Former deputy police commissioner Jevon McSkimming sentenced over objectionable material
Wednesday, 17 December 2025
Former deputy police commissioner Jevon McSkimming has been sentenced to home detention for having child exploitation and bestiality material.
McSkimming, 52, pleaded guilty in Wellington District Court in November to three charges of possessing objectionable material. But he escaped jail on Wednesday, with a sentence of nine months' home detention.
It emerged at Wednesday’s hearing that McSkimming admitted to report writers that he started seeking out objectionable material online as early as 2015. Police were only able to retrieve information from internet searches from about mid-2020.
McSkimming rubbed his eyes as the judge spoke about his prior good character and the good he had done in the community
Read more:
His case was unusual for being charged for essentially viewing the objectionable material without downloading it.
McSkimming approached the dock knowing he would likely not be going to jail, even though the offending he admitted could be punished by up to 10 years’ imprisonment.
He had asked for a sentencing indication, a process for an accused person to find out what type of sentence they could receive if they pleaded guilty.
His lawyer, Letizea Ord, had told the court McSkimming was a flawed individual whose overwhelming addiction to pornography had wrecked his life.
Sentencing indications cannot be reported until the case has ended.
Judge Tim Black started his calculation at three years’ jail, but with credit for factors such as guilty plea and efforts at rehabilitation that reduced to under two years’ jail, the point at which a judge can consider imposing home detention instead of jail.
Home detention is served at a specific address with absences only as a probation officer allows, for urgent medical treatment, or to avoid injury or a risk to life. The address for McSkimming’s detention is suppressed.
Steps had been taken to make it impossible for McSkimming to access objectionable material at home, the judge said.
He said people would be alarmed to know their teenage children could find objectionable material online with a simple Google search, as McSkimming had.
‘It just kept escalating’
When he knew he was being investigated he had told a colleague that “over the years he had needed different types of pornography to make him feel anything and it just kept escalating”.
As part of the investigation it was calculated that in work hours between 8am and 4pm over the 4½ years of internet searches that were able to be retrieved 7% ‒ or 432 ‒ of McSkimming’s searches were either intended, or highly likely, to find objectionable content.
Those searches served up 2945 objectionable images to browse. He made other searches intended to find adult pornography, a prosecution summary said.
From the 432 search results, police chose 14 to analyse further, and half of those had objectionable material. McSkimming had been using a mainstream search engine and some of the content he found had been moved or deleted by the time police were recreating what he had done.
But in the seven searches with objectionable material were 880 images, with 812 portraying adult bestiality and 68 child exploitation material that would be displayed as “thumbnails” on the screen from which he picked 48 to enlarge.
The process of tracking which images McSkimming enlarged was time intensive and the court was told the analysis was limited so McSkimming’s former police colleagues avoided “undue exposure” to the type of objectionable material he had found.
The court was told that many of the images McSkimming found were artificial intelligence-created, computer generated or cartoon-like depictions of child exploitation and bestiality. But there were also images of real children and young people being abused.
A summary of his crimes said that although some of the images were computer generated, they also looked realistic.
The judge said production, distribution and viewing objectionable material created misery and harm to thousands of children worldwide each year.
Prosecutor Barnaby Hawes had told the court that the offending had been a profound breach of trust, as McSkimming must have known the harm that type of material caused.
Even during work hours he was committing a serious crime while other police officers were picking up the pieces from the harm that type of material caused, Hawes said.
McSkimming was the second-highest ranking police officer in the country and he couldn’t say he didn’t appreciate what he was doing was wrong, Hawes said.
He said McSkimming’s remorse centred on the impact on himself and those close to him, but the judge accepted remorse was genuine.
As a deputy commissioner McSkimming was police chief security officer with special responsibility for information and communications technology oversight. He knew the information security controls applied to use of the internet.
In late 2020 the police senior leadership team stopped receiving six monthly internet usage monitoring reports.
McSkimming used a police-issue cellphone and laptop, but mostly used the phone to look for pornography and objectionable publications. In December 2024 it was noticed he was using explicit terms to search for sexual material on his work devices.
His sentence includes probationary oversight that lasts for six months past the end of detention.
The judge decided not to direct McSkimming’s registration as a child sex offender for reasons that included expert reports putting him at little or no risk of reoffending.
The court was told McSkimming had been seeing a psychologist and a faith-based therapist as part of his rehabilitation. The names of the psychologist and therapist were suppressed out of concern to avoid unwanted attention for involvement in the case.
Separate from his criminal internet use, McSkimming’s relationship with a young woman, and her later complaints about him, caused turmoil in police and political circles about who knew what, when, and what should have been done about it but wasn’t.
Timeline:
July 2020 was the earliest search for pornographic and objectionable publications as it was as far back as records could be retrieved in the police system.
December 18, 2024, the last recorded search for pornographic and objectionable publications. Also in December he was suspended pending an investigation.
In May, Police Minister Mark Mitchell announced McSkimming had resigned before he could be dismissed.
July 2025 McSkimming, identified only as a “prominent” person, first appears in court.
An independent review of police technology finds numerous issues to be improved.
November 2025 McSkimming pleads guilty.