Independent Police Conduct Authority
The Independent Police Conduct Authority is an independent body that considers complaints against the New Zealand Police and oversees their conduct. It derives its responsibility from the Independent Police Conduct Authority Act 1988. Under section 12 of the Act, "the Authority’s functions are to: receive complaints alleging misconduct or neglect of duty by any member of Police or concerning any Police practice, policy or procedure affecting a complainant; and to investigate incidents in which a member of Police (acting in the execution of his or her duty) causes or appears to have caused death or serious bodily harm." Most of the Authority's investigators are former police officers, which creates concerns about the IPCA's independence and effectiveness.
The Authority also monitors conditions of detention and treatment of detainees in Police custody. In this respect, the IPCA is one of several ‘national preventive mechanisms’ designated in 2007 under an amendment to the Crimes of Torture Act 1989. Other agencies with responsibility for monitoring places of detention include the Human Rights Commission, the Children’s Commissioner and the Ombudsmen. Together, these agencies including the IPCA, have joint responsibility to uphold New Zealand's commitment to the Optional Protocol to the United Nations Convention Against Torture and Other Forms of Cruel, Inhuman and Degrading Treatment (OPCAT).
Read more about Independent Police Conduct Authority: History, Membership, Complaints Process, Independence and Effectiveness, Significant IPCA Reports
Famous quotes containing the words independent, police, conduct and/or authority:
“The ex-Presidential situation has its advantages, but with them are certain drawbacks. The correspondence is large. The meritorious demands on one are large. More independent out than in place, but still something of the bondage of the place that was willingly left. On the whole, however, I find many reasons to be content.”
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)
“I guess a career in the police didn’t really prepare you for this, did it?”
—Bob Hunt (b. 1951)
“My belief is that no being and no society composed of human beings ever did, or ever will, come to much unless their conduct was governed and guided by the love of some ethical ideal.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)
“The great problem of American life [is] the riddle of authority: the difficulty of finding a way, within a liberal and individualistic social order, of living in harmonious and consecrated submission to something larger than oneself.... A yearning for self-transcendence and submission to authority [is] as deeply rooted as the lure of individual liberation.”
—Wilfred M. McClay, educator, author. The Masterless: Self and Society in Modern America, p. 4, University of North Carolina Press (1994)