In the wake of the IPCA report, it is easy to understand why the politicians have been so willing to endorse terms like “cover up” and “ corruption.” It is convenient to explain what went wrong in personal terms, as the product of poor decisions made by a few leaders at the top, several of whom are no longer with the force.
To date, the official response has been to treat what happened with the Police as being highly atypical. Yes, the politicians say, bad stuff did happen and this has been duly noted and lamented – we are shocked! appalled! etc – but only as a lapse and departure from usual professional standards. Normal service can be trusted to resume shortly. After a stern chiding in the IPCA report and a couple of penitent press conferences, this leopard can supposedly be trusted to change its spots. It may be officially expedient to paint the picture in such terms, but this is not what the IPCA report concluded.
The IPCA does indeed provide chapter and verse of the poor decisions made – and not made – by then-Police Commissioner Andrew Coster and by some of his senior officers. Yet as to how and why this happened…so far, this conclusion reached by the IPCA has received far less attention:
“We do not wish to imply that any of the actions we criticise in this report involved officers consciously doing the wrong thing or setting out to undermine the integrity of the organisation. We found no evidence that this was the case.”
The IPCA does repeatedly criticise Coster for the decisions he made, and for the indecisions he displayed. (The IPCA also criticises aspects of its own prior handling of the serious allegations being made by the complainant.) Yet anyone who reads the report in full can readily see a recurrence of the same systemic problems within Police culture that were identified and condemned by the Bazley Commission of Inquiry 18 years ago.
The IPCA lays out both the positive and the negative aspects of that Police culture:
This culture emphasises the importance of hierarchy. It fosters a positive group ethos; promotes a strong sense of collegiality and loyalty to colleagues; rewards those who support the organisation and protect it from external criticism; and thus helps to maintain organisational solidarity.
As the IPCA goes on to say, these features are found in Police forces elsewhere, and in in other hierarchical workplaces as well. (The Operation Burnham inquiry exposed a similar “circle the wagons” response, one that led senior NZDF staff to conceal evidence of wrong-doing by our military forces in Afghanistan.) The IPCA believes that this same “us versus them” mindset “is likely to be present “within organisations that have a vertically aligned hierarchical structure, and are reliant on order and discipline in operational environments.”
In the context of policing, such a culture has many benefits – for example, in situations in which officers are exposed to a risk to their safety and depend upon each other for protection. It also enables the operational ability to provide an effective and coordinated Police response – for example, in crowd control, policing mass events, or managing a crime scene.
That said, the IPCA report continues, there can also be significant negative aspects to the internal culture found within such organisations:
It tends to produce resistance to external criticism, and intolerance and even bullying of those who challenge the status quo internally. It can lead to what is commonly termed “groupthink”, the psychological phenomenon in which the desire for harmony and conformity in a group can result in dysfunctional decision-making. That, in turn, can be manifested in….a failure to challenge poor decisions; a tolerance of unethical behaviour; and a tendency to overlook alternative responses to problems due to pressure to conform or fear of ostracism. And it is reflected in the fact that many of those we interviewed justified their own poor decision-making by saying that they were merely doing what they were told and that it was for their superior officer to determine what else should be done.”
Thankfully, not every officer fell in with the “groupthink” that developed around this case. Several did display moral courage in challenging some of the decisions made by their superiors. It would be overly optimistic however, to assume these officers are the norm. They were the exception here and – given the institutional pressures to conform mentioned by the IPCA – they are likely to be the exception in future.
The McSkimming narrative
Against the backdrop of this ingrained, almost tribal Police culture, the role played by McSkimming himself was crucial in two main respects. Firstly … for years, McSkimming had successfully peddled a false narrative that the complainant was a “woman scorned” out for revenge because he did not wish to resume the relationship. Over a period of six years, this basic narrative had shaped Police perceptions of the complainant, to the point where senior Police – including Coster – automatically assumed they knew what had happened, even though that ingrained belief had been based solely on McSkimming’s self-serving version of events.
