‘We got an uppercut’: Meet the duo tasked with restoring faith in a bruised police force
Friday, 30 January 2026
For much of last year, New Zealand Police felt like a ship listing in public view.
Cultural rot had been exposed at the highest levels, with now-disgraced Jevon McSkimming at its core, as questions swirled about whether the organisation charged with upholding the law could still credibly police itself.
But now the decks are cleared and two fresh faces are stepping into the second-highest rank of deputy police commissioner: Jill Rogers and Michael (Mike) Pannett.
Together, they inherit an organisation chastened by scrutiny, grappling with recruitment challenges and an evolving crime landscape.
Read More:
Scandal and scrutiny: The year that tested New Zealand’s top cop
Jevon McSkimming: The totally charmless, conscientious copper from the sticks who defies definition
Asked about last year, Rogers is blunt: “We got an uppercut”.
“You don’t have the luxury of coasting in this role. Our community deserves us to be our best, and last year showed us that we weren’t,” she says.
For Pannett, the priority is equally clear: “We have to make sure we have the public trust and confidence that enables us to do our job. Restoring that is a big focus for me.”
A new kind of leadership
On Monday morning, Rogers sat before a selection panel, vying to make permanent the position she’d been holding in an acting capacity for almost a year.
By evening, confirmation came: she was top cop Richard Chambers’ pick to be second-in-command. A wave of “relief and excitement” followed.
Since news of her appointment broke, Rogers has received messages from colleagues spanning her 33-year policing career, prompting reflection as much as anticipation.
But when she thinks back, it isn’t promotions or postings she reaches for first, it’s the people.
One young girl in particular – a victim of child sexual assault – has stuck with Rogers from her detective years.
It was the kind of investigation that takes years, spanning multiple victims, witnesses and technical experts.
“You’re conducting a whole orchestra to bring it all together to get the result for that young girl and the other victims.”
Fifteen years later, Rogers was at a police graduation in Manukau in her role as District Commander when she noticed a family lingering at the edge of the room.
She recognised them instantly. The girl was there too, now grown, for the graduation of her partner.
“She came up to me and said, ‘You know who I am’. And I did, I knew exactly who she was,” Rogers recalls, tears in her eyes.
The encounter crystallised something she’s learnt over time: that policing leaves echoes. Some are institutional, others intensely personal.
“As you go through different levels of the organisation, you learn that you contribute in different ways. There’s that direct contact with victims earlier on, but now my role is to help support our people to be at their best.”
A farm girl from Ōtorohanga, Rogers spent two years as a primary school teacher before graduating from Police College in 1993.
The desire to be a cop could, at least in part, be traced back to a childhood memory of the community policeman.
“He came to visit us at school, and – you wouldn’t be allowed to do it now – but he drove the police car across the field with his knees,” Rogers laughs. “He was a local icon in the community […] It always stuck in my mind as a pretty cool job.”
Rogers began with general duties in Auckland City, before joining the Criminal Investigation Branch (CIB) as a detective just three years later.
Colleagues had noticed her neat handwriting and clear witness statements. One request turned into another and she was encouraged to sit the detective’s course.
“None of my career has had a path that’s been deliberate. I’ve had some amazing bosses that have seen something and said, ‘Why don’t you try this or that?’’
But investigative work pulled her in: “You solve puzzles, and you work collectively as a team to come up with the answers to some pretty challenging things”.
Across nearly two decades, she worked “lots of tricky and complex” investigations, including when former RSA-employee William Bell murdered three and seriously injured another during an aggravated robbery of the Panmure branch in 2001.
Eventually, a belief in making space for others pulled Rogers back into uniform and leadership: “It’s always been a philosophy of mine that you’ve got to bring the next generations through […] You’ve got to allow space for someone else to lead.”
In 2017, Rogers took on the post of District Commander of Counties Manukau. It was there that she made one of her most visible leadership moves.
She replaced the dark leather furniture used by her predecessors with brightly upholstered sofas in pink and green patterns. From the corridor, her office glowed.
“I never intended it to say, ‘Here’s the new boss,’” she laughs. “It would break the ice. People would walk in and just crack up laughing”
The chairs became a kind of shorthand for Rogers’ approach: serious work, but not joyless; authority without intimidation.
“In that office, really serious things happened. But we can work hard and still be good to work with. We can even have some fun.”
More recently, Rogers became the police face of the fatal end to the search for fugitive Tom Phillips and his children.
But for her, the role was less about visibility than steady leadership: “You never think about it as being the face of it. You have a role to do”.
And for Rogers that role was providing answers when she could, restraint when she couldn’t. Reassurance without false certainty.
“My focus was making sure everyone else could get on with what they needed to do.”
It’s a kind of leadership Rogers has grown into over decades – less command-and-control, more containment and facilitation.
When Rogers joined the police in the early 1990s, the job looked very different. There were no sophisticated tactical assets or digital tools to lean on – just a baton and a trusted partner.
Small stations taught her fast, sometimes painful lessons, as her supervisors quietly put guardrails in place.
Those early lessons shaped her understanding of leadership: “You don’t get to own just the good. When you take on leadership roles, you have to be there for the stumbles too.”
While no longer investigating or standing at cordons, Rogers sees herself now as an “unblocker” – someone who removes obstacles so frontline officers can do their jobs.
Rogers spent last week in the Bay of Plenty, working alongside officers in the aftermath of two fatal landslides – an experience that reminded her how much leadership matters.
