McSkimming’s ‘porn’ addiction overwhelmed him

Thursday, 18 December 2025

Former deputy police commissioner Jevon McSkimming had a pornography addiction that saw him committing serious crimes even during work time, a court has heard.

McSkimming, 52, was sentenced on Wednesday to nine months’ home detention for having child exploitation and bestiality material.

In Wellington District Court he had pleaded guilty to three charges of possessing objectionable material.

The charges covered internet searches he’d made since about mid-2020 that police were able to discover but it emerged at Wednesday’s hearing that it had been going on as early as 2015.

His case was unusual for being charged for essentially viewing the objectionable material without downloading or storing it.

The court was told that many 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.

McSkimming knew he would likely not be going to jail after earlier receiving a sentencing indication — not able to be published at the time — to find out what type of sentence he could receive if he pleaded guilty.

The address for McSkimming’s detention was suppressed.

His lawyer, Letizea Ord, said McSkimming was a flawed individual whose overwhelming addiction to pornography had wrecked his life.

Judge Tim Black said he was told steps had been taken to make it impossible for McSkimming to access objectionable material at home.

He said people would be alarmed to know McSkimming had found the material with a simple Google search.

The court was told that when McSkimming knew he was being investigated he 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.

Police chose 14 searches to analyse further and half of those had objectionable material.

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. He picked 48 to enlarge.

It was estimated he might have “clicked on” 160 images in all to look at more closely.

McSkimming used a police-issue cellphone and laptop, but mostly the phone, to look for pornography and objectionable publications. In December 2024, when he was under scrutiny for his conduct with a younger woman, it was noticed he was using sexually explicit search terms online.

The court was told analysis of McSkimming’s searches was limited so his former police colleagues avoided “undue exposure” to the type of material he had found.

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 sex offending caused, Hawes said.

McSkimming was the second-highest ranking police officer in the country and must have known what he was doing was wrong, Hawes said.

He said McSkimming’s remorse was for the impact on himself and those close to him, but the judge accepted remorse was genuine.

The sentence includes a probation officer’s oversight during home detention and six months past the end of it.

The court was told McSkimming had been seeing a psychologist and a faith-based therapist as part of his rehabilitation.

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.

The Independent Police Conduct Authority has released one report into how police responded to the woman’s complaints against McSkimming. The authority has yet to release reports into the police investigation into McSkimming’s possession of objectionable material, the investigation into allegations of sexual misconduct and also the arrest of McSkimming’s complainant.