Revealed: 125 cops on wrong side of law

Assault, property damage, intimidation, threats, sex attacks, theft, kidnapping, fraud and even murder.

Those are just some of the crimes sworn police officers have been charged with in the past five years.

Figures provided to the Weekend Herald reveal that from 2015 to 2019,

125 constabulary staff appeared in court accused of criminal offending.

The police figures do not include

2020 information.

Of the charged officers, 32 were convicted and sentenced for crimes including serious or grievous assaults, intimidation and threats, criminal harassment, property damage, alcohol or drug driving, sexual offending, fraud, computer crime, tax evasion and other driving offences.

A further 39 were discharged without conviction for things such as animal welfare offending, minor driving offences, family violence, firearms and fraud.

Twenty-six cases were ongoing and still before the courts.

Professional conduct national manager Superintendent Barry Taylor said police took any charges seriously.

The majority of officers charged –

52.5 per cent – ended up resigning or retiring during or at the end of the court process.

About 32 per cent underwent an employment process investigation where a sanction occurred.

In 20 cases no further action was taken because the matter was dismissed within the courts and there was no employment process.

The rest of the cases are either ongoing in court or internally.

The Herald has covered some recent cases where police have been convicted.

In December 2017 Constable Ben McLean was jailed for life with a minimum non-parole period of 17 years after he murdered his wife, Verity McLean, on Anzac Day that year.

The mother of their three children died from a single gunshot to the head, less than three weeks after she told McLean she was leaving him for a family friend, Garry Duggan.

McLean also pleaded guilty to attempting to murder Duggan.

Last December Vili Taukolo was jailed for two years and two months after his criminal offending was uncovered.

During 15 months, while he was a constable based in Auckland, Taukolo was a highly-paid informant for the criminal underworld.

The 31-year-old was accessing the police’s national intelligence application system (NIA) before releasing confidential information to crooks, all while getting paid tens of thousands of dollars for the leaks.

Taukolo, formerly a deputy registrar of the High Court, had been caught after irregularities in his use of the NIA were discovered and led to an audit by police.

The NIA holds details about police investigations, people’s vehicles, locations, phone numbers and criminal histories.

The audit identified more than

20,000 queries between November

2017 and March this year.

In April this year, North Shore officer Jamie Foster was sentenced to six years in jail for indecently assaulting and raping a female workmate at a Kerikeri motel during the early hours of February 5 last year. He was part of a group deployed to help police the 2019 Waitangi Day events at the Treaty Grounds.

In July 2017, Jeremy Malifa, 34, “brought shame and embarrassment to the police” after using police resources to stalk women.

He was convicted of illegally accessing the national intelligence police system and and sentenced to

400 hours of community work, 12 months’ supervision, six months’ community detention and ordered to pay $200 to each of his victims.