The crime of neglect

BY TONY WALL

FOR YEARS Sue Mackle banged her head against a wall. The Masterton-based detective was not coping with the huge backlog of child-abuse files mounting on her desk – it had reached more than 140 – so she took what was extreme action for a front-line cop: she went over the heads of her immediate superiors and wrote directly to police bosses in Wellington.

Her message, in April 2006, went to deputy police commissioner Rob Pope and Wellington district crime manager Harry Quinn, among others. With 13 years experience as a child-abuse investigator, she talked about how she was often exhausted having to deal with most of the Wairarapa's abuse complaints by herself, and had asked for more staff on several occasions. And she held no punches.

"My excessive file load has been widely known at a local level for years [literally] but obviously child abuse is not an area of importance for the police, as opposed to areas such as traffic, which is," she wrote in an email later obtained by the Dominion Post.

Police sent a senior detective to the Wairarapa to investigate the claims. The ensuing report backed up Mackle's concerns and recommended more staffing, but nothing was done.

Five months later, Mackle and other child-abuse investigators around the country again spoke out, this time publicly in Police News, the magazine of the Police Association. They were scathing of the way "volume crime" such as property offences were taking over the police.

"District commanders get their brownie points for volume crime and as a result child abuse is shuffled back down the list of priorities," one detective was quoted anonymously as saying.

Mackle told the magazine that because child-abuse cases were difficult, resource intensive and, in the case of historical complaints, almost impossible to get a conviction for, they languished in terms of police priorities, and she knew of cases where alleged offenders were still living with their victims.

Detective Sergeant Tusha Penny, supervisor of the Lower Hutt CAT (child-abuse team), told the magazine the fear of every officer was that offenders named in uninvestigated files would continue to abuse children.

"We put all our resources into the murder inquiries for these children when they get murdered, but when they're alive and we know they're at risk, often we don't have the resources to allocate to it," she said.

Mackle and Penny had lit the fuse on a bomb that went off only in August this year, when the police hierarchy publicly apologised for the "unacceptable" delays in the Wairarapa, and the shocking extent of the problem began to emerge: 108 cases left uninvestigated; one complaint laid 11 years ago; files uninvestigated on average for five years; victims having lived with their alleged abusers all that time; a teacher accused of abuse continuing to teach.

It appears police bosses finally woke up to the extent of the problem late last year, during the formation of a new child-protection team for the Wellington district. In December they launched Operation Hope to clear the backlog, and have since arrested 41 people and laid more than 100 charges. In many cases, the alleged victims are now adults.

They are now conducting an internal investigation into the reasons for the backlog and the Independent Police Conduct Authority (IPCA) has launched its own inquiry.

What is still not clear is how widespread the problem is, as police have brought down a veil of secrecy over the issue. The 2006 Police News article estimated there were hundreds of unallocated child-abuse files throughout the country and reported significant backlogs in Auckland, Tauranga, Christchurch and Dunedin. Police Association president Greg O'Connor has said the Wairarapa backlog is the "tip of the iceberg".

IPCA chairman Justice Lowell Goddard says the authority has asked police for a "robust audit" of child-abuse files nationally to determine whether or not delays have also happened in other districts.

The Sunday Star-Times asked each police district to provide information on its child-abuse caseload (see Top Secret, below right), but police national headquarters vetoed the release of the information on the grounds it could prejudice the IPCA inquiry. A request for an interview with Commissioner Howard Broad was also declined.

Police Minister Judith Collins did not want to comment on the reasons for the delays or the extent of the problem, but told the Star-Times "the priority of police has to be the safety and wellbeing of children. Children and their parents must be able to count on police to investigate and prosecute abuse allegations quickly and professionally. I would be concerned at any unnecessary delays as they add to the suffering of victims".

A police source, who asked not to be identified, says police hierarchy is trying to cover itself after initially sweeping the problem under the carpet.

"There's now this rushing around from HQ saying `what do you need?' It was lacking for years, before they were taking their cars off them, now suddenly `you can have your cars back'. It's almost that it has to be in the media before something gets done, and that's a bit of a worry, really, when you're dealing with kids."

Whistleblower Mackle, who is still working out of the Masterton police station, has long since been gagged, as have all of her colleagues and superiors, who ironically now find themselves under investigation. "We're not allowed to talk to the media in any sort of form," she says.

The police source says Mackle and the other investigators were brave to speak out.

"It takes a lot of courage to put your head above the parapet, and say `this is not good enough'. They had the best interests of those kids at heart. There were some disturbing cases... people they knew were still offending but whom they couldn't get to because of the volume of files they had on one person's desk. They knew these kids were being abused by stepfathers and things like that; it was a horror story basically."

