How the plods lost the plot
Thursday, 20 November 2025
ANALYSIS: There’s a point in the Independent Police Conduct Authority’s (IPCA) excoriation of how police handled the Jevon McSkimming scandal where you’re left wondering just what planet senior officers were on.
Truth be told, there are innumerable points in the 135-page report where you’re left thinking that, given how their logic and decisions seemed so completely irrational and inexplicable.
But the example on page 66 seems to distil a police leadership whose grasp on reality was fast slipping.
It’s where, after years of ignoring complaints from a woman who’d been in a relationship with top cop McSkimming, police had finally decided to investigate whether she might be telling the truth about his alleged abuse.
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Police had drawn up some terms of reference for the investigation, but these didn’t include speaking with Ms Z, who’d made the repeated allegations.
The officer chosen to do the investigation, Detective Inspector Nicola Reeves, queried her superiors about this, pointing out that it wasn’t in line with normal police practice, and requested permission to contact Ms Z.
Reeves told the IPCA Assistant Commissioner Paul Basham then asked her where in police policy it stated that police had to speak to a complainant.
As Reeves later bluntly put it to the IPCA: “I personally think it should be very simple in every police officer’s world. Doesn’t matter who the hell you are. We speak to the person, take a complaint, and investigate it. It’s all very simple.”
That one of the country’s most senior officers didn’t appear to see it as that simple, that fundamental, seems staggering.
But then, the more you look into the IPCA’s revelations of what happened, the more staggered you become.
Here are some of the misconceptions, missteps, and examples of astonishing inaction that continue to confound.
That’s not what she said…
Senior police accepted McSkimming’s claims that Ms Z was “a woman scorned”, as former deputy commissioner Tania Kura put it, and her accusatory emails and social media posts about McSkimming were an effort to get him to return to a relationship that had foundered.
But Ms Z never said she wanted the relationship with McSkimming to resume. Quite the opposite.
What she wanted was to air her accusations that McSkimming had manipulated her for sex, and in doing so, arguably broken laws and police protocol.
The IPCA mentions more than 200 emails Ms Z sent to an array of people about the affair, along with social media posts and reports to the police 105 call line.
If someone had gone through them, McSkimming’s claims that Ms Z wanted him back would have been swiftly exposed.
Do this - but not that…
In 2023, Ms Z posted allegations about McSkimming on a police LinkedIn website, following McSkimming’s promotion to deputy commissioner.
His fellow deputy commissioner, Kura, told the IPCA about her reaction when she was informed: “I kind of went: ‘Gosh, who knows about that? We should be doing something about that if that’s true.’”
So Kura took action: She told another officer to contact the police media team and get Ms Z’s post removed.
She did speak with McSkimming, and accepted Ms Z was “a woman scorned”, the matter had gone on for years, and there was nothing to see.
“I did not think that it's my responsibility to then go over old ground and check (what) every other person’s done, everything five years earlier, and I didn’t have that in my power to do that, to be honest,” Kura told the IPCA.
But when the IPCA asked what those previous investigations into Ms Z’s allegations were, Kura admitted, “No, nobody had actually done anything”, because the allegations were anonymous.
It was something police commissioner Andrew Coster claimed also: We didn’t know who she was, so we couldn’t act.
The IPCA described this as “particularly disingenuous”, given all anyone needed to do was ask McSkimming who Ms Z was.
And, as it pointed out: “They had no difficulty in locating her when they wanted to search her premises and arrest her.”
Call 105 - and be ignored
Ms F oversaw police’s 105 non-emergency call line, which also allows people to submit information online.
She reported to McSkimming, looked up to him as a mentor, and had known about his relationship with Ms Z and her allegations for many years.
In April 2024, after Ms Z sent three reports to the 105 service, McSkimming contacted Ms F about them. (Ironically, the much-criticised 105 system that had been established by McSkimming, was now being legitimately used to facilitate accusations about him.)
To the IPCA, Ms F described Ms Z’s reports as “complete spam” and “gobbledygook”, with “nothing for us to follow up on … we get a lot of those through 105 like, ‘Mickey Mouse here, and this has happened’. You know, just people that are painful.
“And so that was what it looked like. It did not look like someone who had a serious complaint. That looked like someone just wanted to spam us with stuff to be really annoying.”
The IPCA pointed out that the 105 reports “made coherent allegations of inappropriate use of credit cards, use of police property to conduct extramarital sexual activity, the taking of unsolicited intimate images for the purpose of use in threats, stalking, harassment, and sexual offending”.
Ms F, however, said despite not being an investigator, the 105 material she read from Ms Z wasn’t how she would have expected a victim “should” present.
