How police ignored warnings about Jevon McSkimming - and prosecuted the woman who tried to expose him

Wednesday, 12 November 2025

For years, some of the country’s most senior police officers were aware of serious allegations against one of their own, a man who would rise to become Deputy Commissioner. An IPCA report lays bare one of the most serious failures of integrity in modern New Zealand policing history: a culture of misplaced loyalty that protected a senior officer, and prosecuted the complainant instead. Paula Penfold reports.

In February 2016, at a sporting competition, a senior police officer met a young woman two decades his junior. She was 21, he was 40, a coach. It started out as platonic, but within months turned into a sexual relationship.

The man was Jevon McSkimming, the now disgraced former Deputy Commissioner of Police.

At the time the relationship began, he was a Superintendent, but soon after, in April 2016, he was promoted to Assistant Commissioner.

Only three months after that promotion, McSkimming sent an email to a police employee suggesting the woman he was having a relationship - known as Ms Z in a scathing report released on Tuesday by the Independent Police Conduct Authority (IPCA) - be offered work within the police; “casual employment'.

She got the job and started work less than two weeks later. He personally requested she be based at Wellington Central Police Station rather than at the police college in Porirua, where the role was based, “making her closer to [his] place of work”.

There’s dispute about when the relationship ended - McSkimming says December 2017, Ms Z says it continued into 2018 - but either way, come the beginning of 2018 her employment with the police ended.

The timeline is set out in the IPCA report, which details how McSkimming, in May 2018, told his wife about the relationship. He also told his supervisor, the Deputy Chief Executive of Resource Management.

“He says it was about this time that Ms Z began sending harassing emails,” the report says.

(Whether they were “harassing” or not, or Ms Z’s view of the emails, is not yet known: the emails are not included in the IPCA report. What the IPCA does say is that while it does not dispute the harassing nature of the emails, “that does not preclude the possibility that they might also have been wholly or partly true”. It also raises “the possibility that Ms Z’s concerning conduct in the sending of harassing emails … may have been taken by a person in trauma; and the possibility that she had been told by Deputy Commissioner McSkimming that she would never be believed if she tried to report his behaviour to police”.)

McSkimming’s supervisor recalls him saying Ms Z was “threatening and blackmailing him”. But that supervisor did not see the emails. McSkimming’s description appears to have been accepted.

He also made disclosures to other senior police staff. They rightly asked whether Ms Z was a police employee, but the IPCA report found McSkimming’s answer was “misleading” - he said she was not, even though she was indeed a casual employee.

So the first people within police to be told of the relationship understood he was simply “disclosing an affair which had ended badly,” a narrative authored by McSkimming of a “consensual extra-marital affair” which, when he ended it, led to “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.”

The IPCA “makes no judgment” about whether the narrative was true or false: That wasn’t the point of this investigation, which was not into the allegations but into how police handled them. The problems with that handling became evident when it emerged other senior officers knew about the relationship and emails. But nobody seemed to have questioned any power imbalance or McSkimming’s seniority influencing Ms Z’s employment in a location that made it “more convenient for a sexual relationship”.

Later that same year of the disclosures, in September 2018, the first public alarm bell rang - in the form of a post on Facebook.

“To all young females,” it read, “you must be careful of Jevon McSkimming, who is ironically an Assistant Commissioner of police. He has previously preyed on a young female who he lured in with countless lies and manipulation - all for his sexual gain. He has admitted to this by stating he “used” her and “treated her like shit”. He threatened to post images of her online to keep her from exposing the truth about him.”

The poster tagged - or “mentioned, as the IPCA describes it - the official accounts of both the New Zealand Police and the Independent Police Conduct Authority.

The IPCA acknowledges that, as per normal procedure, it received an email alerting it to the fact it had been mentioned in a post, and assumed police would have got the same.

But, at the time, police had no policies or procedures in place for monitoring and responding to mentions on social media.

A culture of silence

Fast forward 18 or so months to April 2020 when Andrew Coster was appointed Police Commissioner, becoming the youngest person in the job.