THAT A backlog of child-abuse cases could be allowed to build up in an area like the Wairarapa seems incredible, seeing the district is something of a ground zero for some of the most sickening child murders of recent memory. During a three-year period starting in July 2000, four children – toddler Hinewaoriki Karaitiana-Matiaha (known as Lillybing), half sisters Saliel Aplin, 12, and Olympia Jetson, 11, and six-year-old Coral-Ellen Burrows – were killed by stepfathers or extended family members in towns dotted across the Wairarapa. This flat, fertile farming district north of the Rimutaka ranges is home to about 40,000 people.

Crime statistics show Wairarapa has had the highest rate of recorded crime in the Wellington region by population in the past few years.

"I've always said if you want to train to be a policeman, the best place to come to is the Wairarapa, there's a lot of different sorts of crime," says former detective Mike Nicholls, who is now a bread delivery contractor in Masterton. Nicholls worked on the Lillybing case, a lengthy, stressful inquiry that resulted in a manslaughter conviction for aunt Rachealle Namana. The case took its toll on the staff who worked on it – Lillybing had been bashed, scalded and suffered genital mutilation at the hands of relatives – and by the end of it Nicholls had had "a gutsful" and quit the police.

"Any large-scale inquiry like that took its toll, but when you're dealing with the death of a young child like that, and the way she died, it just got to the stage where it was enough for a lot of people – two or three of us left around that time."

Another officer who worked on child-abuse inquiries for many years in the Wellington region, quitting because of the psychological damage it did, says the cumulative effect was like lead poisoning. "We had to go and see a psychologist every three months, and I'm still f-----," he says.

Nicholls did all his policing in the Wairarapa after joining in 1979. As long as he can remember, there had been a backlog of child-abuse and other files.

"All you needed was a major inquiry and that took guys away for six weeks, basically the whole office worked on that inquiry. There was always a backlog, and no matter what you did, you just never seemed to be able to clear it up, it was a constant stream coming through."

Nicholls says that when child-abuse complaints came in, "if there was current, physical harm being done to anyone, it was dealt with then and there, but otherwise it joined the pile, really".

There was a constant battle for resources, he says. "You haven't got that great number of people to call on to help you. OK, Wellington is an hour-and-a-half away, but all you need is something major to happen there ... "

For years local police chiefs would make the trip over the Rimutakas to regional headquarters to plead for more staff. One of those was the former officer in charge of south Wairarapa police, Kevin Tunnell, now a tyre salesman in Masterton.

"The standard answer was, `if there's a problem, we'll support you from Wellington'," Tunnell says. "It was always my impression that we were at the end of the food chain for resources and staffing."

Tunnell, who left the police in 2001, says child abuse was treated seriously. "If you had a serious child-abuse or sex-abuse case, you basically dropped everything else. But we were under-resourced for the size of the problem. Historically there has always been a level of child abuse in the Wairarapa that's been beyond the resources of the allocated staff to handle."

Around 1999, Tunnell says, the then head of the Masterton CIB, Luther Toloa, conducted a review of CIB resources and concluded there was a serious need for two more detectives, primarily to work in the area of child abuse. The report went to Wellington, but nothing happened.

Toloa is now an investigator with the IPCA. The Star-Times attempted to draw him on the issue but he declined. "I can't help you at all, I'm in a very precarious position, " he said, adding that he and other ex-Wairarapa police staff were not involved in the inquiry to avoid conflicts of interest.

The officer in charge of the Masterton CIB until he retired in 2003, Graeme Reisima, says as the stigma around the reporting of child abuse was lifted, more and more complaints were referred to police, yet the resources were not there to "catch the floodwaters". Such cases were inherently difficult to investigate he says, given police were often dealing with split families or children who might be lying. Naturally there would be delays in such cases.

Reisima says he remembers one where police moved too quickly to arrest an offender, not having interviewed every witness, and the case quickly fell apart at trial. "That didn't achieve anything for anybody. There are plenty of examples of where we got it wrong, and I'm guilty of that."

He does not believe the move to create a district-wide child-abuse investigation team based in Wellington is a good idea. "You can't deal with it on a district basis when you're dealing with witnesses, victims and offenders in a smallish area. What will happen if it's a Wellington-based team, they'll soon get sick of driving over those Rimutakas."

NATIONAL BACKBENCHER John Hayes, the MP for Wairarapa, stirred up a hornet's nest in August when he wrote in the Wairarapa News that the "underlying issue" behind the child-abuse backlog was "poor leadership, inadequate management systems and administrative incompetence in Masterton and the Wellington police region" and that the Wairarapa had for too long been a "dumping ground for police leadership that would not cut the mustard closer to the commissioner's nose". Local staff took that as a direct attack on them but Hayes told the Star-Times: "I think it goes right to the top actually, this extends to Wellington."

