Allegations of Abuse by NZ Police
	peterellis Home / police allegations / Rickards, Shipton, Schollum vs Jane Doe Page 7 - Further Reaction to Not Guilty Verdict
	National Business Review March 9 2007 The two hot scandals of the week provided politicians with plenty of ammunition Ben Thomas and David W Young What is truth? This is the question that fuelled two scandals this week: the acquittal of three policemen on historical rape charges and the failure of a parole board to keep killer Graeme Burton in prison before he took another life. The rape charge verdicts had a measure of inevitability. If there is no debate about whether a sex act took place, whether it was rape will depend on consent - and determining that involves going into the minds of both defendant and complainant. That's a tricky process that can separate out what people believe to be true from what the prosecution can prove to be so. That's why we have juries. The ordinary people who sit on them are not expected to be specialists or experts. Or, rather, they aren't expected to be experts in anything except being ordinary people. When juries get too excited about becoming experts, in law or forensics, US prosecutors allege a so-called "CSI effect:" juries refuse to convict unless they can see the complex technical minutiae they expect to see from watching TV shows like Crime Scene Investigation. The parole board is not meant to be a bunch of ordinary people but a carefully constructed panel of judges and social workers. But the parole board seemed to fall for the "CSI effect" too - arguing that they could not determine the truth of a psychological assessment of Burton without actually speaking to the report writer. And the Corrections Department most certainly got it wrong in the Burton case, ignoring plenty of suggestions that Burton posed a risk, on the basis that there was no proof. The fallout from the Burton case saw the chief of the Corrections Department, Barry Matthews, asking not "what is truth?" but "what is zero tolerance?" The Corrections Department ostensibly has a "zero tolerance" policy toward criminals' non-compliance with parole conditions. "The difficulty with the words 'zero tolerance' is that they mean different things to different people," Matthews declared on Tuesday. In Matthews' world, "zero" obviously means "a wee bit:" under his interpretation, the policy does not mean prisoners need to be recalled to prison, or that sanctions for breaches are inevitable and non-negotiable. The bureaucrat has experience defending and rebuilding sick bureaucracies. As commissioner of Western Australia Police Service, Matthews oversaw a department riddled with accusations of corruption. He is seen as a safe pair of hands for an unenviably tricky role. (And this week he declared that those hands were free of blood.) But after the Corrections Department botched its investigation into the Burton affair - it was widely seen as arrogant and smug, rather than contrite and constructive - Matthews was hardly a prime ministerial favourite this week. And, sadly for the Corrections Department commissioner, Helen Clark has a more traditional approach to the word "zero." She believes "zero tolerance" means just that. Rapping Matthews over the knuckles and delivering a scathing attack on would-be police commissioner Clint Rickards after he was found not guilty of rape, the prime minister waded into both the major criminal law sagas this week. This is as inevitable as the dramas themselves. After health, crime is the second highest-rating issue registering with voters. It's a notoriously easy area for the opposition to score points, as the past electoral success of Act and New Zealand First attests. Between lobby groups like Sensible Sentencing Trust and National MP Simon Power, there has been no shortage of fingers pointing at perceived parole board, Corrections and police mistakes. If it's not a gun-toting criminal out on parole, it's a jailed rapist smuggling a vial of sperm to his wife. The Corrections investigation left ample room for National to point the finger, especially with its failure to pinpoint a single individual who should accept any real blame. Corrections Minister Damien O'Connor's line that everyone involved "feels in some part responsible for this and will do their very best to make the improvements to ensure that this doesn't happen again" was a poor substitute. To cut off the National Party attack, it was inevitable the prime minister would step in and criticise the department. Of course, finger-pointing is the easy part for the opposition. Proposing solutions can be more treacherous. One particularly daring National solution is to scrap the Corrections Department and wrap it into the Justice Ministry. Daring because, after all, it was the National government that separated Corrections from the Justice Ministry in 1995. But that's not to say policy formation is any easier for the government. In the textbooks - well, in the textbook Evaluating Policy and Practice: A New Zealand Reader (a best-seller in the bookshop across from Parliament last September), public policy lecturer Karen Baehler outlines the traditional description of how policy is made. It's a smooth cycle - a problem leads to options. Those lead to a solution being proposed, which is then tested. That leads to new problems. And so on. In real life, as Dr Baehler points out, policy creation can be more abrupt. The police rape accusation case was heard shortly after the government had completed an extremely comprehensive review of the Evidence Act, which aimed to make it easier for witnesses in rape cases. This review took years. After one day of public outrage, Ms Clark said maybe they had to go back to the drawing board. In other words, there's no evidence of the CSI effect afflicting our legislators when it comes to justice policy. In one case this week, the solution (giving the police the power to apply to the Parole Board for a parolee to be recalled) was announced long ago - well before this week's "problem" provoked by the Corrections and Parole Board reports into the Burton saga. But it had to be announced to the public as a clampdown, not the ongoing evidence of better and more refined policy over time. The biggest problem with the Corrections Department is that New Zealand's prison population has increased by 50% in the past eight years and it's struggling to keep up. Last year there were eight - yes, eight - spare beds in our nation's prisons. Incremental policy change may be frustrating, but there isn't much room for grand gestures.