‘Jevon would be happy to have a go legally’: Andrew Coster’s worries if McSkimming’s road to top job was muddied
Wednesday, 12 November 2025
Former police commissioner Andrew Coster - now on leave as the head of the Social Investment Agency - has refused to comment on a damaging IPCA report that suggests he and other top cops turned a blind eye to serious complaints against former deputy Jevon McSkimming.
Visits to Coster’s Wellington home by The Post on Wednesday were fruitless. Nobody came to the door, and a doorbell was subsequently ripped away.
A statement from an email in Coster’s name, sent on Wednesday morning, said: “As has been publicly noted by Ministers, this is now an employment conversation between the Public Service Commissioner and Andrew Coster. He will not be responding to media ahead of that process.”
During an extraordinary press conference held by current police boss Richard Chambers, Police Minister Mark Mitchell and Public Service Minister Judith Collins on Tuesday, the three laid bare their disgust at how the top echelons of police had handled serious complaints made against McSkimming from a young woman he’d previously admitted having an affair with.
Ultimately, rather than investigating the woman’s complaints, they charged her with harmful digital communications offences and chalked up anonymous complaints made to police about McSkimming as harassment.
The IPCA said while an investigation eventually got under way - because McSkimming was applying to be interim police commissioner - Coster appeared eager to get it over with, ultimately telling the authority he was worried McSkimming would take legal action if he was professionally disadvantaged over the investigation into the complaints.
While the IPCA found no collusion within the police executive, Collins said the IPCA report revealed “a leadership team that seemed more interested in protecting one of their own”, and suggested the IPCA findings looked like corruption.
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What Andrew Coster told the IPCA
Coster became Police Commissioner in April of 2020 and says he learned about McSkimming’s affair in October that year through McSkimming - who told the IPCA he told Coster soon after Coster’s appointment. McSkimming told Coster he was receiving “harassing” emails about it, Coster said.
Coster told the IPCA that his assessment of the disclosure at the time was: “It’s incredibly poor judgement, but there was nothing in what he said that gave me a sense of a work connection.”
(We now know there was, as the IPCA learned that McSkimming had helped the woman get a job as a non-sworn staff member.)
McSkimming later admitted to Coster that she was a non-sworn employee for a time, but that he had no part in helping her secure the role (which wasn’t true).
Coster told the IPCA: “I didn't interrogate him about the fine detail of what occurred. I sought assurances around the things that I thought were concerns from a police perspective. Like is there any work connection with us?”
Coster and McSkimming weren’t friends, says Coster
Coster told the IPCA his relationship with McSkimming was a “purely professional one”, and that he had always “been careful to maintain professional distance from his team, so there could be no suggestion of a conflict of interest or other bias”.
Coster told the IPCA two factors gave him “comfort” in relation to the complaints that were being anonymously made about McSkimming: The first, that he had been through an external vetting process before his promotion to (non statutory) deputy commissioner, although he agreed he didn’t know what McSkimming disclosed in that process (he did not disclose the affair).
The second was that McSkimming had disclosed the relationship to two other staff members two years earlier, in 2018.
“And so that was also a factor in my decision-making,” Coster told the IPCA, “If we as the employer were going to make an issue of this, we should have done it three years prior when it was first discovered. He was in a senior role, then Assistant Commissioner.”
No alarm bells
Coster told the IPCA that in considering the affair, the age difference (he understood the female to be in her 20s, in fact the woman was 21 when she had a relationship with 40-year-old McSkimming) did not raise any “alarm bells”, and neither did the fact they met through a sporting club at which McSkimming was a coach.
Coster agreed he had accepted McSkimming’s description of the nature of the “harassing” emails and told the IPCA that he agreed he should have made further enquiries about the assurances he received from McSkimming and about what follow-up occurred after his original 2018 disclosures about the affair.
Following a police investigation of the “harassing emails”, the IPCA said that report was ultimately used to prosecute the complainant, rather than as a launching pad to investigate any wrongdoing by McSkimming.