He’d barely got his feet under the desk when, according to McSkimming's account to the IPCA, he told the new Commissioner that he’d had an affair and was receiving harassing emails. Coster’s recall was that McSkimming said the woman was contacting people because she was “very focused on wanting to resume the relationship”. Coster knew the woman was in her 20s and while he thought it was “incredibly poor judgement” on McSkimming’s part, there was nothing in the disclosure that gave him a sense of a work connection.

That revelation, Coster told the IPCA, came later - after McSkimming’s October 2020 internal promotion to Deputy Commissioner. At that point, McSkimming assured the new Commissioner he had not played a role in securing Ms Z the job. Coster accepted he “didn’t interrogate him about the fine detail”.

The IPCA concluded Coster should, at a minimum, have asked McSkimming questions, which Coster acknowledged.

By 2023, Commissioner Coster did know not only of the relationship, that it had ended badly, that the woman was - according to McSkimming - sending harassing and threatening emails. He knew she had been a police employee, that there was a significant age difference, and how they had met.

But he did not disclose any of this to the Public Service Commission, who, later that year, was running the recruitment and vetting process for the statutory Deputy Commissioner appointments.

Yes, McSkimming had been a Deputy Commissioner for three years by that point, but as a police employee. The difference was this was an independent role, appointed by the Governor-General.

Coster had sat on the shortlisting and interview panel.

The IPCA found his failure to disclose the relationship and subsequent concerns about the email contact fell below what would have been expected of the Commissioner of Police who was also a member of the selection panel.

McSkimming’s formal appointment as Deputy Commissioner set in train another lost opportunity: in May that year, when police announced the appointments of McSkimming and fellow new Deputy Commissioner Tania Kura on LinkedIn, a new public warning was posted beneath it.

“Yea you should be really proud of Jevon McSkimming,” the post read, “who cheats on his wife for years using taxpayer funded hotels and police property to do it in a way that makes him feel ‘safe’, has sexually assaulted at least one police employee on police property, threatens to destroy and ruin people when he is concerned about his behaviour being known.”

The post continued: “He has also taken images of someone without their consent and threatened to use the images to destroy them.”

The IPCA report attributes those “serious allegations” to Ms Z.

Alerted to the post, a senior officer in Christchurch made a phone call to Wellington.

The officer who received the call spoke to Deputy Commissioner Kura and sent her an email. Kura asked that officer to contact police media to have the LinkedIn post removed.

The officer also spoke to the police Acting Director of Integrity and Conduct who said the issue raised in the LinkedIn post would need to be notified to the IPCA. The next day, the Acting Director did just that, in a phone call.

But five days later they followed up with an email: “I’ve since found out that this is an ongoing matter that has been going for 6 years… It does not appear that this matter requires investigation or notification to the IPCA”.

The IPCA replied, saying Kura had provided more context and would provide a “brief written overview” of what had taken place.

In its own findings, the IPCA acknowledged there was no formal undertaking to provide that overview. “In any event, we failed to follow up the matter with Deputy Commissioner Kura. Our response was inadequate, given the nature of the complaints in the posts.”

It found both Kura and Coster failed to make “sufficiently robust enquiries” about the LinkedIn post, and relied too much on the account given by McSkimming and other senior officers.

The warnings went unheeded again.

‘This looks like a cover-up’

Then things escalated.

From late December, 2023 into early 2024, Ms Z allegedly dramatically increased the “number and nature” of her emails. In January 2024, Coster directed Kura to seek the input of the Fixated Threat Assessment Centre (FTAC), “as well as consider mental health support for the writer”.

An investigation into Ms Z was launched, and in May 2024 she - the complainant - was prosecuted, charged under the Harmful Digital Communications Act, over the emails she’d been sending.

It wasn’t until the next month, June 2024, that Kura asked a senior investigator - Officer D - to establish whether any of the allegations in the emails she’d sent were actually true. This step, the IPCA says, was the correct decision - just three or four months late.

