POLICE FIDDLE AS CRIME BURNS
The ‘ghost crimes’ fiasco fizzles out with unanswered questions.
Certain stories are doomed to haunt you, stories that linger and you never really know if you’ve got to the bottom of them. Ghost crimes was one of those – and no, that’s not because of the name it became known as.
It’s the story of how a small group of police in Counties Manukau made hundreds of burglaries ‘‘disappear’’ from the official police statistics, a story about allegations of a cover-up at the highest level.
Among its characters were Police Commissioner Mike Bush, Police Minister Judith Collins, five officers (including area commander Inspector Gary Hill) who were disciplined over it, a senior-ranking officer who put his neck on the line, and an anonymous letter writer who wreaked havoc through determined efforts to blow the whistle.
The story broke two years ago and became a fleeting political scandal. In reality, its roots went back five years earlier, and it has smouldered away in the background until now.
But then, last week, it finally fizzled out completely. Talk of investigations came to nothing.
A letter from the police apologised for aspects of the case, and promised more transparency and accountability in future.
‘‘While expressions of regret such as this cannot turn back the clock, my sincere hope is that the attached material and the police apology help draw a line under past difficulties,’’ wrote Mike Webb, national manager of the police’s assurance group.
And just like that, the ghost crimes controversy was over, leaving behind the lingering whiff of old questions left unanswered.
To trace its origins and explain what the saga meant and why it matters, it pays not to go back to the beginning – in 2009 – but to a couple of years later. In December 2011, the Papakura Courier ran a story trumpeting the ‘‘stunning results’’ police in the Counties Manukau south area had achieved during the year.
Burglaries were down 37 per cent, and the resolution rate was 59 per cent. Community leaders were pictured presenting local police with a cake to celebrate – and no wonder. Burglary is a touchstone, invasive crime – if police aren’t on top of it, communities feel unsafe. Producing figures which showed burglary was under control in the area sent a signal, and was something to be proud of. Collins, MP for the Papakura area, highlighted the statistics in her electorate newsletter and then deputy commissioner Bush, who had been district commander from 2008-2011, told local reporters around that time it was pleasing burglaries were decreasing. ‘‘Our aim is to ensure that our communities are safe and feel safe in Counties Manukau,’’ said Bush, who was promoted to commissioner in 2014. Police statistics are not just an instrument for political and topbrass back-slapping. They are a vital indicator of the success of policing methods. They inform policy and funding. For instance, under Bush’s leadership, Counties Manukau pioneered a programme called Prevention First, which has now been rolled out throughout the country after crime statistics showed its impact on reducing crime. And so when allegations that the statistics in Counties Manukau south were fake arose in an anonymous letter to TV3 in March 2012, just months after that Papakura Courier story, it was an extremely serious matter. Statistics matter. The letter was specific, alleging that the statistics had been altered in the Counties Manukau south area. ‘‘Burglary codes were changed to theft or any other minor offence to allow the area to achieve the best crime reduction stats for the district,’’ the letter read.
‘‘How could anyone know what the real facts are when the figures are falsified, this is fraud and the staff changing codes should be held accountable.’’ The letter went into other specifics too.
As a journalist, it’s difficult to investigate anonymous allegations. I decided the best approach was to use the Official Information Act, a tool which enables anyone to request information from government agencies. One of the purposes of the law is to promote the accountability of ministers of the Crown and officials.
What followed instead was years of obfuscation.
In the background, though, a flurry of activity was under way.
For starters, the letter writer had been busy.
Anonymous letters were sent to the Independent Police Conduct Authority in January and March 2012 too. Collins has said that she heard about the allegations in February 2012, just after she had become Justice Minister, although she hasn’t said how she heard. Documents finally released under the OIA this month show the serious allegations did not trigger any robust response, however. The IPCA forwarded the first of the letters on to police with a covering email which said simply: ‘‘We will just note this on our Miscellaneous files.’’ Senior police circulated it among themselves, speculating ‘‘it appears to be from an employee or a close relative’’ but otherwise taking no action. ‘‘No file has been created,’’ said an email to Superintendent John Tims, district commander of Counties Manukau. According to Tims, a review of the allegations began in April 2012 – the timing is interesting because that is after my Official Information Act request. If the letter writer hadn’t contacted the media, would anything have happened? After all, by then, Police Commissioner Peter Marshall, Bush, Tims, Collins and the IPCA all knew about the allegations. But the inquiry only began in April, after Tims received an OIA request. Seasoned investigator Inspector Keith Brady was brought in to carry out the review. He reported back at the end of May 2012, and his findings were damning. A summary of his report, released under the OIA, showed the Counties Manukau south area had a pattern of making burglaries disappear from the statistics. Between July 2009 and July 2012, about 700 burglaries were ‘‘recoded’’, tagged within the system as lesser crimes or just ‘‘incidents’’. That’s 700 victims of crime whose situation was disregarded. In some cases, burglars were seen breaking into places and stealing things, but the crime was downgraded to theft. In others, burglaries interrupted when alarms went off were changed to incidents, meaning they didn’t even count as crimes in the official statistics. In other words, police were letting criminals get off burglaries scot-free.
