Introduction
The NZ Police Professional Conduct group works to ensure the actions, conduct and procedures of Police employees maintain the trust and confidence that New Zealanders have in their Police service.
Maintaining and increasing high levels of trust and confidence is one of NZ Police’s top priorities. NZ Police is committed to ensuring we provide an excellent quality of service to the public.
Police Professional Conduct is primarily focused on prevention, ensuring employees have the support to enable them to maintain their professionalism.
Police recognise that despite the best of intentions, individual staff members and/or the organisation as a whole, don’t always “get it right,” meaning there is always the potential for complaints or expressions of dissatisfaction to be made.
When incidents do occur, the focus of Police Professional Conduct shifts to doing all that is possible for those involved to feel satisfied that the lessons learnt from the incident will only improve everyone’s Trust and Confidence.
Incidents can be any of:
- Complaints from members of the public
- Significant events involving NZ Police
- Internally identified possible breaches of the NZ Police Code of Conduct
Incidents will be investigated by an independent investigator and may be overseen by the IPCA - Independent Police Conduct Authority of New Zealand with which Police has a Memorandum of Understanding that clarifies the principles and processes through which both entities will cooperate to ensure effective, independent oversight of Police conduct. Independence is also ensured by the investigator signing a declaration that they have no conflict of interest.
For further information, check out the incident investigation process.
The Police Professional Conduct group has a significant role in maintaining high levels of Trust and Confidence by ensuring complaints against NZ Police are dealt with professionally, and quickly.
It is our purpose to demonstrate transparency at every stage of the complaint process. Therefore, a decision has been made to proactively publish information about the number and types of complaints against Police, and any other incident notified to the IPCA, onto the NZ Police public website. We have also made openly available a copy of the overarching framework for Police investigations into complaints and notifiable incidents, which is spelt out as a chapter in the Police Manual.