When police break the law

More and more police officers seem to be ending up on the wrong side of court cases. JAN CORBETT investigates if - and why - standards are slipping.

When it's the cop who turns out to be the bad guy, it's usually the plot of a Hollywood movie or a newsclip from Queensland or the United States.

But in this country it cannot be long before police who have broken the law are the subject of a documentary, funded, no doubt, by New Zealand On Air.

The opening scene could be a cascade of newspaper clippings from the past year about policemen being charged with assault, theft, fraud, drink driving, drug offences, and rape. Significantly, because this is occurring with increased regularity, the stories would not always be found on the front page.

Such a documentary might show flashes of 37-year-old Mangakino senior constable Colin McLean, convicted of rape and assault, or 38-year-old Rotorua constable Wiki Waru, who took $595 from a tourist's wallet that had been handed in.

There might be a mention of a story reported briefly this week of a Whakatane sergeant charged with perjury. Two other serious cases are still before the courts. We report today that 15 police officers have been arrested for drink driving offences since 1995.

It all adds up to an apparently shocking trend of the people who are there to uphold the law and protect us, instead breaking the law and violating us.

It is not only a betrayal of the trust society places in its police force, but a crack in a structure that protects us from slipping into a corrupt tyranny.

Why aren't the sirens squealing louder about this?

Last year 20 police officers were charged with these types of criminal offences - down on the high of 27 in 1997, but almost double the 11 and 12 charged in 1998 and 1999 respectively. This year the number charged has already reached 12.

There are two clear views about what is going on, but only one to which people want to put their names .

The other view, on which people are not willing to be quoted, has it that by dropping the starting salary in 1992 and widening the selection criteria to include a wider socially-representative mix, the calibre of person entering the force during the 1990s was not what it had been.

So anxious was the police department to fill its recruitment wings, that it was accepting people with convictions for assault, theft and driving over the alcohol limit.

Says one insider: "I suspect some of the people getting into trouble nowadays wouldn't have been considered when the applicant pool was bigger."

He talks of new recruits who either lack the intelligence or judgment to do the job or who have close family associations with gang members.

But although Assistant Commissioner Steve Long, who is in charge of police discipline, says they pore over the details of every instance of a police officer turning criminal, they have found no discernible pattern of either age or recruitment period or previous record.

People with criminal, drink driving or other serious driving offence convictions have not been accepted into the police force for close to three years. The police say this is not a toughening up of the conviction policy, more a clarification of one that was unevenly applied.

They say there has always been a discretion to admit people who've been on the wrong side of the law in the past.

Youthful mistakes, the argument goes, should not preclude otherwise good candidates from being accepted.

According to the police brochure about "joining the team that makes a difference" the department will tolerate less serious convictions that "will be assessed on a case-by-case basis."

You don't need to have School C to be a police officer. But you do have to pass the police's own academic and psychological assessment tests and in the first two years complete two university papers on criminal law and problem solving, and understanding human behaviour.

Police National Headquarters was unable to produce figures of educational standards across the force, but claims more are tertiary educated than ever before.

Of course you also need to be able to run, swim, keep good health, provide six references and also have your family assessed.

You can take a year-long polytechnic course to get you up to speed to pass the entry test - but that is also derided by critics as a sign the police are accepting people who are intellectually challenged.

But again, no evidence has been flushed out that it is the dim who are breaking the law on or off-duty.

What the police do admit is that they are finding it more and more difficult to recruit. That cannot help but mean fewer people whose qualities far exceeded the police entry threshold than there were when policing was a more attractive career.

Starting salaries were raised again in 1997 and are now the equivalent of $27,979 a year for the first 18 weeks of training, rising to $46,125 on graduation. But this is still not enough to lure enough mature applicants from Auckland, where high property prices have lumbered people with high mortgages and there is a greater range of career options.

While Assistant Commissioner John White admits recruitment came under pressure when the politicians decided to increase police numbers - the John Banks 900 and the Coalition government's 500 - the entry bar has not been lowered, he insists.

And in answer to the theory that going for social diversity has eroded standards, he says that a deliberate policy of recruiting more women, Maori, Pacific Island and Asian police officers, so that the force better reflects the society it is policing, has not made for an unethical and ill-disciplined force.

Indeed, despite these efforts the police force is still a white man's preserve. Only 15 per cent of the force are women, 9 per cent Maori, 1.5 per cent Pacific Island and the Asian representation is too small to register.

