Political blame game over slipping standards among police recruits
A significant number of applicants are allowed into the college, despite failing preliminary tests.
Photo:
Supplied / Police
Current and former police ministers are pointing fingers at each other over slipping standards at the Police College.
Findings from an audit into recruitment standards at the Royal New Zealand Police College has found a significant number of applicants were allowed into the college, despite failing preliminary tests.
The Police College sometimes gives discretion to recruits who fall short of certain standards, although they must still pass the tests before graduating - but the audit found this had become increasingly common.
The findings prompted Police Commissioner Richard Chambers to instruct the college not to accept anyone who hasn't met all mandatory recruitment standards.
Minister of Police Mark Mitchell blamed the previous government.
"There is no doubt in my mind that the priorities set by the previous government around recruiting contributed to this," he said.
"When in opposition, I expressed my concern around the change in standards. When coming into government, I supported an immediate change back to a 20-week recruit course from 16 weeks."
Labour's police spokesperson and Mitchell's predecessor, Ginny Andersen, noted the audit covered the period from January 2024 to April 2025, under the current government.
"This review period falls completely under his watch as Minister of Police," she said. "Mark Mitchell himself talks about people needing to take personal responsibility, but he never fronts up for his own failures."
Instead, she blamed the government's promise to recruit 500 new police officers by early next year.
"This raises those real concerns that there has been potentially political pressure applied to the college in order to deliver on a political promise - a coalition promise - of 500 more police that quite clearly won't be met."
Mitchell noted that was not the intention.
"Both Casey Costello and I made our expectations clear that meeting the coalition agreement of 500 more police officers would not come at the expense of standards," he said.
Police Association president Chris Cahill said he didn't think it was a government issue, but an internal police issue.
"There's continuous pressure to recruit and it's police that have to hold those standards," he said. "They can't blame the politicians, I'm afraid.
"Clearly, internal people within police knew discretion was being applied and standards were being breached."
Cahill said members of his association had noticed the standards for new officers appeared to drop.
"It's an accusation we get often from our members that they're seeing people they don't believe would have met all the standards," he said.
"We've had multiple assurances from police that isn't the case and then we see this report that clearly says standards have been breached at times."
During last year's pay negotiations, Cahill said part of NZ Police's argument against a higher wage increase was that there were plenty of recruits to choose from.
"We've argued in the pay round that [meeting recruitment targets] was a struggle and they denied it was, give us big figures for applications that we found out were only expressions of interest.
"I'm wondering if these people were pushed through to aid that argument and, if that's the case, it's pretty dishonest. It raises some real questions of integrity to me."
He said allowing underqualified recruits into the college put them and their fellow officers at risk.
"Once they graduate, they're out on the street, pretty much doing the exact same job as a 20-year veteran.
"Now, they might have an experienced supervisor or an experienced partner... but what if you've got two of these people that were marginal graduates together?
"It's putting them at risk. It's very unfair on them and it also presents the risk that police reputation is damaged by poor performance."
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