The sexual relationship between McSkimming and the complainant began in 2016 and ended in 2018. At its commencement, the complainant was 21 and McSkimming was 40 years old, and married. There was also a workplace imbalance of power. She was a non-sworn Police employee, he was a very senior officer who could – and did – influence where she worked, apparently in order to enhance his sexual access to her. As the IPCA says:
….Until September 2018, there was nothing that Police as an organisation ought to have responded to. However, it was over that period that Deputy Commissioner McSkimming started to form a particular narrative – that he had been in a consensual extramarital affair and that, when he ended it, the female began a campaign of emails and threats in order to convince him to return to her. That narrative then formed the basis for much of the subsequent response by a number of senior officers. This later became problematic, as these officers failed to recognise that their view of what had occurred, even if only recently formed, was nevertheless based on several years of narrative provided by Deputy Commissioner McSkimming.
The McSkimming narrative was either (a) untrue and/or (b) was being actively contested by the complainant. (She did not believe the affair had been consensual; she was never interested in resuming the relationship etc.) Later, by the time that calls for an official investigation had grown louder, McSkimming’s well known aspirations to be the next Police Commissioner served to further distort the process (not) followed.
Disclosure of even the existence of an ongoing investigation would almost certainly have torpedoed McSkimming’s ambitions to be the next Commissioner of Police. The IPCA justly criticises Coster for his lopsided emphasis on McSkimming’s rights to natural justice. It also criticises Coster for his apparent lack of attention to the risk that the allegations and/or an inadequate investigation would pose to the organisation’s public reputation.
This risk had been elevated by the Police decision to use the barrage of accusatory emails being sent by the complainant as cause to arrest and charge her under the Harmful Digital Communications Act. Since the complainant was pleading “not guilty” to the charge, it should have been clear by then that McSkimming’s narrative and the repeated Police failure to take the complainant’s allegations seriously were about to be exposed to scrutiny in court.
That said, one can see the dilemma that Coster had created for the Police (and for himself) by his prior credulity, which had been based on his professional allegiance to a senior colleague, McSkimming. Putting to one side for a moment the natural justice rights of the complainant…by late 2023/early 2024 at the very latest it should have been clear to Coster that the allegations were posing a serious reputational risk to the organisation he led.
Moreover, and as mentioned, the mere existence of an official investigation would end McSkimming’s career aspirations– which in turn could also expose Coster (and the Police) to retaliatory legal action by McSkimming for the harms done to his reputation and to his career. (At this point, no one knew about the highly incriminating contents of McSkimming’s work computer.)
Faced with this dilemma, once can see why Coster mistakenly floated (and then quickly retracted) a half-baked proposal to truncate the investigation and create reporting lines solely to himself and to his subordinate, then Deputy Commissioner Tania Kura. By this point, all of Coster’s available options were bad ones, since all of them were fraught with the potential for reputational risk to the Police, an organisation that – to repeat – depends on public trust.
As mentioned, Police Minister Mark Mitchell, Judith Collins and the current Commissioner Richard Chambers now share an interest in sheeting the blame home solely to the personal failings of Andrew Coster and his immediate underlings. No doubt, and especially with hindsight, Coster and some of his senior staff did fail to do the right thing, repeatedly. Yet some of the reasons why they did so run far deeper.
Based on what we know so far, McSkimming did succeed in grooming a young woman for his own sexual gain. Yet as victim’s advocates have pointed out, he was also successful in grooming his colleagues over the course of six years of repetition, into loyally accepting his version of the events – which painted him not as a sexual predator, but as the victim of threats and harassment by a (possibly mentally unstable) woman bent on revenge.
None of the political responses to date have addressed the tribal nature of the culture that evidently still exists within the Police, nearly two decades after the extensive Bazley report. The same tendencies have long been evident in other hierarchical organisations like the armed forces, and the Catholic Church – other organisations that have regularly empowered and protected the predators in their midst. Personalising the blame (it was all Coster’s fault!) will only make it inevitable that the same sort of things happen again.
Footnote One: As for the government response…victims deserve more than hope that after Bazley, after McSkimming, the Police will have learned the errors of their ways. Since Bazley, significant advances were made in responding to complaints involving less senior Police staff. Plainly, those rules were not followed in this case, apparently because they involved a senior Police officer at the top of the pyramid.
As yet however, there is no indication that the government is willing to carry out (and fund) the structural reform required to remove entirely from the Police the decision to initiate such investigations. This could be done by creating either (a) a new and entirely independent Inspector-general of Police role, or (b) by appointing a Victims Commissioner to triage such complaints, and direct the Police response.
Ultimately….is Mark Mitchell willing to create ( and fund) an adequate structural response to the victims of predatory Police officers?