M.P. calls for examiner of police practices

Press, 7 May 1984, Page 22

M.P. calls for examiner of police practices

PA Wellington An examiner of police practices should be appointed, and the police should be made accountable to a Parliamentary select committee, the Deputy Leader of the Opposition, Mr Palmer, has said. If a select committee was “monitoring and reporting on police policy issues regularly, it should improve the accountability and • remove some of the problems with Ministerial control of the police,” said Mr Palmer. “If the police are accountable in every respect to the Government of the day, how can they escape being a political police?” he asked an Australasian conference of commissioners of police. “A way around the problem would be to have the accountability function done in the main by a select

committee representative of all parties in Parliament,” he said.

Legislation should be introduced to provide for an examiner to monitor investigations by the police into complaints of criminal misconduct, Mr Palmer said. The examiner should be a person of sufficient status to be a judge and would function as a watchdog for the public in “those cases where the police are investigating their own.”

“The Ombudsman’s efforts come too late to be effective,” Mr Palmer said.

“It is not that police investigations of themselves are not rigorous, it is that public confidence that the investigation is thorough and complete requires some independent verification.”