ZORAN RAKOVIC: Bureaucracy First, Public Last

When leadership hides behind protocols and misses the warning signs, the public pays the price. The McSkimming case exposes a crisis of accountability

OPINION: One might have thought that when a senior police officer pleads guilty to possessing child sex-abuse and bestiality material, there would be a rapid stocktake of how such an individual rose through the ranks without someone raising an eyebrow. You’d be wrong. In New Zealand, our police leadership apparently needs a Royal Commission to discover what used to be known as “common sense.”

The case of Jevon McSkimming, once considered a frontrunner for Commissioner, now disgraced by his own revolting admissions, should have been a singular moment of institutional clarity. But alas, clarity is not something our public institutions are renowned for. What we have instead is a rapidly decomposing tale of systemic evasiveness, finger-pointing, and the kind of bureaucratic cowardice that would embarrass even a Soviet archive clerk.

Here’s the lay of the land. According to reports, an anonymous complainant attempted to raise the alarm about McSkimming’s conduct. She was not thanked for her civic courage. No, she was prosecuted for harassment. The nation’s police leadership apparently took the view that sunlight was not the best disinfectant; confidentiality clauses and suppression orders were.

And where was the Police Minister in all this? According to him, somewhere behind a wall of “protocols.” Emails arrived in his office but were not shown to him. Whether that was due to misplaced zeal, administrative inertia, or political insulation is unclear. What is clear is that leadership, both operational and ministerial, failed to detect or act upon red flags fluttering plainly in the wind. The public is now expected to accept that this was an “error of judgment.”

That’s the phrase they all reach for: error of judgment. It’s the bureaucrat’s version of “the dog ate my homework.”

Now, in private life, one is allowed the odd error of judgment. You might buy a lemon of a car, trust a bad contractor, or attend an amateur production of Shakespeare. But in public office, especially in roles charged with oversight, protection, and authority, there’s a higher standard. When complaints are laid and patterns begin to form, shrugging and invoking “error of judgment” is not just unconvincing - it’s insulting.

The philosophical literature is rather instructive here. H.L.A. Hart, the doyen of British legal theory, pointed out long ago that negligence is not the absence of malice, but the absence of care, and that this absence still attracts responsibility. In fact, the person who neglects to know what he ought to know is more dangerous than the one who knowingly offends. At least the latter is intelligible.

Enter Holly M. Smith, Gideon Rosen and the contemporary school of moral responsibility. Their thesis? If you failed to act because you didn’t know, and you didn’t know because you didn’t bother to know, then you are culpable. This is not some arcane academic point. It is basic, elementary, Sunday-school morality. You cannot wear a blindfold and then claim innocence because you didn’t see.

In McSkimming’s case, it seems information existed. Complaints were made. People raised concerns. The ministerial office received emails. That nothing meaningful happened is not the result of one wrong call: it is the product of a leadership culture that views early warning signs not as a call to duty, but as administrative irritants best neutralised.

Hans Jonas, in his “Imperative of Responsibility,” wrote that power plus knowledge equals duty. The more one knows (or can know) the more obligation one has to act. Power without that sense of moral obligation is merely inertia in a fancy suit. And that is what the public sees here: a powerful institution turning slower than a rusted weathervane, even as the winds of scandal howl around it.

One must be charitable and acknowledge that leadership is hard. But it is not that hard. When a complainant alleges misconduct against a senior police officer, and your institution’s reflex is to bury it under legal process and prosecute the complainant, your compass is no longer broken: it is pointing due south to oblivion.

The moral error here was not one moment of misjudgement. It was a failure to imagine that the complaint might be true. It was a failure to ask the most obvious questions. It was a failure to say: “If this were true, what would be our duty?” Instead, they chose the path of least embarrassment. That is not public service. It is institutional vanity.

