Jevon McSkimming: The totally charmless, conscientious copper from the sticks who defies definition

Saturday, 22 November 2025

In the wake of his downfall, former deputy police commissioner Jevon McSkimming left a trail of wreckage - to reputations, careers, and police esteem. Katie Ham and Mike White investigate the ambition and arrogance of the man at the heart of one of New Zealand Police’s most explosive scandals.

Just after 8.30am on August 4, a silver Mercedes turned into Wellington’s Ballance St, and nosed towards the kerb outside the District Court.

In the passenger’s seat was arguably New Zealand’s most wanted man: Jevon McSkimming, the disgraced former deputy police commissioner about to face charges of possessing images of child sexual exploitation and bestiality.

He hadn’t been seen in public for months, as his secret life was exposed, and he became fodder for public speculation and censure.

His appearance in court that mid-winter Monday wasn’t scheduled until 10am, but he’d arrived early, likely hoping to beat the media he knew would be there to pounce. He wasn’t early enough.

When McSkimming, now 52, spotted a Post reporter and photographer, the family member driving the Mercedes jerked the car to the side of the street and stopped just beyond them. For thirty seconds. A minute. Five minutes.

Then the car swung into a slow U-turn and began edging away. It didn’t go far before stopping again, then rolling forward a metre, then pausing once more.

It was a strange, hesitant piece of vehicular choreography, as if McSkimming hadn’t quite worked out how to enter a world expecting him to answer for his actions, or was perhaps having second thoughts about going through with the public ordeal.

Inside the car, his phone rang. McSkimming didn’t answer it, didn’t even look at it.

Instead, he stared out of the car’s front windscreen. He seemed to have slipped into another world entirely, as his own world came crashing down.

And then the passenger door flew open. McSkimming pivoted around the back of the sedan, ignoring the reporter’s questions as he barrelled across the road, eyes fixed ahead as he disappeared inside the court, his phone still ringing.

The puzzle at the centre of it all

What had he been thinking as he sat there, staring blankly ahead, phone buzzing, a photographer papping him through the car window?

This was the man who had almost become the most powerful cop in the country, but was now headed for the dock, having been caught viewing the ugliest of imagery while at work.

This was the man everyone saw as a church-going community leader, a happily married family man, who’d had an affair with a young woman nearly half his age (known publicly only as Ms Z), arranged a job for her within police, and kept the relationship secret until she outed him.

What on earth was he thinking?

It’s a question anyone trying to understand McSkimming and the entire torrid affair has asked themselves, and one with seemingly few logical answers.

McSkimming hasn’t spoken publicly, hasn’t offered an explanation or apology. That morning, the only words he managed were a flat “Fine, thanks,” when a TV reporter asked how he was, as he left court.

When he returned to court earlier this month, he remained silent, his lawyer intoning guilty pleas on his behalf.

Even after endless coverage of his misdeeds, and countless scarcely-believable stories, McSkimming remains something of an enigma. Trying to define him is to prod a glob of mercury: Whatever shape you see slips away again almost as quickly as it came.

It’s no easier to pin him down when you talk to those he worked with. Views swing wildly from loyal friends and supporters who sought to protect him, to others ready to share their accusations and suspicions.

To some, he was a sharp, conscientious country cop. To others, he was a totally charmless narcissist who manipulated those around him.

And to the young woman whose life he derailed, Ms Z, he was “a sad, pathetic, f….d-up human who seems to get enjoyment from screwing with people’s lives for his sexual gain,” according to one of her police reports.

For years, McSkimming moved through the job with little fanfare, quietly climbing from rural stations to city bureaus to Police HQ. He drew few headlines and left behind only the faintest public trace.

Until, of course, he didn’t.

The country cop turned heir apparent

Before he was a deputy commissioner, before the polished promotional photos, flash cars and executive gloss, McSkimming was a rural constable.

After growing up in Dunedin, McSkimming graduated from police college in 1996, and was posted to Auckland.

In 2000, recently married, he was transferred to Gore, and then Murchison, where his staple beat was car crashes and cannabis crops.

But after a decade as a constable, McSkimming moved to the capital, and began a swift rise to bigger things. By 2010, he was Wellington’s most senior police officer.

In 2015, he was made an assistant commissioner, overseeing police technology, rolling out the non-emergency 105 phone line, and managing police property and vehicles.

To someone who worked with McSkimming on a major project, he seemed a “very capable guy” who was “clearly super-ambitious - he was bouncing from post to post”.

The only negative things that struck the person, who wasn’t in the police, were some of McSkimming’s unusual boasts. But they said McSkimming was good company when out for a beer, while always acting appropriately.

Former police minister Ginny Andersen described the McSkimming of this era as “always hard-working and a pleasure to work with”.

As his career flourished, his personal property portfolio and vehicle fleet grew too.

A sprawling $2 million home in Te Horo. Two more properties in Waikanae. Flashy sports cars, including an Audi R8, and motorbikes he raced until a crash forced him into a different kind of high: gliding.

It was a lifestyle that spoke of momentum and ambition. But McSkimming also leaned on another, quieter persona: the church-going family man, projecting moral steadiness.

By 2020, newly-appointed police commissioner Andrew Coster promoted him to deputy commissioner, the two men appearing in smiling photos, sharing matching pressed uniforms and hairstyles swept to the right.

His rise came despite having little investigative experience, with even the Public Service Commission noting McSkimming had “a relatively unique career path within New Zealand Police”.

