Over the weekend we learned that police had been juking the stats, recoding burglaries as "incidents" to make themselves and their Minister look good. But its all fine now, supposedly - the police claim they've instituted a series of spot audits to ensure it can never happen again.
Except when they're asked for information about these supposed safeguards and whether they've uncovered any problems, they suddenly can't find anything...
A refusal by the police to release any details of their response to wrongly coded burglaries in South Auckland is being called a "snow-job".
A police investigation found that about 500 burglaries were wrongly reclassified as other offences or incidents between 2009 and 2012 in Counties Manukau.
Police and the acting Police Minister Judith Collins have said it was an isolated incident, and spot audits nationwide have been put in place to ensure the integrity of crime statistics.
There was no information to suggest it had happened elsewhere, police said.
But police have refused to reveal any details of the spot audits, and District Commander Superintendent John Tims could not answer when they started, or whether they had uncovered any irregularities.
Apparently its all very complex and would take too long to collate. Which sounds like poor excuses. At the least, you'd expect them to be able to point to the order for spot checks to be implemented, even if they don't have the results yet. The only reason they wouldn't be able to do that is if there is no policy and they're making it up to make themselves look good (sorry, "preserve public confidence in the police", because clumsy lies totally do that).
The police have totally forfeited our trust. If they want us to believe them, on this or any other issue, they need to front up with proof. Documents, or its bullshit!
