Locke Keith: Independent Police Complaints Authority Amendment Bill — Second Reading 
Locke Keith: Independent Police Complaints Authority Amendment Bill — Second Reading 
[Volume:625;Page:20298] 
KEITH LOCKE (Green) 
: 
 I rise on behalf of the Green Party to support the Independent Police Complaints Authority Amendment Bill. It is a step forward from the present situation with regard to the Police Complaints Authority where there are huge delays and huge resourcing problems and where a big problem is that a lot of the work done for the Police Complaints Authority is done by the police—the very people sometimes who are being investigated. In terms of the delays I can give a personal example. I put in a complaint in 1999 and despite reminders the complaint still has not been resolved 5½ years later. That is an indication of the workload before the present one-person Police Complaints Authority. The authority is expanding to three people which is good. It is being given a little more independence and the powers of an ombudsman which is very good. It can have access to more staff and it will rely less on the police to investigate situations. 
I had thought that this particular bill would be left until after we had had a report back on the rape allegations against police from the Rotorua district because one of the aspects of those cases which are proceeding through a commission of inquiry is that the authority itself seemed to fail in those particular cases. It would seem that the police who investigated the officers whose behaviour was referred to the authority misreported on the situation to the head of the authority and as a result of that the authority essentially covered up the situation. That indicated the problem with the police investigating their own and being largely responsible for the work of the authority on the ground. Hopefully under the new system there will be many more independent investigatory staff. Some of them may be former police officers because they have those investigatory skills. 
There is always a problem in a police force—and this is no criticism of this particular police force—that because police officers are often in very difficult situations and do very difficult tasks there is a very strong feeling of camaraderie. When one has been through a lot of difficult experiences with a fellow officer one is a bit reluctant to blow the whistle on him or her. So there is sort of a structural problem in having the police investigate themselves. If the staff of the Independent Police Complaints Authority is independent that will be good. Sometimes the police say that they are their own harshest critics etc. etc. There is an element of truth to that statement but I think that if we want there to be a proper investigation of complaints into possible police wrongdoing then it has to be done independently. Also the public of New Zealand will have greater confidence in the outcome of those inquiries if not only the three-person authority itself but also the staff working under it are independent. So the Green Party will be supporting this bill. 
I think the question of disclosure that the Law and Order Committee went into quite a bit is quite important too. The committee did not handle it too badly. It is true that if we want people particularly those in the police force to blow the whistle on wrongdoing to the authority they have to be able to do it fairly confidentially. A lot of the information that comes to the attention of the new authority will come from the police themselves. When an initial complaint is made by someone outside the police who is affected by a police action a member of the police force may say he or she does not want to be associated with the incident and may blow the whistle. But he or she may not want to blow the whistle publicly so the system needs to offer a bit of protection through confidentiality. 
The people who do the complaining may themselves be up on trial as the report indicates. Someone who is up on trial may have been beaten up in the cells or affected by some other wrongdoing and may want to bring that to the attention of the authority. That person may give the authority some information pointing to his or her guilt or innocence that he or she does not want to brought out in the trial for one reason or another. It would undermine the ability of the police and of accused people to go to the authority if they thought that that would compromise a later court trial. So the disclosure provisions in the bill as the committee presents them are more to the benefit of the accused than of the police. I think the bias has to be in that direction so that it does not undermine the tendency to go to the authority. The bill probably does not go far enough though in really establishing the independence of the authority in terms of its investigatory powers. 
There is also the problem we have seen in many cases—and the Steven Wallace case that of the man shot in Waitara is a case in point—of the authority’s investigations being suspended for very long periods often for too long for them to be effective because of coronial proceedings or as in the Wallace case a court trial. Proceedings may also be suspended for an internal police investigation. Even under this bill the authority has the right to suspend proceedings while an internal inquiry takes place. So there are various forms of inquiries or proceedings—criminal proceedings etc.—that can prevent the authority from moving forward. I think we have to work out procedures for an authority that is not held back in that way. Possibly the very fact that there is confidentiality in the system will enable the authority to proceed with a speedy investigation. 
For instance I think the complaint I made back in 1999 relating to police actions towards the protesters against the visit of the Chinese leader for APEC over the question of Tibet has been compromised. There was police wrongdoing in Auckland Wellington and Christchurch in relation to those protests. Some of that wrongdoing has been brought out in the Justice and Electoral Committee report. The authority could have done more on that matter and hopefully it will do more on it even though the events took place so many years ago now. I gave a lot of information to the authority and it took down the transcript etc. But despite my reminding it that the matter has not been rectified the delays in the system have been just too big for an adequate result to be achieved. People’s memories fade over time. 
I think the whole question of a police complaints system is critical. We have seen the police come under a bit of criticism—often not very justified criticism—in recent times. Often there is a distrust of the police. When the police are under pressure often they cannot fulfil all the requirements such as attending some burglaries—they are too busy trying to catch people with little amounts of marijuana and not doing enough on the burglary front. People lose a bit of confidence in the police sometimes not through their own fault but because of the directions that are imposed on them. So in order to keep up the confidence in the police so that they appear whiter than white it is important to have a proper police complaints investigation system. This bill moves in that direction.