Pass the blame, protect the badge: what the McSkimming finger pointing says about our institutions

Sunday, 16 November 2025

ANALYSIS: The fallout from the Jevon McSkimming scandal has exposed an uncomfortable truth: the system that is supposed to stop unfit people rising to power still relies on people being honest. Each agency insists its processes worked; yet those same processes depended on others telling the truth.

This week, as the damage-control machine went into hyperdrive, the finger-pointing began.

Police commissioner Richard Chambers immediately attempted to cauterise the haemorrhaging of trust in the force, blaming his predecessors for ignoring a woman’s complaints to protect their own careers.

“It was not the processes that were at fault here,” Chambers said.

“It was people at a very senior level deciding to ignore and put aside those processes out of self-interest.”

Police Minister Mark Mitchell, who was blocked from seeing the woman’s emails at police headquarters’ request, also blamed police leaders who had already been moved on.

Public Service Minister Judith Collins said there were questions for the Public Service Commission, which recommended McSkimming for the deputy commissioner role.

The commission, in turn, pointed the finger back at police for giving it bad information.

Public Service Commissioner Sir Brian Roche said an internal review found “no fundamental issues” and that the commission’s information relied on police, thus completing the circle of all fingers pointed the other way..

But if the system depends on bad people telling the truth - at what point does it essentially take a gamble?

It’s hard to underestimate how important public trust is in policing. People need to believe that when they seek help it will be there and when they report wrongdoing it will be acted upon. But trust is hard won, easily lost, and as agencies scrambled to blame each other, the risk is that trust in the system that allowed McSkimming to thrive slips further away.

While Chambers lay the blame squarely at the 'inexcusable conduct of former senior leaders” of police, it’s in his, and the police’s, interest to limit the damage to a small group of bad eggs and rotten apples.

“I know some people will question whether police have learned the lessons of the past,” Chambers acknowledged.

And there have been many lessons. The similarities to what happened to sexual-violence survivor advocate Louise Nicholas are remarkable. In recent years, police have made significant efforts to improve their culture - something Nicholas herself acknowledges.

But for nearly five years McSkimming escaped the attention of those trained to catch criminals — all while searching for child sexual exploitation and bestiality material on his police-issued devices, sometimes during work hours. His search terms referenced under age girls, incest, animals, and words such as “slave”, “abuse”, and “extreme”.

And in 2021, while conducting those searches, McSkimming was promoted to chief security officer - the person responsible for enforcing information-security policies.

When his offending was uncovered this year, Chambers told staff: “These are the actions of an individual,” and ordered a rapid review of police IT controls. It found weak technology settings, poor visibility of user activity and governance gaps. Another officer has since been stood down.

At the same time McSkimming was Googling explicit images at work, police leaders were ignoring sexual assault accusations, diverting the complainant’s emails and prosecuting her.

McSkimming was also promoted again - to Deputy Commissioner after a vetting process run by the Public Service Commission.

Defending his agency, Sir Brian Roche called McSkimming a “devious liar”.

“I’m really confident now about our processes,” Roche said. “But if we have candidates who run alternative lives, as McSkimming did, it’s very, very hard to detect.”

McSkimming’s web of lies was so thick, it would have been highly unlikely, if not impossible, they could have uncovered it, he said.

Psychometric testing, including a mock interview with broadcaster Kim Hill, found nothing concerning. Past complaints of assault and phone use while driving were seen as “nothing out of the ordinary”.

The interview panel — which included then-commissioner Andrew Coster — described McSkimming as “very impressive, thoughtful, and an authentic leader with a strategic mind.”

Yet the complaints continued, and for years McSkimming curated a narrative about his accuser that convinced senior colleagues to dismiss her. Trust had been put in the fact McSkimming had a top secret security clearance provided by the intelligence service - and that such a rigorous process would surely have thrown up red flags if there were any.

The IPCA findings in part blame police culture which “emphasises the importance of hierarchy” - this structure is for good reason because of what is required to police effectively.

“However, the culture can have negative consequences,” the report says.

“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.”

It was dsfunctional decision-making by a cast of some of the same characters which failed to alert the prime minister this year to another scandal: the fact a man they’d questioned for allegedly covertly recording audio of sessions with sex workers was working in the PM’s office.

Michael Forbes had his government-issued phone seized when he was caught with the recordings by a brothel last year. In his contacts was the prime minister’s phone number, and in his photo albums were pictures of women working out at the gym, at the supermarket, asleep and filmed through a window.

The police were called. Forbes was questioned and his phone was seized under a search warrant.

An alert was sent to a “cast of thousands” of police staff, including police commissioner Andrew Coster. He was on leave so McSkimming was in charge. Deputy Police Commissioner Tania Kura, who was named in the McSkimming IPCA report, sought to recall the message. Kura has since retired.

This all happened behind the Beehive’s back. The “no surprises convention” wasn’t triggered and a Department of Internal Affairs review later found it should have been.

At the time Chambers blamed the previous administration. Such an oversight wouldn’t happen on his watch, he said.

As part of the response to the McSkimming scandal, earlier this year Chambers asked the Public Service Commission to conduct a performance improvement review into police, focusing on integrity and conduct. It is the first such review of the force since 2012 and it’s hoped this could be the most transformational action that’s come out of the sorry scandal.

Embedding integrity into every element of policing, right from police college, will be critical to ensuring colleagues don’t blindly trust their superiors and colleagues.

The allegations against McSkimming were only finally acted upon when officers - mostly women - questioned the decisions of others. Better training around sexual violence will also be essential. It took an experienced adult sexual assault investigator to know the woman’s hundreds of emails weren’t the sign of a villain, but a sign in itself.

'She was also able to identify what many senior officers were not - that a traumatised victim who has been told she will not be listened to if she tries to approach police, may not present as a regular victim 'should' and that the emails Ms Z was sending may have reflected the desperation of someone emailing into the 'abyss', having not been heard for several years prior,' the IPCA said.

Ultimately, the McSkimming case shows how fragile the “honesty system” can be. It survived because too many people trusted the wrong man for too long.

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