But it was not just a drop in starting salaries that made it less attractive. Two things happened in the 1980s that changed the police. One was the 1981 Springbok tour, which saw normally law-abiding people turn hostile to the police force, and others, who liked the idea of picking up a baton against their fellows, develop an attraction to it. The theory is that the force began attracting too many of the wrong kind.

Then came the introduction of the Police Early Retirement Fund (Perf). Not only did it encourage an exodus of talent and experience, but suddenly joining the police force looked like a short-term job you did for 15 years before going out into business as a private investigator or security manager. No longer was it a desirable life-long career. All up, this line of argument goes, good solid people looked for jobs elsewhere.

The other view on this apparent upsurge in cops turning bad is that our police force has always harboured its share of thugs, thieves, liars and rapists, but they are no longer quietly tolerated or silently disposed of.

Criminologist Greg Newbold attributes our newfound awareness of rogue cops to the zero-tolerance of police misconduct introduced by former police commissioner Peter Doone, who was, ironically, snared by those same standards.

Commissioner Rob Robinson is said to be equally determined to run a clean force. Unlike average citizens, cops caught drunk in charge of a vehicle, are sacked.

Victoria University senior law lecturer Neil Cameron suspects that social changes that have made us less tolerant of drink drivers and have made women more confident about reporting rape, even by a policeman, may have also helped flush police offenders into the spotlight.

Certainly Newsweek has reported that US police are subject to a similar phenomenon, with a spate of sexual abuse claims against cops surfacing across the country.

The magazine attributes it to "debates in the workplace and on college campuses, [giving] sexual harassment and date rape a place in our national dialogue. At the same time high-profile cases of police misconduct ... have offered stark reminders of how police can cross the line."

Neil Cameron points out the average age of new recruits has increased to 28 years, meaning they may be less intimidated by peer pressure and less likely to pull the blue veil over their colleagues' misdemeanours.

Trevor Morley, a policeman in the 1970s who now runs a thriving security and investigation firm, remembers in his day "a couple of police convicted of drink driving who kept their jobs."

Back then, police found drinking and driving, might get a warning and be driven home by a colleague. These days they face court like anyone else. And when their police mates get caught trying to smuggle them through a back door, they face a reprimand from their superiors.

He says in the old days if a police officer "biffed a guy in the ear" during an arrest "they'd be told to apologise." These days they face suspension and a Police Complaints Authority Investigation.

In the case of policeman Chris Moore, convicted and discharged of an assault on a 71-year-old man, the Employment Court ruled that the police department's decision to sack him, went too far.

When you ask the police hierarchy why there suddenly appears to be so many police officers facing criminal charges, the answer is invariably that there are no more than usual.

However the figures the department supplied to the Weekend Herald, go back only four years. Earlier figures are trapped between databases, and could not be retrieved before our deadline, according to media liaison officer Jon Neilson.

Which is why Police Association national vice-president Richard Middleton, is able to say, "Until we do an in-depth study of the figures, we don't actually know if there is an increase in the number of police up on charges."

However a search of newspaper clipping files shows only the occasional story of police facing criminal charges before 1997.

Nevertheless, says Richard Middleton, the Police Association "accepts a vigorous investigation of all alleged offending by officers as part and parcel of maintaining the integrity of the police."

The good news, according to Long, is that "we're confident that if there is offending going on, we get to it and deal with it."

Internally, he says, "we look at each case and take stock of the management of the police officers around it. We're learning we have to be ever vigilant about policing and have to be on the pace about maintaining police discipline."

Whistleblowers, he says, will be congratulated.

In the old days police trainees would be warned they were at greatest risk of breaking the law when they were dealing with the three p's - property, prostitutes and that other word for alcohol.

Long says there are strict internal auditing procedures to ensure attractive property does not go missing. And because there is always a risk in the rough handling of prisoners, they are putting cameras and recording equipment in police cells to not only protect detainees from assault but to also protect police officers from false accusations.

The blue veil is perhaps being penetrated by the new technology. Where would Rodney King have been without an amateur with a video camera?

The one thing that everyone agrees on, is that New Zealand still enjoys one of the least corrupt police forces in the world.

One officer talks of only ever been offered one $50 bribe. He managed to raise it to $200, saw the colour of the money, and took it - as evidence.

* To lay a complaint against a police officer you suspect of committing a crime or breaching police regulations, contact either the senior sergeant at the station concerned, the area controller, the District Commander or see the procedure on the police website. New Zealand Police. You can at the same time lay a complaint with the Police Complaints Authority.