Why police won’t back a sexual assault refresher course

Monday, 1 December 2025

The Independent Police Conduct Authority’s investigation into the McSkimming IPCA case reveals a collapse of processes at the very top of police. It has sparked fresh debate over training, culture and whether the force can maintain the trust it’s worked years to rebuild. Amelia Wade reports

Acting deputy police commissioner Tusha Penny says she shed more tears in the week following the damning report into the handling of sexual assault complaints made against Jevon McSkimming than she has in the past year.

“My only concern was that we would have rape victims sitting out in communities being harmed and hurt, and that they would think they couldn't come to the New Zealand police.”

For Penny, who has spent most of her career working with victim-survivors, the thought that trust in police may have slipped because of the McSkimming case is devastating.

“We can't have this moment in time where we have got victims out in the community that go ‘we can't come to police because either they won't believe us, they won't take it seriously, or they won't investigate it’.”

Read more:

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

• ‘An explanation, Andy’: Survivors call on Coster to speak out

• Moving on: The controversial plan to shift people from Auckland city’s streets

Her conviction comes from experience. One of her earliest investigations was into ‘The Beast of Blenheim’, serial rapist Stuart Murray Wilson, a case in which she saw first-hand how women’s complaints had been dismissed by police.

Later, Penny gave evidence to the Dame Margaret Bazley-led Commission of Inquiry which followed Louise Nicholas’ allegations of rape by police officers. After that, she became the first national manager of child protection and sexual violence, leading a sweeping national change programme.

Police is not the organisation it once was, Penny says. “We’re not perfect, we’re on a journey.”

That journey has been jolted by this month’s Independent Police Conduct Authority report, which found that for years senior police repeatedly ignored proper processes after receiving sexual assault complaints about one of their own: former deputy commissioner Jevon McSkimming.

The complainant, referred to as Ms Z, was much younger than McSkimming when the pair had an affair. After it ended and he continued rising through the ranks, she began emailing allegations to him, his colleagues and the media. She claimed he took advantage of her and threatened her with intimate images.

Yet McSkimming persuaded several senior colleagues — including then commissioner Andrew Coster — that she was simply a jilted ex-partner harassing him. Her allegations were dismissed, and at several points over several years, very senior police officers failed in their duties to act.

“Concerningly, some within police failed to recognise that a possible victim of sexual assault, who had allegedly been told by a very senior police officer that she would not be listened to (and that explicit images of her might be distributed) if she tried to complain, might present as a desperate person sending sometimes extreme and abusive emails to be heard,” the IPCA said.

It was only once the matter finally reached officers with specialist sexual assault experience that anyone asked fundamental questions: Why had Ms Z never been spoken to? Why was she not being treated as a complainant? And why was there no record of her allegations?

Detective Inspector Nicola Reeves, referred to in the report as Officer D, was the one who recognised the hundreds of emails as a potential sign of victimisation rather than harassment. One of the most experienced investigators in the country, Reeves told the IPCA police had not followed policy “whatsoever”. She said what she saw “looks like a cover-up”.

“Jevon has tried to get rid of this by making a complaint and … making [Ms Z] the villain, when in actual fact what he perhaps should have done was gone: 'Can someone look at this and investigate it and get it cleared up? Because I've got designs on the future, and I want my integrity intact, so I welcome an investigation. Let's get it cleared up, get it out of the way',” she told the IPCA.

Reeves’ instincts are exactly why numerous victim-survivor advocates are calling for all police - right from college through to top brass - to be put through a “refresher course” on sexual assault response.

McSkimming has never been charged with sexual offending, but the fact he was able to persuade colleagues to bypass protocol has been described to The Post as a wake-up call.

Kathryn McPhillips, from HELP Auckland, which works with police to help survivors, says one of the things missing from the response so far is more training.

“People who sexually offend are so good at covering up, are so good at seeming like they're the great guy, often, not always, but often. And so it needs somebody really experienced to be able to call it out.”

Advocate and journalist Ali Mau, who is developing the alternative reporting platform Tika, says frontline detectives working with victim-survivors are doing “incredible mahi” and have driven much of the progress made since the Bazley review. But trust in police has undoubtedly taken a hit, she says, and more training - and clearly communicating that it is happening - could help rebuild that trust.

“If I could advise police, I would say it would be good to urgently ensure that every sworn police officer, in fact, every member of the police force, is given training in survivor-focused procedure, policy and procedure. I would actually see that as a bare minimum right now.”

Former chief victims advisor Kim McGregor echoes the call for more training but said the challenge was that there are 15,000 police officers. She would also like to see better advocacy for victims and an automated IT system which ensured every complainant was informed of their rights.

