History
Prior to 1989, complaints against the Police were investigated internally. Following several years of debate about Police accountability, sparked in part by the role of Police during the 1981 Springbok Tour, the Police Complaints Authority was established in 1989. The Police Complaints Authority comprised a single person, Allan Galbraith, who was the Authority’s Manager of Investigations between 2003 and 2010 and had been a member of the New Zealand Police for 37 years. Because of its reliance on police to investigate themselves, the Authority was perceived as lacking independence.
In 2004, a number of historic sexual misconduct allegations dating from the 1980s were made against both serving and former police officers. During that year, Prime Minister Helen Clark announced a Commission would be established to carry out an independent investigation into the way in which the New Zealand Police had dealt with allegations of sexual assault. The investigation was conducted by Dame Margaret Bazley and took three years. It reviewed 313 complaints of sexual assault against 222 police officers, including 141 in which Dame Margaret said the evidence was strong enough to warrant criminal charges or disciplinary action.
As part of the inquiry, in March 2006 assistant police commissioner Clinton Rickards and former police officers Brad Shipton and Bob Schollum were charged with raping and sexually abusing Louise Nicholas in Rotorua during the 1980s. The defendants claimed all sex was consensual and were found not guilty on 31 March 2006. However, in 2005 Brad Shipton and Bob Schollum had been convicted of another historic pack rape with an object and were serving lengthy prison sentences - but the jury in the Louise Nicholas' case were not told this. Rickards subsequently resigned from the police.
Dame Margaret's inquiry identified the inadequacy of police investigations into misconduct by their own officers and recommended that a more independent body was needed. In November 2007, the Independent Police Conduct Authority was established employing independent investigators.
Read more about this topic: Independent Police Conduct Authority
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