There is an almost medieval flavour to the hierarchy’s instinct for suppression. Anonymous whistleblowers must be silenced. Potential future Commissioners must be protected. The public’s trust must be preserved, not by transparency, but by obfuscation. One is reminded of Arendt’s account of Eichmann, how evildoing can come not from monsters, but from men in offices, performing their roles with dull routine, never once lifting their heads to think.

And here we see that thoughtlessness on display. A minister of the Crown admits that there were protocols preventing him from seeing emails about one of the most serious matters his office could face. He reports that he was “blocked” from seeing them, as if he were a helpless intern rather than the elected authority charged with oversight.

Let’s be clear: if your department constructs protocols that prevent you from seeing warnings about an officer who later pleads guilty to child abuse material, your job is not to accept the protocol. Your job is to tear it to shreds, throw it into the bin, and tell the public precisely why it existed in the first place. To do otherwise is not to make an “error of judgment.” It is to abdicate.

Public institutions are like rowboats. If the captain refuses to look at leaks because the protocol says not to check for leaks, the boat still sinks. The water does not care for ministerial memos.

Rosen and Smith offer another idea: “moral responsibility requires reasons-responsiveness.” That is, when you are presented with reasons to act (facts, complaints, warnings) you must be able to respond. If your institutional structures inhibit that, then either you break the structures or you accept responsibility for what they conceal.

The defence of “I didn’t see the email” is about as persuasive as “I didn’t hear the fire alarm because I was wearing noise-cancelling headphones.” It may be true. But that doesn’t absolve you: it indicts your setup.

There’s a moment in all this that deserves quiet horror. The complainant (who turned out to be correct) was prosecuted. The officer she accused ascended. Think about that. She tried to raise the alarm and was silenced by the very system designed to receive it. That is not just irony. That is structural failure with a human cost.

Ginny Andersen, to her credit, at least gestured towards the loss of public trust. She noted, correctly, that New Zealanders should expect complaints to be taken seriously. But again, one is struck by the mildness of the language. This wasn’t a clerical error or a delay in processing a parking fine. This was the potential shielding of a high-ranking officer from scrutiny that could have prevented his advancement, and possibly more harm. If that doesn’t warrant alarm, what does?

The truth is that the public already senses all this. Trust in institutions is not a natural resource; it is a cultivated thing, hard-won and easily lost. Every time the public is asked to believe that a failure of this scale was merely an “error of judgment”, trust erodes. Every time we see institutions defend themselves before examining themselves, trust diminishes. And every time a whistleblower is punished, and a predator protected, the legitimacy of the state takes another step backwards.

Now, there are good people in the police force. We know that. But good people in bad systems are like swimmers in a rip. Unless the system allows them to surface, they drown alongside the rest. And if leadership allows rot at the top, the goodness below cannot disinfect it.

Let us say what this was, in plain terms. It was not an accident. It was not a rogue anomaly. It was a system behaving precisely as it was designed to behave: defensively, bureaucratically, self-protectively. And it produced the outcome that systems like that always produce: blindness at the top, silence in the middle, and punishment for those who raise their hands at the bottom.

The lesson is not that people are bad. The lesson is that institutions without moral courage always bend toward decay. That decay begins with a phrase: “error of judgment.” It is the lie we tell ourselves when we cannot face the fact that we saw and did nothing. Or worse: refused to look in the first place.

This episode should provoke soul-searching. Not only in the police force, but in the ministries that oversee it. If a protocol exists that blinds the Minister to scandal, then the protocol is the scandal. If leadership allows that to persist, they own it.

There will be no perfect fix. No structure will prevent all wrongs. But moral responsibility, as the philosophers remind us, begins with the will to see. If you cannot guarantee truth will always be acted upon, the least you can do is ensure it can be seen.

Instead, in this case, they looked away.

And then had the gall to call it “error of judgment”.

Zoran Rakovic is a structural engineer with nearly 30 years of experience, who has helped design and strengthen buildings across New Zealand. His substack is HERE