In the first year covered by the review, 2009-2010, Brady found 61 per cent of the burglaries re-coded shouldn’t have been.
Think about that percentage. It’s not one or two, here and there: the majority of the burglary re-coding was done so wrongly.
A report released under the OIA reveals the practice was still happening in 2011/12, right up until April when I made my initial inquiries to Tims. And it was happening at an even higher rate than when it started – 72.2 per cent.
When the information I had initially sought under the OIA was released to me, Tims sought to play down what had happened.
‘‘[W]hen investigating officers or their supervisors learn more about the circumstances of a case, it can often be more appropriate to regrade, upgrade or sometimes downgrade a matter which has initially been reported as a suspected burglary,’’ he wrote.
‘‘The classic example is where an intruder alarm has been activated but subsequent inquiries prove inconclusive.
‘‘While the ability to make such sensible coding changes is acknowledged, there is sometimes the potential for human error and in rare cases (such as the historic Counties Manukau south example) irregularities come to light which are dealt with quickly and robustly.’’
But was what happened really dealt with ‘‘quickly and robustly’’? And was there a culture of accountability and transparency within the police?
In the end, the ghost crimes story was broken by journalist Bevan Hurley (now of the Sunday Star-Times), who was leaked a copy of the report. Clearly there were people in the police who were anxious that the concerns be unearthed.
Tims’ response to my OIA, meanwhile, had taken more than two years, arriving the week after Hurley’s story broke.
And when it arrived it was missing some things I’d asked for. After a two-year investigation by the Office of the Ombudsman, police have now admitted that was wrong.
‘‘Looking back, [the withholding of some documents] is difficult to fathom,’’ national assurance manager Webb wrote to me. He said steps had been taken to make sure police handled OIA requests better in future – the Office of the Ombudsman had been called in to brief staff about their responsibilities, and an ‘‘executive champion’’ was about to be appointed to institute changes to OIA processes.
But there was no word on perhaps the most curious aspect of the response to my OIA request.
In June 2013, Keith Brady, the officer who carried out the review, wrote a police job sheet about a meeting he had just had with Tims about my OIA request.
‘‘Superintendent Tims advised that he had discussed the . . . request with Deputy Commissioner Bush and Assistant Boreham.
‘‘The direction to me was not to respond to the Official Information Act request and file the file as it is.’’ The implication of the job sheet, I believe, is that officers right at the top of the police wanted the ghost crimes story to remain buried. When Brady’s job sheet came to light, Bush and Boreham were adamant that they had given no such direction. Tims believed Brady had misinterpreted the conversation. ‘‘I told Inspector Brady that no further action was required in relation to the Official Information Act request as I had already met with the requester on April 16, 2012 and therefore believed his request had already been complied with by way of a verbal briefing,’’ Tims said once the job sheet came to light. This is clearly wrong. Tims and his staff continued to remain in contact with me after the meeting, for instance in an email from his media adviser in October 2012 which said: ‘‘As promised once the investigation is complete we will invite you to discuss the findings.’’ Brady, meanwhile, has never backed away from what he wrote. ‘‘My job sheet is my job sheet. It’s the record of my conversation and I have no other comment to make about that document,’’ he told Hurley in 2014. Two years ago I asked the Office of the Ombudsman to investigate – it seemed a serious matter that an inspector of police would not only say that he had been told to ignore the law, but that he felt the need to record this in an official document. This month, the Office of the Ombudsman advised that it did not have the jurisdiction to act. ‘‘Your complaint to this office illustrates issues which are outside an Ombudsman’s authority to investigate . . . despite the underlying subject matter’s inherent link to the OIA,’’ said a letter from the Ombudsman’s office.
So that’s it. The ghost crimes story is done. There has been no independent investigation of either the deliberate meddling with crime statistics, or the subsequent coverup.
And in the end, there remain unanswered questions about integrity and accountability.
Would the practice have even stopped if the media hadn’t been alerted? Would any internal investigation have been carried out?
If not for the anonymous letter writer, who doggedly kept blowing the whistle, I doubt it.
Meanwhile, back in Papakura, burglaries increased 37 per cent last year.
Have more information? Email eugene.bingham@fairfaxmedia.co.nz