KEY POINTS:
How can Police Commissioner Howard Broad's apology to the women harmed by sex abuse and raped by serving officers be taken seriously, particularly after the revelations that his force fought tooth and nail to stop the Bazley inquiry being widened to examine the police response to all rape complaints?
Broad justifies Police headquarters' decision to oppose commissioner Margaret Bazley's intention to survey general sexual assault complainants with the astonishing disclosure that the proposed method of data collection could have been prejudicial to the police.
The counter - that the failure to probe whether the obvious bias displayed against some complainants of police rape extended to other New Zealand women prejudiced women's interests - does not seem to have featured highly in the Police Commissioner's thinking.
We don't know how big a difference it would have made to the lives of the vulnerable New Zealand women who have told Rape Crisis centres they felt the police had not taken their complaints seriously, if the issue had at least been aired by the Bazley Inquiry.
We don't know how many women were persuaded to withdraw their complaints because of a built-in bias by some police, or, simply because the police (justifiably) felt there was insufficient evidence to ram home a successful criminal action.
Again, we won't know how many of the unsuccessful complaints might have resulted in a successful criminal action if the women had been able to fight their corner with the level of armament available to the police defending theirs. But we damn well ought to.
It's hard to believe the attitudes displayed in a 2004 email relate only to complainants of sexual abuse by police.
"The [complainant] would be looking for a money train. If you can prove her wrong lock the bitch up for making a false complaint. I hate people who cause shit like this."
In this case, police were investigating an allegation that coercion was involved when a woman had sex with a police officer in a patrol car in 1989.
Bazley wanted to know to what extent such attitudes may have been endemic.
But police opposition forced her to pull her claws in.
As the results of Bazley's inquiry sink in, the Police Commissioner would be doing New Zealand women a favour by requesting his own survey into his officers' attitudes towards rape complaints.
Broad wasn't in the top job when police lawyers issued their 2005 challenge.
But right now it looks as if the lessons the police have learned from this affair are skin deep at best.
If Broad can't bring himself to demand further inquiries on this score, then Police Minister Annette King should commission a survey herself.
The report of the Inquiry into Police Conduct revealed that 141 of 313 complaints laid against 222 serving officers between 1979 and 2005 contained sufficient evidence to lay criminal charges or take disciplinary action.
But just 32 officers had criminal charges laid against them as a result of 45 complaints. 10 resulted in conviction. Twenty were discharged and two suicided.
Rape Crisis centres probably have a good idea of just how many criminal actions have gone begging because of police intransigence. But that's just one of the stratagems Police headquarters used to contain damage from Bazley's inquiries.
Louise Nicholas and Judith Garrett, two women who sparked the inquiry with public allegations that they had been raped by male police officers, should have had their day in front of the inquiry.
But instead they effectively shut down the public inquiry by launching criminal actions.
It was inevitable some cases would fail given the sequencing of criminal actions and the conventions that prevented prior rape convictions from being aired in court.
The report is not a patch on what it would have been if Bazley had not had her prime lines of inquiry closed off.
Police should have been been questioned publicly about their procedures in relation to Nicholas and Garrett.
But instead the star witnesses were shamed by the failure of police prosecutors to ram home the criminal cases. The great irony of this dreadful episode is that the police pulled out all the stops to ensure the concept of natural justice was observed in their case.