As one high-ranking officer spoken to by The Post this week said: “ The strangest thing is that I didn’t know him. Usually, when someone reaches that high up, we all know them. We’ll think of them as ‘so-and-so who ran X homicide investigation’, or they’ll come to the station. But I’d never even heard of him.”

Coster championed him regardless, praising him as a “values-driven leader” who supposedly cultivated a “positive culture”.

The affair with Ms Z proved no impediment to McSkimming’s career, and in March 2023, he made his final career jump, leapfrogging assistant commissioner Richard Chambers to become the second most powerful officer in the country.

At the time, Prime Minister Chris Hipkins accepted advice from officials that McSkimming was a “fit and proper” person who was “honest and trustworthy'. Hipkins has since described the advice he received as “completely inadequate”.

So there he was, the heir apparent. The man who, if anything happened to Coster, would have become New Zealand’s Commissioner of Police.

The shape that finally settled

But the end of McSkimming’s meteoric but increasingly murky policing career was near.

Eventually, police were forced to investigate Ms Z’s allegations, and just after he lost out to Chambers for the police commissioner’s job, McSkimming was quietly sent home on “special leave”.

On December 23 last year, he was suspended from his position by the Prime Minister and Governor-General.

Then in May, McSkimming’s facade collapsed completely when Police Minister Mark Mitchell revealed McSkimming had resigned, jumping before he was pushed, and a criminal investigation was underway.

The following weeks and months saw the extent of McSkimming’s double life exposed: highly objectionable material found on his work devices; a confession to the serious crimes; a damning Independent Police Conduct Authority (IPCA) report and a clandestine extra-marital relationship, underpinned by a power imbalance.

But alongside the legal and professional reckoning also came the collapse of the life McSkimming had carefully curated.

The two Waikanae houses were sold; honours and affiliations quietly rescinded; his policing medals revoked.

Even the church that once welcomed him no longer opened its doors to him in person. Officers with certificates signed by him now requested they be re-signed by someone else.

Step by step, McSkimming was expunged from the record, his name struck from the blue brotherhood’s family tree.

But there was also a peculiar irony to McSkimming’s downfall: it was entirely of his own making, some spoken to by The Post say.

If he hadn’t had the audacity to put his hand up for the top job, the chain of events that led to him being exposed might never have been set in motion. No one would have done a deep dive into his past.

The historic complaints Ms Z filed might have stayed buried. His work computer might have remained unexamined. And the objectionable material that was the final nail in his undoing might never have come to light.

In a sense, the ambition that once saw him destined for policing royalty was the very thing that tore McSkimming’s world apart.

It was an arrogance most police officers spoken to for this story noticed, and in the eyes of one detective, was “verging on narcissism”.

But perhaps the same trait that made him ambitious enough to challenge Chambers for the top job - knowing what was lying barely beneath the surface - was also the trait that convinced him the law didn’t apply to him.

“Honestly, I think that’s the only way you can explain what he did. There’s no other way of explaining his behaviour than for him to have thought he was above the law,” the detective said.

Another source said McSkimming certainly wasn’t a computer klutz, and would have been well aware his internet searches were discoverable.

A third added that McSkimming's use of his work devices to commit the offending for “deviant purposes” showed quite how “entitled and arrogant” he was.

Even amid McSkimming’s first and only public statement on the saga - delivered through his lawyer - his bravado shone through.

“Mr McSkimming is cooperating fully with police and looks forward to the investigation being concluded swiftly, after which he expects to resume his duties as Deputy Commissioner,” the January 2025 statement read.

As one detective told The Post: “To think he would come back, after what we were starting to learn, is inconceivable.”

By July, McSkimming had been charged with eight counts of possessing objectionable material. Going back to work was replaced by fears of going to jail.

Coster, along with everyone else who once worked with McSkimming and supported his climb through the ranks, was left to reconsider his position on his former deputy, and left to wonder how he and others had been conned so convincingly for so long, tarnishing otherwise outstanding careers in the process.

But how did he get away with it?

According to another senior officer spoken to by The Post, the ripple effect of McSkimming’s collapse might be partially explained by his self-assuredness.

McSkimming was, he said, highly intelligent: “He had a convincing nature about him that when he spoke, people believed what he was saying. He always spoke with such conviction and came across so self-assured. And when someone is like that, people tend to side with them.

“I think that’s where the others fell into his trap. Instead of following the processes, they chose to deviate from them and follow his lead. They were sucked in by an extreme manipulator,” the officer said.

The officer added that people like McSkimming, who commit the offences he did, are “exceedingly good at hiding who they are”, and will go to extreme lengths to disguise their behaviour.

To this end, the 135-page IPCA report points to McSkimming’s failure to ever tell the whole story about his involvement in Ms Z’s employment as “misleading”.

To his colleagues alike, he was a chameleon.

One person described him to The Post as a cold technocrat. “He had no charm, zero charm”, and it was clear he was 'in a hurry', and at times unable to contain his ambition.

McSkimming’s intelligence is also a recurring theme among those who knew him.

But so too, several said, was his unfathomable stupidity in helping Ms Z get a job in the police, and arranging for her to work from an office close to him.

“But what astonished me was the blasé attitude around having porn on his work device. And it’s not consensual adult sex, obviously. But kiddy-porn? And bestiality? I mean, seriously, that beggars belief,” one said.

And so, in the end, the mercury settled.

The man who had been many things to many people had at last crystallised into his final form in the public’s eye - and, in the words of one detective, his legacy would forever be that of a “monster”.

You can read more about the cops, the culture and the cover-up that led to Jevon McSkimming’s downfall here and an analysis of how the plods lost the plot here.