The IPCA accepted Coster did not receive a copy of the FTAC (Police/Health Fixated Threat Assessment Centre) report which ultimately looked into the “harassment”.
However, Coster told the IPCA he remembered receiving a briefing from then Deputy Commissioner Tania Kura about it. He could not recall the specifics of the conversation, but “he says that his expectation was that the FTAC engagement would identify anything that would require investigation”.
Coster believed he was told by Kura that police had spoken to the complainant. That, in the IPCA’s words, “They’ve had a conversation with her about the behaviour. That nothing of particular note from that came out and they weren’t going to pursue it further.”
Coster told the IPCA he believed the complainant had not been forthcoming with a formal complaint: “…the report back that I got was she hadn't sort of made a clear articulation of something that could be investigated through that process.”
Emails were ‘entirely consistent’ with McSkimming’s story
The IPCA thought it significant that Coster admitted he had read the occasional email complaining about McSkimming: “The ones I saw were entirely consistent with what Jevon had described to me, and certainly nothing that … made me think this has reached the threshold for investigation.”
Coster also pointed out to the IPCA the emails were anonymous.
“…there was nothing in those that grounded an allegation that was capable of investigation when the person sending the emails was doing so anonymously. To my knowledge, she never disclosed her identity to us. We only knew who she was because Jevon had declared it.”
‘Jevon would be happy to have a go legally’
Coster denied to the IPCA “placing unreasonable time pressures” on the investigation of the complainant’s allegations “or, as best as he could recall, pushing for any specific timeframes. He denied placing a one-week time limit on the investigation.”
Coster told the IPCA he had sought reassurance that police were appropriately investigating to try and resolve the complaint in a timely way, “and that he still believes that was a reasonable approach based on the information he had at the time”.
Coster had a “genuinely held belief that FTAC had approached [the complainant] and that she had declined”.
Coster said his aim was: “… timely resolution so that the Commissioner process wouldn't be decided on process but on substance.”
Coster also told the IPCA he had in the back of his mind that McSkimming would take legal action if he thought he had been disadvantaged in his go at being top cop.
“I was fairly confident that … Jevon would have been happy to have a go legally at anyone he could, if he was that way disadvantaged, and we needed to do the right thing,” Coster told the IPCA.
According to the IPCA, Coster was not the only one worried about this.
“Commissioner Coster was not the only officer concerned by the threat of legal proceedings by Deputy Commissioner McSkimming. A similar view was expressed by Assistant Commissioner A in explaining why he thought there was a need for caution in the original … investigation into the veracity of allegations.”
Coster said his over-riding concern was balancing “natural justice”.
“… between progressing that criminal investigation and doing so in a timely manner, because if the charging of her for criminal harassment was correct and if there is no criminal charge to answer, then Jevon missing out on the Commissioner appointment process because he’s still subject to investigation would amount to another potential victimisation for criminal harassment …”
‘I don’t know what she’s alleged’
Coster appears to confirm to the IPCA he couldn’t characterise the veracity or credibility of the allegations against McSkimming, but that he remained concerned about the impact on McSkimming’s vying for Commissioner.
“I don’t know what she’s alleged and I don’t know whether there is a criminal case to answer. But it felt to me from a natural justice perspective that the adverse outcome for Jevon, if the facts had landed in his favour, would be experienced because of a lack of timeliness, regardless of what the outcome of the criminal investigation was, so that was the interest I was trying to balance in that situation.”
Coster told the IPCA that it was appropriate for him to consider a special assessment team to investigate the complaint when such a senior officer was involved. Wrote the IPCA: “[Coster argued] he would have been open to considerable criticism had he blindly proceeded with a standard approach, which would leave officers junior to the officer in question having to take a decision that might place their own careers in jeopardy.”
The IPCA disagreed with that, and it was of “utmost importance” that the usual policies and procedures were followed.
Clarification: This story has been updated to clarify there is a discrepancy between when Coster says he was told by McSkimming about the affair (October 2020), and when McSkimming said he told Coster (April 2020). Story updated November 13, 12.31pm.