“I have been told they can’t train their way out of this,” she says.

Penny disagrees that a whole-of-organisation refresher is necessary.

She says that if existing processes are followed, all allegations of sexual harm should be immediately referred to a specialist officer. The issue in the McSkimming case was not lack of training but lack of adherence.

When challenged that the IPCA shows processes can and have been circumvented, she agreed and said that training for strategic leaders and detectives is being redeveloped to incorporate lessons from the report.

There are four levels of sexual assault training. Every officer goes through the first round as a recruit at police college.

“Our frontline staff … often get called to, or stumble upon, victims of sexual violence, and it is critically important that they know how to have a victim focus, that they also need to know what to do with evidence and what the procedure is for that first step.”

There are two more courses at the detective level, then the top tier is an intensive week-long advanced sexual assault course for sergeants and senior sergeants stepping into a more senior role or a specialist unit.

Nicholas, who has worked with police since the Bazley inquiry, presents to the course and her case is part of the training.

“Louise has walked alongside us since the commission of inquiry as a partner to ensure that our training is correct,” Penny says.

“She's bringing all that in because every day she's working on the ground with some survivors who are either going through court or dealing with trauma and she's making sure she's bringing that into our training as well.”

Penny said the views and work of campaigners were “critically important” and their input has been essential to the change in culture the police had been through.

Penny says campaigners’ perspectives have been essential to the cultural shift police have undergone. While she does not support a force-wide refresher, she says police are considering creating another specialist adult sexual assault course.

She also sits on the new senior leadership oversight group established after the IPCA report, which will be in place “as long as it needs to be”. External experts will be brought in to assess training across the organisation.

Among the IPCA recommendations was establishing a nationally consistent ethics training programme, including a refresher programme, that all police officers are required to attend. Work to address this recommendation is under way.

The organisation had to make revolutionary changes to be evolutionary, Penny said, and police were at a moment in time where they didn’t want the public to lose faith.

The push for cultural change has been a long-term project. A 2023 monitoring report, 15 years of change, mapped the progress since the Bazley review.

In the foreword, then-commissioner Coster wrote that police must bring humanity to every interaction.

“Being able to see a person from a human perspective … means we can respond more appropriately,” he said.

The report noted that “society has begun to recognise that victim blaming is not appropriate”, and legislative change has followed. Yet now, in the wake of the McSkimming scandal, the failures of senior leaders - including the top police officer in the country at the time - pose a direct challenge to that progress.

Current commissioner Richard Chambers has been quick to point out that most officers identified in the report have since left the force.

Penny, who has spent much of her career on sexual violence issues, is also clearly frustrated that the actions of a small group of senior leaders risk undermining decades of work.

“The reality is that the IPCA report discussed the issues of very, very senior leadership, not our detectives out there who are doing it every day.

“And the important thing is all these actions, if they play and we leave people in harm or hurt in communities and they won't come to us, that is what would drag us back decades.”

Advocates have told her they still have confidence in frontline police. Penny says the public should also take comfort in mechanisms such as the quality assurance improvement framework, created after Bazley. Each district undergoes three audits a year. Police are currently reviewing 250 files across six districts.

“We look for adherence or not to policy and protocol. We look for the standard of service to victims. We look for, if it’s the decision-making? Do we think that decision-making is correct and evidence-based?” said Penny.

“I think perception is a destination you try to get to, but the challenge is to keep moving and progressing.”

Criminologist Jan Jordan, who has helped train police officers for two decades, also believes more training is necessary - including for the “upper echelon”.

“If they’ve ever had the training, they’ve clearly forgotten about it.”

But Jordan, the emerita professor of criminology at Te Herenga Waka Victoria University of Wellington, argues the problems run deeper than process or training alone.

She says police loyalty - viewing colleagues as “family” - is ingrained through the nature of the work. But it can lead to tunnel vision and a sense of protecting colleagues at all costs, which is why so many senior officers failed to consider investigating McSkimming’s narrative.

The IPCA itself identified this as a form of “groupthink”.

Jordan says police attitudes also reflect wider societal attitudes about sexual violence: persistent rape myths, male bias, beliefs that women lie, and expectations of a “perfect victim” can all shape how complaints are judged.

“Those rape myths are not dead and buried. At times you can see them bubbling beneath the surface.”

Penny says she’s eager to listen to any advice Jordan offers.

“Jan Jordan is a jewel in the crown for this country,” she says. But she stresses that broader change must happen outside police as well.

“It’s about educating the community and juries about what this looks like. So that's why, in other jurisdictions, they do specialist courts … it's a far broader context than just police, if we're talking about the end to end system of justice for survivors, it's a far bigger place.”