A “vulnerable victim”, she suggested, would “get a lawyer, or they go to find a front door of a station, or they ring”.
The IPCA said given Ms F knew McSkimming had had an affair, “she should not have classified the reports as nonsensical”, and it expressed concern that Ms F’s current role included responsibility for victims.
Call 105 - and be arrested
The IPCA also points to how Ms Z’s reports to the 105 service were used against her.
They were quickly handed to the team investigating Ms Z for harassing McSkimming, and one was initially included in the charging documents when she was arrested.
“To be clear, what the Ms Z investigation team has done here is to take a report, submitted through the correct online reporting channels, and rather than ensuring it is handled by Police Integrity and Conduct group as policy requires, have instead used it in evidence in a prosecution against the complainant,” the IPCA summarised.
A false negative
Despite not querying the veracity of the 105 claims, the team investigating whether Ms Z had harassed McSkimming with her repeated allegations filed them in its database as “False 105 Report”.
It was an assumption that made its way into other police documents when Ms Z was arrested and charged, with the police summary of facts labelling Ms Z’s allegations “false”.
But as the IPCA pointed out, police had not even started investigating the allegations at this point, yet were simply assured by McSkimming’s insistence they were false.
The reference to the allegations being false was later removed, following advice from Crown Law.
Wrong-headed investigations
When questioned about why they didn’t investigate Ms Z’s claims, one officer argued to the IPCA that “the reasonableness of my actions cannot be fairly assessed without an understanding of whether Deputy Commissioner McSkimming was telling the truth or lying about these things”.
In effect, they were saying, well, if McSkimming is found to be not guilty of Ms Z’s accusations, then my decision to not investigate him will be proven correct.
Unsurprisingly, the IPCA strongly disagreed with this logic.
“A failure to investigate a complaint at the time it is made cannot be justified by saying that when a decision was belatedly made to investigate, the complaint was found to lack evidential sufficiency for a prosecution.”
In other words - you need to do the investigation to find out who’s telling the truth, not prejudge and guess who’s right or wrong.
One rule for us…
In 2024, when police finally initiated an investigation into Ms Z’s allegations about McSkimming, there was considerable discussion about being cautious, given McSkimming’s position, and the fact he was running to become the next police commissioner.
“A serious allegation against any politically exposed person has the potential to significantly, and permanently, impact an individual’s work and career, ” the investigation terms of reference noted.
But such deference, due to McSkimming’s role, was not something afforded to any other members of the public, the IPCA suggested.
“It is unlikely that in the normal course of dealing with a complaint, senior officers would constrain the extent to which, or the manner in which, a detective investigates, on account of the potential impact on the subject’s work and career.”
‘Do the right thing’
There were other reasons why there was such timidity to investigate McSkimming.
Mentioned several times was that McSkimming was “financially sound”, and wouldn’t hesitate to engage lawyers if he felt his chances of becoming commissioner had been harmed.
“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.
But most alarmingly, senior officers, including Kura, feared what the IPCA might say if it considered a police investigation had affected McSkimming’s job prospects.
“We find this concern puzzling, to say the least,” the IPCA said in its report.
“It seems that, while they did not turn their mind to the possibility we might criticise their actions if they did not investigate serious allegations made against Deputy Commissioner McSkimming, they were concerned that we might be critical if he was denied an opportunity for promotion because of an investigation into his conduct.”
About time
McSkimming told police about his affair with Ms Z and their fallout in 2018.
He told Coster about it in 2020.
It wasn’t until 2024 that police launched an investigation into Ms Z’s allegations.
The intervening years were marked by acceptance of McSkimming’s version of events, a framing of Ms Z as a bitter woman “ranting”, (“She’s amping up” said Kura at one point), and protection of McSkimming by bypassing normal police protocols.
When the IPCA finally became involved, in October 2024, Coster was so unhappy he wrote to the watchdog’s chair, Kenneth Johnston, KC, complaining how unfair the process was to McSkimming.
“This is against the backdrop of an issue that has been visible for a very long time and was capable of being resolved long ago,” Coster wrote.
The irony of his own comment appeared lost on Coster.
Indeed, the issue had been known about for a very long time - six years by that time, and four years by him.
And it could have been resolved long before, without doubt.
Coster personally, and as the officer ultimately responsible for all police actions, had innumerable opportunities to do that, to investigate the accusations, to put them to rest one way or the other.
But through a seemingly endless series of blunders, that never happened.
Even one or two of these mistakes would have been an indictment.
That there were so many is as perplexing as it is has been calamitous.