New Zealand Police once promised recruits “better work stories”.  At this point, the country could use some boring ones.

A lawful arrest. An honestly completed breath test. Evidence disclosed to the defence. A complaint against a senior officer investigated with the same enthusiasm Police would show if the accused were an ordinary member of the public.

No suppressed evidence. No mass collection of photographs. No mysteriously inflated statistics. No senior officers closing ranks around one of their own.  Just competent, lawful and accountable policing.

Instead, the Government is advancing a Policing Amendment Bill that would widen Police authority to collect personal information, record images and sounds, gather intelligence and control temporarily closed public areas.  The Justice Committee has recommended some additional protections and delayed implementation for six months. That is an improvement on the original bill, but it does not answer the fundamental question:

Why is Parliament giving Police broader discretion at precisely the moment Police have demonstrated how badly unchecked discretion can be abused?

A Legislative Workaround for Being Told “No”

The bill did not emerge because Police suddenly discovered a new kind of crime they were powerless to investigate.

It followed two inconvenient findings.

In 2022, a joint inquiry by the Independent Police Conduct Authority and the Privacy Commissioner found that Police officers were routinely taking, using and retaining photographs without lawful justification. Thousands of photographs had been stored on individual officers’ phones or retained in Police systems after any legitimate need had expired.

The inquiry began after complaints that Police were photographing rangatahi without proper justification or consent. It found unlawful practices, inadequate training and a widespread failure to recognise the special protections owed to children and young people. The problem was not that Police lacked sufficient power. It was that they were already exercising power they did not lawfully possess. The official inquiry findings are available here.

Then came Tamiefuna v R.  During a routine traffic stop, Police photographed Mahia Tamiefuna and uploaded his image to the National Intelligence Application database, not for a particular investigation, but because it might prove useful later. It did. The photograph was subsequently used to connect him to an unrelated aggravated robbery.

In 2025, the Supreme Court held that the taking and retention of the photograph was an unlawful and unreasonable search. The evidence was excluded and a retrial ordered. The Court’s point was not that Police may never take photographs in public. It was that the State cannot systematically collect and retain biometric information about people merely because it might become useful one day. The judgment is available here.

The Government’s response has not been to ensure Police obey the limits identified by the watchdogs and the Supreme Court.  It has been to redraw those limits.

That should make every New Zealander uncomfortable. When a court finds that a public authority has exceeded its lawful powers, the answer should not automatically be legislation authorising substantially the same conduct.  Sometimes the correct response to being told “no” is to stop.

“Intelligence” Is Not a Meaningful Limit

The Government describes the bill as a clarification of Police’s longstanding powers. That language is carefully chosen.

A “clarification” sounds administrative. A power grab sounds constitutional.

But the bill would authorise information collection for broad policing purposes, including an undefined “intelligence purpose”. That matters because intelligence is not necessarily evidence of an identified offence. It can mean gathering information now because it might conceivably become useful later.

That is the very logic that concerned the Supreme Court in Tamiefuna.  The Privacy Commissioner opposed the original bill, warning that it granted an excessively broad authority to collect information, displaced important Privacy Act protections and contained no meaningful constraints on retention, use or disclosure. He also warned that the bill was likely to affect Māori disproportionately and harm the privacy interests of children and young people. His submission is here.

The Justice Committee has now recommended making clear that Police remain subject to the Privacy Act. It has also proposed preventing the new recording powers from being used where a surveillance-device warrant would ordinarily be required, and requiring an independent review after three years.

Those amendments are welcome. They are also an admission that the original bill was nowhere near safe enough.

Six months of implementation work and a review three years later do not transform an undefined intelligence power into a narrow one. By the time that review begins, vast quantities of information may already have been collected, retained, analysed and shared.

Rights are not adequately protected by promising to inspect the damage later.

Alan Hall Is Not Ancient History

The timing of this expansion is particularly grotesque.

Alan Hall spent nearly 18 years in prison and almost another 18 years on parole after being wrongly convicted of murdering Arthur Easton. In 2022, the Supreme Court quashed his convictions and entered acquittals.

The Court found that important witness evidence had been materially altered and that the failure to disclose it caused a substantial miscarriage of justice. The Crown accepted that this resulted either from extreme incompetence or a deliberate and wrongful strategy to secure a conviction.

Hall’s case has now returned to court. Two former Police officers are on trial for allegedly attempting to pervert the course of justice. Both have pleaded not guilty, and their guilt must be determined by the Court. But Alan Hall’s wrongful conviction is not an allegation. It is an established catastrophe.

A vulnerable man lost decades of his life. His family spent years trying to make the justice system examine evidence that should never have been concealed in the first place. The State eventually paid him almost $5 million, not as a reward, but as an inadequate monetary acknowledgement of something that could never truly be repaired. The Ministry of Justice records the compensation here.

