. Their efforts to cover up what they perceived as a messy affair also served to protect a serious criminal in the most senior ranks of the police.
The Politicians under scrutiny
The political dimensions of this scandal cannot be ignored. Police Minister Mark Mitchell has revealed that his office received 36 emails containing allegations against McSkimming since December 2023. However, Mitchell says then-Police Commissioner Andrew Coster directed police staff in the ministerial office to send the emails directly to his own office and not share them with the minister or his political staff.
“I am extremely disappointed that those emails were not raised with us at the direction of the then-Police Commissioner,” Mitchell told the Herald. Had he been briefed on the emails, he says he would have immediately raised concerns.
This revelation is explosive. It suggests that Coster not only failed to investigate the allegations but actively prevented political oversight by controlling the flow of information to the minister. The processes that should have protected the public interest and ensured accountability were systematically bypassed or manipulated by senior leadership.
Labour leader Chris Hipkins, who was Police Minister and then Prime Minister during much of this period, claimed that “nothing was ever raised about any of this” with him. While Hipkins called the failings “inexcusable,” his claim of ignorance raises questions about whether ministerial oversight of police is fundamentally inadequate or whether the police executive deliberately kept ministers in the dark.
A New watchdog: The Inspector-General of Police
In response to the crisis, the government has announced it will create an Inspector-General of Police, which is the strongest statutory oversight mechanism available. This new office, modelled on the Inspector-General of Defence, will have extensive powers to obtain information, direct access to police databases, and a right of entry to police premises.
This is a profound admission that the entire post-Bazley oversight framework, including the IPCA, has failed. As Collins noted, an Inspector-General would have the power to “review whatever files they choose” rather than waiting for police to refer matters. In theory, such an office could proactively audit the system, identify failures to act on internal recommendations, and immediately intervene. This is precisely what was needed in the McSkimming case.
The creation of this role represents the state’s most explicit acknowledgment that the New Zealand Police executive, when left to its own devices, cannot be trusted to police itself.
But will this new oversight measure solve the integrity problem? It is a step in the right direction, though a cautiously received one. Much will depend on the scope of the Inspector-General’s powers and their willingness to use them. If properly empowered, an Inspector-General could address shortcomings that the IPCA couldn’t. However, scepticism is warranted given how long it took to reach this point and the long history of reforms that promised change but delivered continuity.
A Few bad apples, or a much bigger culture problem?
The narrative being crafted by ministers and the new police commissioner is one of “rotten apples” – that the failure was limited to a former police executive and does not reflect on the 15,000 frontline officers. Police Commissioner Richard Chambers has emphasised that “all those in the executive who were involved in the case at the time have now left the police.”
This narrative must be challenged. The IPCA report does not describe one or two rotten apples. It describes serious misconduct by a significant number of very senior officers: the then-Commissioner, a Deputy Commissioner, two Assistant Commissioners, and a Detective Superintendent. This was not an individual failure; it was the entire executive culture in action.
Sam Sachdeva of Newsroom makes a crucial observation today: “The commissioner and Police Minister Mark Mitchell were both at pains to argue the findings should not be seen as a reflection on the frontline police. Yet the report comes less than two weeks after the revelation that 120 officers are facing investigation for the alleged falsification of over 30,000 breath tests. There may be no direct connection between the events, but it’s tempting to wonder whether a police leadership team all too willing to compromise on integrity and ethics has passed on the wrong lessons to the junior ranks.”
Indeed, the breath test scandal is another damning integrity failure that has emerged concurrently. About 120 police staff are under investigation after an audit revealed over 30,000 alcohol breath tests were falsely or erroneously recorded between July 2024 and September 2025. The tests were logged without any driver involvement. Police officers across the country were systematically falsifying official records. Defence lawyers say this “strikes directly at undermining the integrity of police conduct and their reliability” and could have far-reaching implications for prosecutions.
When officers see leadership protecting the powerful and punishing whistle-blowers, when they see senior executives bypass integrity systems with impunity, what lessons do they learn about the value of honesty and accountability?
As Sachdeva notes, “In the wake of McSkimming’s guilty plea for three charges of possessing objectionable material, Mitchell asked the public to not let one ‘rotten apple’ overshadow the good work of thousands of cops. An oft-used cliche, particularly when it comes to allegations of police misconduct, the metaphor has changed in meaning from its original use in the 1300s: that ‘a rotten apple quickly infects its neighbour’. The task for Chambers, and the Government, is proving that the rot is not too far gone to be fully removed.”
This isn’t a case where police have shown they are not above the law – where “the system is working.” Quite the opposite. As blogger No Right Turn argues, “It only fell apart because the perpetrator — who Coster clearly wanted to succeed him as Commissioner — had his computer searched, resulting in a sudden prosecution and conviction for knowing possession of child pornography.”
That blogger’s conclusion is stark but difficult to refute: “It’s hard to see how the organisation can retain any public confidence whatsoever after this. As other people have said, when the tree is producing this many bad apples, you don’t just throw them away one by one. You cut off the whole branch—or cut down the tree, tear up the roots, and start again from scratch. And maybe we need to do that with the police.”
The Crisis of trust
Twenty years ago, the Bazley Commission exposed a police culture that enabled sexual predators within its ranks. The government accepted all recommendations and committed to a decade of monitoring. Yet the McSkimming case demonstrates that when tested at the highest levels, police culture reverted to its default setting: protect the powerful, silence the victim, close ranks.
Public trust in institutions is fragile. While surveys show that 69 percent of New Zealanders express trust and confidence in police, this trust will erode as the full implications of these scandals sink in. When the public sees an elite officer evade proper investigation while those who speak out are punished, it breeds cynicism and fear. It also risks deterring both ordinary citizens and honest police staff from coming forward with complaints.
The question that must be asked is this: why, after decades of inquiries, reports, recommendations, and promises of reform, does New Zealand Police continue to demonstrate the same patterns of protecting its own at the expense of victims and public accountability?
The answer lies in understanding that police integrity failures are not primarily about individual bad actors but about institutional culture and the protection of organisational reputation above all else. Until the default setting shifts from protecting the organisation to serving justice, until the instinct to shield senior officers is replaced by a commitment to transparency and accountability, the integrity crisis will continue.
The woman who tried to hold a powerful police officer accountable deserves better. The thousands of New Zealanders who have been failed by police over the years deserve better. And the dedicated police officers who uphold the values of integrity and service deserve an organisation that does not repeatedly bring shame upon them through the failures of its leadership.
The establishment of an Inspector-General is necessary but insufficient. What is required is a fundamental shift in how police understand their relationship to power and accountability. Until that shift occurs, New Zealanders are right to remain deeply sceptical about whether they can trust the police not to cover up their own crimes.
Dr Bryce Edwards
Director of The Integrity Institute
.svg){kind=logo}
