KEY POINTS:
Prime Minister Helen Clark has weighed into the latest police sex scandal saying any officers found to have been involved should be disciplined.
Police have promised a thorough investigation into potentially highly damaging new allegations that serving officers used batons and handcuffs in group sex - with a
police radio blaring in the background.
The alleged incident was recorded on tape.
Deputy Police Commissioner Rob Pope said last night, after Police Minister Annette King called for an urgent report, that an investigation would be conducted as soon as possible.
Today Miss Clark said it was clear from the tape and other allegations that have surfaced that something went on.
She said: "Given the videotapes and the rest of it, we have to assume that something happened and if anything like that happened, it's frankly disgusting.
"If there are any people in that frame who are currently serving police officers that's absolutely a matter for disciplinary attention."
The allegations, by a woman who claims to have had sex with uniformed officers introduced to her by convicted rapist and former detective Brad Shipton, have emerged just days before findings of the Commission of Inquiry into Police Conduct are due to go public.
Although the woman told Sunday News she considered those encounters consensual at the time, on reflection she thought Shipton and the others had exploited her "like a circus seal".
She alleges the activities took place between the mid-1990s and 2002 in the Bay of Plenty.
That makes them more current than the allegations that sparked the inquiry, which began in 2004 after Rotorua woman Louise Nicholas claimed she was raped in the mid-1980s by Shipton and fellow police officers Bob Schollum and Clint Rickards, who remains suspended as an Auckland-based Assistant Commissioner of Police.
All three have been acquitted of raping her and another woman in two separate trials, but Shipton and Schollum are serving jail terms after being found guilty of taking part with other men in a pack rape on a woman in Mt Maunganui in 1989.
The Sunday newspaper published images of a lurid, hour-long homemade videotape allegedly featuring Shipton and two other men involved in an orgy with the woman at the centre of the new allegations.
The soundtrack of a music television show playing in the background indicates the video was made after September 2001.
Although those men were both described as former police officers, the newspaper reported claims by the woman that:
* She had sex with serving officers while they were on duty, in uniform, and within earshot of a police radio.
* The officers used police handcuffs and batons on her during sex.
* She has a photo of a baton being used on her sexually.
* She was the victim of a "controlled rape" sex role-play involving a serving officer.
* She was shackled to the ceiling of a building by Shipton, who bit her before having sex with her.
Shipton's lawyer, Bill Nabney, said he could not comment as prison telephone restrictions meant he would not have a chance until today to discuss them with his client.
But Mr Pope said last night that the police took a serious view of the allegations and would thoroughly and swiftly investigate them.
"Clearly a lot of information may be reliant on people coming forward, but we will still be thoroughly investigating it to the best means we can," he told the Herald.
"If the behaviour as such is provable, it's as unacceptable now as it was back in the '80s and '90s and we do need to investigate thoroughly."
Ms King appeared shocked to be told by the Herald yesterday of the allegations, saying nobody had mentioned them to her and she did not generally read Sunday News.
"It is the first I have heard about it and I will be seeking an urgent report from the commissioner," she said.
"But I would also urge the woman to come forward to the police. It has to be checked out - I think it would be unfair on every serving police officer to have allegations sitting out there that label the police without them being checked out, because that is pretty serious stuff."
Police regulations state officers can be disciplined for conduct tending to bring discredit on the service.
Louise Nicholas said she had not known of the allegations until reading the newspaper yesterday but was not surprised by them.
"It just absolutely makes you sick."
She said they belied claims by the Police Association and others that alleged sexual misbehaviour by officers was isolated to the 1980s.
"I'm sorry, but it has been going on before the '80s, during the '90s, the 2000s and it will continue to go on until the cops themselves grow some balls and stamp it out.
"They can't expect rape survivors and ministers to make the changes - they've got to do it themselves."
National MPs Simon Power and Chester Borrows urged police to act swiftly.
- additional reporting: NEWSTALK ZB
