Editorial: Police chief must clean up, then go

Opinion

On first reading, the very public nature of the police crackdown on officers accessing pornography on their work computers has the appearance of over-reaction.

In any workplace with email and internet links, the prevalence of unwanted pornographic messages is a fact of life. In a male-dominated profession like the police, finding that around 3 per cent of staff had kept some of those images aside on their computers and sent them on to others is, sadly, unsurprising. That perhaps 0.3 per cent of the 9900-plus police staff had material which might break the law is indeed unacceptable, but hardly endemic.

Why, then, the public self-flagellation? The answer is not to be found in the sordid secretions on hard-drives and laptops in police stations around the country. It is in the fact that, at every level, this department faces serious questions about its character. And the Police Commissioner knows it.

In this case, as in many crises on his watch, the concern is not only the actual breach of procedures, ethics or the law.

It is what those breaches say to the public about this police department's collective integrity, its discipline and the calibre of those sworn to serve the public.

It is also, unquestionably, about a failure of leadership.

Here, from one moment of the police email system frozen in time, we find 5000 sexually explicit images.

The department and the police union had issued warnings about misuse of the computer system. Some of these images are likely to be illegal, the kind of material which leads Internal Affairs to seek police help in executing warrants to prosecute members of the public.

Yet the main reason this affair has shaken the department, Government and the public is that it shows - again - that too many police staff do not accept higher personal standards than those with whom they deal most frequently.

In other times, the public reaction might be more forgiving. But when there is a growing perception that, in big cities at least, you cannot rely on the police to offer to help you when you need it, tolerance of misbehaviour is scarce.

Public esteem for the police had plunged in an opinion poll taken ahead of Mr Robinson's grave announcement on Thursday. The reasons include: one of the most senior commanders and two former policemen facing serious charges; numerous officers before the courts; the mishandling of the Iraena Asher emergency call and subsequent revelations of inappropriate comments about her; repeated 111 failures.

Throw in the dire public relations resulting from money-raising traffic policing, the trial of a senior sergeant that provoked a judge to lament a "sick" culture in Counties-Manukau, and the failure to act on thousands of complaint files nationally, including some rape allegations.

The commissioner must be held accountable. He advanced the careers of some of those whose characters are in question. He has had years at the top. Now he must report on "police culture" to the existing Commission of Inquiry into police conduct by February.

It will be a case of shutting stable doors long after the horses have bolted, but perhaps Mr Robinson can go inside, muck out and leave, for a successor, a cleaner institution upon his early retirement.