Alan Hall demonstrates what Police power looks like when tunnel vision, institutional confidence and weak accountability combine.  The answer to that history cannot sensibly be: give the institution more discretion.

The McSkimming Scandal Reached the Top

The Jevon McSkimming scandal is even harder to dismiss as the misconduct of another era.  The IPCA found that the Police response to serious complaints against the former Deputy Commissioner was characterised by inaction and an "unquestioning acceptance” of McSkimming’s account.

A recommendation that the allegations be referred to the National Integrity Unit and the IPCA went nowhere. Instead, Police investigated and prosecuted the complainant under the Harmful Digital Communications Act. The IPCA found serious misconduct involving a number of very senior officers and said their conduct undermined the integrity of the organisation as a whole.

Then-Commissioner Andrew Coster was found to have attempted to influence the scope and timing of the investigation after it was eventually referred to the IPCA. The Authority said those attempts were perceived within Police as an effort to prevent the investigation interfering with McSkimming’s prospects of becoming Commissioner.  McSkimming later pleaded guilty to possessing objectionable material, including child sexual exploitation material, accessed using Police devices.  

This was not a lone constable making a poor decision during a chaotic arrest. It was a failure of integrity at the highest levels of the organisation. The IPCA’s findings are available here.

The Government responded by promising an Inspector-General of Police. Yet before that new oversight regime has proved itself, the same Government is moving ahead with wider Police powers.  Accountability is being promised in the future. Power is being delivered now.

Tens of Thousands of “Irregular” Breath Tests

Then there are the breath tests.  Police initially identified 30,961 tests that were likely to have been recorded while testing devices were moving, an obvious physical impossibility if an actual motorist was being tested. Approximately 120 Police employees were subjected to internal investigation.

An independent analysis later estimated that there had been 42,678 irregular tests in total. Police declined to investigate which staff were responsible for the additional 12,000, saying that examining every officer and checkpoint would be impractical.

Apparently it is practical to record millions of tests, report them against performance targets and receive road-policing funding on that basis.  It is only identifying who falsified or incorrectly recorded them that becomes impractical.  Police ordered nationwide retraining. But this was not primarily a training problem. An officer does not need an online module to understand that activating a breath-testing device while driving is not the same as testing a motorist.

It was an integrity problem.  It was also a warning about data. Police information does not become reliable merely because it sits in an official database. When incentives, targets and weak supervision collide, official data can become institutional fiction. Police’s own release confirms the initial 30,961 irregular tests and approximately 120 investigations.

That matters enormously when Parliament is considering giving the same institution greater authority to collect and retain information about the public.

Police Power Must Be Earned

None of this means Police should be powerless.  Police need lawful tools to investigate crime, preserve evidence, control genuinely dangerous situations and protect the public. Temporary closure powers may be justified in tightly defined circumstances. Recording in public may be reasonable when connected to an actual offence, identifiable threat or legitimate investigation.

But powers should be specific, necessary and independently reviewable. “It might be useful later” is not a sufficient constitutional standard.  Before Parliament grants any broader intelligence-gathering authority, it should require:

• a precise statutory definition of “intelligence purpose”;

• necessity and proportionality tests for collection;

• special protections for children and young people;

• compulsory audit records showing who collected, accessed and shared information;

• firm retention and deletion periods;

• independent oversight from the moment the powers commence;

• meaningful consequences for unlawful collection or misuse;

• public reporting on how often the powers are exercised; and

• strong protection for officers who report misconduct by their colleagues or superiors.

A review three years later is no substitute for controls operating on day one.

Give Us Boring Work Stories

The argument for broader Police powers rests heavily on trust: trust that officers will exercise discretion properly, trust that information will not be gathered indiscriminately, trust that databases will not be misused and trust that misconduct will be confronted rather than concealed.

That trust cannot simply be demanded.

Alan Hall shows what happens when Police decide on a suspect and inconvenient evidence disappears. McSkimming shows what happens when senior officers treat allegations against one of their own as a threat to the organisation rather than a matter to investigate. The breath-test scandal shows what happens when institutional targets become more important than honest records. The unlawful photography inquiry shows what happens when supposedly useful practices spread without adequate regard for legality.

These are not arguments for broader discretion.  They are warnings against it.  New Zealand does not need Police to have better work stories. It needs Police work to become almost painfully boring: rules followed, evidence preserved, records accurate, complaints investigated and wrongdoing exposed regardless of rank.

More accountability. More supervision. More independent scrutiny.  And until Police can reliably exercise the powers they already possess, more power is the last thing they should be given.