He says he took part in a meeting in August in which Wellington regional police chiefs appeared to be "shoving the blame" at a Wairarapa officer who had supposedly "hidden paperwork". They would not name the individual they had in their sights, as there were employment issues. "They essentially said the problem was someone had buried files, but I find that difficult to believe," Hayes says. "If you have proper management processes, checks and balances, you know what's going on. That's why we have managers and pay them highly, especially in a hierarchical organisation like the police."

This apparent scapegoating of local officers concerns the Police Association. "We welcome the IPCA inquiry and [want to] make sure it addresses the fundamental issues rather than just look for scapegoats, people who are trying to manage and juggle files," says O'Connor. "[We want an] understanding of the decisions made at the top of the organisation – what influence they had on the situation."

The Star-Times understands those under investigation include Inspector John Johnston, the area commander for the Wairarapa; Detective Sergeant Bill van Woerkom, the Masterton CIB head; his predecessor, Detective Senior Sergeant Mark McHattie, now the head of the organised-crime squad in Auckland, as well as those dealing directly with child-abuse cases such as Mackle.

"I think they're looking for scapegoats," the police source says. "I hope they aren't hung out to dry for something that was a police failure. Some of the officers were just so frustrated by the fact they were working long hours, had a huge backlog of files, and just knew in their hearts some of these guys were still abusing kids. All they wanted to do was lock [abusers] up but were being told to prioritise files – lose files basically."

Anthea Simcock, chief executive of the Hamilton-based Child Protection Studies, says she understands police are having to juggle resources, but "it would be lovely if this [child abuse] was made a priority". It was a huge deal for a child to come forward about abuse, and the impact of not having it followed up was devastating.

"The thought that the person is out there, nothing happens to them, it hasn't been followed up, almost confirms in the child's mind that they're wrong and that these people have the right to do this to them. It actually compounds the issue."

Penny, of Lower Hutt police, put it this way in Police News: "These children don't have a voice ... when little children are sexually abused they can't ring us up and say, `Why haven't you done anything about it for a year?"'

Child abuse: the sickening truth

A recent report by the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD) ranked New Zealand 29 out of 30 countries in the general measure of health and safety of children.

NZ is ranked fourth worst for its child-abuse statistics. We have the highest rates of suicide in the developed world for youth aged 15-19. Last year 75 babies were hospitalised as a result of abuse, on average, one every five days. Last year 2855 children were physically abused, 1126 sexually abused and 15,615 damaged through emotional abuse or neglect.

Child, Youth and Family last year received 49,000 reports that were serious enough to require follow-up action. Almost 1800 of those dealt with by social workers last year were reabused within six months.

Sources: Ministry of Social Development, OECD.

Top secret: what police don't want you to know

The Sunday Star-Times wanted to know how many child-abuse cases around New Zealand have gone uninvestigated, but police refuse to release even basic information. They would not divulge how many child-abuse complaints they are dealing with nationally, how many of those remain unallocated or even how many staff are attached to their specialist child-abuse teams. The Star-Times asked each police district to provide figures showing their child-abuse workload but the request was quickly taken over by the media team at Police National Headquarters, which said the questions would be treated as an Official Information Act request. Under the act, agencies should try to respond within 20 working days. After 25 working days, police said they would not be releasing most of the information sought, because of an ongoing inquiry by the Independent Police Conduct Authority (IPCA).

These were the questions we asked, and assistant commissioner Viv Rickard's answers:

Q: How many child-abuse teams (CAT) are there in your district?

A: There are 21 dedicated child-abuse teams nationally.

Q: How many staff are attached to those CAT teams and what are their ranks?

A: This is being refused ... on the basis that this information is currently the subject of an investigation being undertaken by the IPCA.

Q: How many cases is each officer currently dealing with and how many cases are unallocated?

A: Any such information will be evidence that police are required to provide the IPCA as part of its inquiries. Therefore this information has been refused ... in order to avoid prejudice to the maintenance of law, namely the conduct of the inquiries being undertaken by the IPCA.

Q: In the past year, how many cases have come before the CAT teams in total?

A: Under the child-abuse category in annual statistics, in the past three calendar years police recorded 1788, 1814 and 1777 cases respectively. Offences which could be categorised as child abuse are sexual attacks, immoral behaviour against persons aged 16 and below and the offence of child abuse. In regard to the number of cases to date this calendar year, that is information that will be evidence that police are required to provide the IPCA.

Q: Of those, how many have resulted in charges being laid?

A: Police are not able to identify how many of those files have resulted in charges without expending considerable resource and time to examine each file. Accordingly, police decline this request. Police would be willing to reconsider your requests once the various investigations have been completed. The Star-Times understands the inquiries may not be completed for more than a year. We believe the public has a right to know the information now and we have appealed to the ombudsman.

- © Fairfax NZ News