ROGER PARTRIDGE: Fake Breath Tests Are Bad. The Police Response Is Worse

This week, Commissioner Richard Chambers announced new targets for trust and confidence in police. They will mean little if the organisation continues to treat deliberate dishonesty as a minor employment matter.

That proposition may sound harsh. But what else should we make of a police force that discovers its officers have falsified thousands of breath test records and responds with little more than a warning?

Between July 2024 and September 2025, officers conducted more than five million roadside breath tests. Only later, when a new mapping tool was introduced, did troubling anomalies emerge. Thirty thousand nine hundred and sixty-one tests appeared to have been recorded despite no test having taken place. Some were logged while officers were driving. Others were recorded kilometres apart within minutes. Several were entered under the ID numbers of staff who were not on duty.

The behaviour is not unfamiliar. Victoria Police faced a similar episode in 2018 when an internal investigation revealed officers blowing into the device themselves or covering the straw opening with a finger to produce a clean reading. More than 258,000 such tests were uncovered there. The practice had become routine. New recruits were absorbed into it as if it were normal. New Zealand’s numbers are smaller, but the pattern is recognisable: a minority of officers quietly recording activity they had not performed.

Police have now completed disciplinary processes for about a third of the 130 staff involved, with the remainder ongoing. No one has been stood down solely for falsifying breath tests, though a small number have been stood down for additional misconduct. Even where serious misconduct is found, the likely outcome is a formal warning of varying length. Police have ruled out any criminal investigation and have required all staff to complete an online refresher module on breath-testing procedures.

Internally, the view was different. Superintendent Steve Greally, Director of Road Policing, emailed his superiors that persistent offenders should be “held to account decisively.” That recommendation appears to have been overridden.

Under standard employment principles, deliberately falsifying official records in a high-trust role constitutes serious misconduct warranting dismissal. International practice reinforces this. In the United Kingdom, officers who enter false information into police systems face gross-misconduct proceedings with dismissal the presumptive outcome. In the United States, officers with proven dishonesty are placed on lists marking them as unreliable witnesses, effectively ending their careers in prosecution-facing roles.

The reason is simple: an officer who has falsified records cannot be relied on in court. Defence lawyers here have already warned that the breath-test revelations call into question the integrity of prosecutions.

Against that backdrop, the adequacy of the response matters. Deliberately entering false information into official systems is not a minor lapse. It goes to the core of what it means to exercise public power. A warning for deliberate falsification of police records is not merely inadequate; it is the beginning of rot. When dishonesty of this kind attracts only a reprimand and a training module, the signal inside the organisation is unmistakable. Some dishonesty can be tolerated.

The incentives at play only heighten the concern. Under the $1.3 billion Road Policing Investment Programme, police are expected to deliver 3.3 million tests a year, with funding linked to delivery. Ministers have publicly praised the record volumes and pointed to them as evidence of a successful crackdown on drink-driving.

When political narratives lean heavily on output statistics, those statistics must be beyond reproach. This makes the disciplinary stance even harder to reconcile. Police leadership insists there was “no pressure” on officers and that the target was exceeded “legitimately.”

Good officers – who doubtless make up the overwhelming majority of our police force – are entitled to expect that integrity is protected, not diluted. And the public is entitled to confidence that the records police rely on in courtrooms and public reporting are accurate.

The Police Minister has maintained an appropriate arm’s-length position. But systems create incentives of their own. Recruitment targets are ambitious and attrition is high. In such an environment, dismissing officers becomes harder, and every marginal case looks salvageable.

That is why this episode matters. It is not about drunk-driving enforcement. None of the falsified tests disguised alcohol offences. It is about the integrity of an institution that asks the public to trust its records, its evidence, and its word. If fabricated records attract only a wet-bus-ticket response, the incentives inside the organisation shift in subtle but predictable ways.

The Police Minister should refer the disciplinary process to the Independent Police Conduct Authority for independent oversight. This would provide the public confidence that outcomes of the scandal are proportionate and that the internal recommendation for decisive accountability has not been quietly abandoned.

Coming so soon after the McSkimming revelations, the breath-test scandal is another reminder that police integrity is too fragile an asset to be traded away.

If New Zealanders are not troubled by deliberate dishonesty in official records, it raises a harder question: what would it take?

This article was sourced from Roger Partridge's substack Plain Thinking and first published in The Post on 5 December 2025.