“There were some really raw emotions there […] It was a real privilege to be on the ground from early on and say, ‘Hey, we’re here to support you in whatever you need’.”
She’s clear-eyed about the challenges ahead, but equally clear about what she doesn’t want: “I don’t want a legacy. I want to bring through other great leaders.”
From Northland streets to Five Eyes briefings
Pannett has spent four decades learning how harm moves – across communities, across borders, and across institutions.
But for a man whose career has stretched from one-person police stations in Northland to Five Eyes intelligence briefings, the one case in particular that still “bugs” him comes from early on.
In 1996, backpacker Sallina Nadia Tuhou was abducted and killed in Northland in a “violent and unprovoked attack”.
Her body was never found, shaking the local community of Kawakawa and leaving two children without their mother.
“A number of the key people involved are now dead, which makes it harder, but I do believe one day we’ll find out where her body is,” Pannett says.
Pannett joined police as a cadet 40 years ago, drawn in by a desire for no two days to be the same.
His early years were spent in Auckland and Northland, policing both dense urban environments and isolated rural communities.
“You learn a degree of humility,” he says of those early postings. “It’s really important to treat people in a way that leaves a positive legacy. I was told once, ‘Treat everyone like you would treat your own family’ and that’s a great place to start.”
Northland is a beautiful region – beaches, fishing, tight-knit communities – but also one shaped by entrenched poverty, high drug use, and serious crime, he says.
Workloads were heavy, the demand relentless. He worked one-person stations, running major organised crime and undercover operations, and helped set up one of the first intelligence units in Northland.
“It’s full-on policing,” he says. “But it’s a great place to learn.”
But his time working up north didn’t just teach him how to be a good investigator, it taught him to read patterns – to understand how crime clustered, how communities were affected, and how information could be turned into action.
He became “passionate” about the overlap between investigations and intelligence.
“Intelligence is about informing operational activity,” he explains. “Both through research or an understanding of the criminal environment […] You do a deep dive on a problem and research why it’s occurred, which then informs your operational response.”
These ideas shaped much of the rest of his career.
In 2009, Pannett was promoted to lead intelligence operations at Police National Headquarters, scaling up what he’d learned in Northland – from local agency collaboration to national coordination.
The following year, Pannett became a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit (MNZM) for his services to New Zealand Police, an accolade that came as a “bit of a surprise”.
Next, Pannett was posted to Washington DC as New Zealand Police’s liaison officer – initially a role whose future was uncertain. Then the world shifted.
The emergence of ISIS, global terror attacks, and rapidly changing security threats transformed the job overnight.
“That period was a bit of a coming of age for New Zealand and our police, where we were recognised for the skills that we had, investigatively, intelligence-wise but also for our relationships.”
New Zealand Police began to be recognised not just as participants, but as credible contributors.
Pannett recalls a particular occasion where he was speaking to the heads of the other Five Eyes nations’ law enforcement agencies, who praised the versatility of New Zealand’s police force.
“Our people are multi-skilled. They’re able to jump from serious crime to organised crime to community policing […] A lot of that comes down to the training and our people, but there’s also a bit of a Kiwi ‘can do’ attitude.”
This adaptability was tested repeatedly during Pannett’s US-based tenure.
One of the most intense episodes came with the international pursuit of fugitive Phillip John Smith, who fled New Zealand for South America in 2014.
Smith had been on temporary release from prison, where he was serving a life sentence for murdering the father of a young boy he had been sexually abusing in 1995.
Using networks built across the Americas, Pannett helped coordinate efforts with police in Chile, Brazil, the US, and members of the public in Rio de Janeiro to track, arrest, and return Smith.
“You learn a lot in a hurry,” he says.
Back home, Pannett was appointed Assistant Commissioner in 2016 and later became National Commander during the 2019 Christchurch mosque attacks.
He describes that period as “chaotic” and deeply sobering – but also as a moment that revealed extraordinary resilience.
“I was incredibly proud of the police response and how everybody came together in what were incredibly distressing circumstances.”
And it’s that sense of community – not strategy documents – that Pannett returns to when asked about rebuilding trust in police.
Rebuilding trust, he says, starts with credibility: doing what you say you’re going to do, being visible, listening to communities, and supporting staff properly.
Pannett is particularly concerned about younger officers being exposed to cumulative trauma early in their careers.
“It’s not uncommon now to see staff attending multiple events, which in their own right would be traumatising, on a day to day basis.”
He hopes to ensure officers have the support, resources and leadership needed to continue to be their best.
Like Rogers, Pannett is upfront about the damage caused to public trust by the actions of the previous top brass (“it was a bit of a shocker)”, and frustrated that failures at senior levels landed on frontline officers doing their jobs.
“Over a period of many years there’s been so much effort put into police culture and the way we work as an organisation. The thing that probably annoyed me was the way it impacted frontline staff, who were out there doing an amazing job.”
At 64, Pannett shows no signs of slowing down. He still gets “a buzz” from coming to work and ensuring he makes one small positive difference each day.
Appointed statutory Deputy Commissioner just before Christmas, Pannett worked through the New Year on the frontline, before taking a short break back up north – returning, briefly, to where his policing career began.
Together, Rogers and Pannett are clear about what they’re not bringing with them into the job. Neither talks about reinvention or grand gestures. Neither suggests past mistakes can be erased.
But both are explicit about one thing: there are no skeletons in their closest waiting to be discovered.