Coster told the IPCA he was also involved in that decision, that a proper assessment was needed to bring together all Ms Z’s communications, assess their overall effect, and assess whether a criminal investigation should be initiated.

Nobody suggested talking to Ms Z.

Kura told the IPCA she didn’t approach it as “an orthodox sexual assault” investigation because of the context of McSkimming’s rank and the prosecution against Ms Z. She said she was also concerned about the implications for McSkimming’s future career, and that if police “rushed into” an investigation, “he would potentially be further victimised”.

One investigating officer said he had been asked to deal with a harassment matter, not an adult sexual assault.

As the IPCA put it, an investigation had been set up supposedly to determine whether there was any truth to Ms Z’s allegations. But in reality it was not an independent investigation into her complaints: it was a “subset of her prosecution”.

In September 2024, Ms Z got in touch with Officer D, a senior adult sexual assault investigator, and they began emailing each other.

Less than three weeks later, that work was “closed down”. The IPCA does not name the officer who made that decision, only their position: Assistant Commissioner of Investigations, named Assistant Commissioner A.

Finally, in October, following a request from the IPCA’s chair, after concerns were raised about the handling of the initial investigation, police referred Ms Z’s complaint to the IPCA, and launched Operation Jefferson: a criminal investigation into her complaints of multiple sexual offence allegations, including sexual violation by rape, sexual violation by unlawful sexual connection, and indecent assault.

Not enough evidence was found to charge him.

Officer D told the IPCA the handling of the case prior to her involvement had been “appalling”.

“We have just not followed policy whatsoever and it doesn’t take a rocket scientist … Jevon has tried to get rid of this by making a complaint and … making [Ms Z] the villain.

“If you make a mistake … the only worse thing that you can do is then cover it up. You can paint all sorts of nice words on this … but to an outsider looking in, and … I mean even me, this looks like a cover-up.”

The conclusion

The IPCA found the police response to Ms Z’s allegations against McSkimming was marked by systemic failures across leadership, that several people, mostly at senior level, failed to take appropriate action in response to the serious complaints made against him.

It found that while none of them set out to undermine the integrity of the police, they did.

That their decision making, and later attempts to justify those decisions, showed they did not see or try to stop threats to the integrity of the whole organisation.

It found that the police responded to the complaints with “inaction and an unquestioning acceptance” of McSkimming’s narrative of events.

That key recommendations from the 2024 joint Police and FTAC report, including considering a separate investigation into McSkimming and referral to the Police National Integrity Unit and the IPCA were not acted on. Instead, the investigation focusing on the complainant was launched. That when the concerns about McSkimming were eventually referred to the IPCA in October 2024, Coster “attempted to influence the nature and extent of the investigation and the timeframe for its completion”.

That Coster had failed to disclose to the Public Service Commission what he knew about McSkimming’s relationship, which had led to the emails alleging misconduct.

The IPCA made a series of recommendations including more safeguards to protect integrity at senior management level, revamping internal policies around integrity issues and ethical behaviour, and making changes to strengthen criminal and employment processes in relation to alleged misconduct by police officers.

It also recommended strengthening its own oversight role, along with enhanced Ministerial and Parliamentary oversight.

The IPCA’s findings leave no room for ambiguity.

Immediately upon the report’s release, Commissioner Richard Chambers said it made for “appalling reading” that exposed a “total lack of leadership and integrity at the highest level”.

Coster was placed on leave from his role as chief executive of the Social Investment Agency.

The Government has accepted all IPCA recommendations and announced an Inspector-General of Police, with Ministers describing what happened as a “massive failure of leadership”.

In the meantime, last week, McSkimming pleaded guilty to charges over child exploitation and bestiality images, which were on his work devices.

He will be sentenced next month.

Tania Kura, who’d served in the police for nearly four decades, had already announced her retirement in July 2025.

The IPCA report makes clear that this report, into whether police responded appropriately to Ms Z’s complaints, is only the first phase of its investigation.

It is still reviewing whether police adequately investigated the complaints and will report back on that as soon as it can.