November 2025’s police-misconduct news did not surprise me. It felt familiar, almost expected. Social media quickly pinned on whichever government last made the senior appointments. But policing in Aotearoa New Zealand has a longer story. And when top cops fail, the institution drifts slow, steady, and always downward. Decades of inquiries show this clearly.

This drift has been visible for a long time. In 2000, the Gallen Review examined the independence of the then Police Complaints Authority. A few years later, in 2004, the Bazley Inquiry into police conduct began investigating serious allegations involving senior officers. Its 2007 report described deep, longstanding cultural failings at the top. Each inquiry promised reform. Yet the pattern repeated: official commitments on paper, cultural habits quietly returning in practice.

Nothing changed after 2007. The fallout from the unlawful surveillance decisions. The Roast Busters period revealed leadership failures rather than frontline shortcomings. A string of IPCA reports through the 2010s and early 2020s highlighted bullying, ethical lapses, and questionable judgements at managerial levels. Add the controversies around pursuit policies, the mishandling of emerging surveillance tools, and the recent senior-rank behaviour issues that sparked the 2025 headlines, and a clear picture forms. This is not a frontline problem. Our first responders continue to do the difficult work with commitment. The weakness sits further up the ladder.

My own sense of this began in 2008, while studying for a Master of Strategic Studies (Victoria University of Wellington). Courses such as—Strategy: Theory and Policy, Strategic Analysis, Transnational Crimes, Terrorism and Counterterrorism, Intelligence Analysis, Intelligence-Led Enforcement, and Diplomacy and Religion carry certain expectations when they sit within a university master’s programme. They assume critical thinking, rigorous assessment, and accountability to academic standards. Into that environment came serving officers from Police, Customs, Defence, Immigration, and Intelligence; people accustomed to hierarchy and organisational protection.

At that time, the agencies were competing quietly for influence within the programme. Many officers were allowed to submit classified operational reports instead of academic assignments; documents the rest of us never saw. It created two tracks inside the same classroom: one built on academic expectations, and one shaped around operational shortcut. The latter is described as recognition of experience, a phrase that carries particular significance within institutional and organisational settings. This recognition is often presented as an acknowledgement of prior service or expertise, serving as justification for certain privileges or exemptions.

The moment that stayed with me came later. A sergeant who had passed the course using those unseen reports returned to the university soon after leading a delegation, claiming they “did not learn anything.” It was a remarkable complaint. When academic requirements are softened for you, when assignments are replaced with operational reports, what exactly are you expecting to “learn”? It felt dishonest. A kind of institutional thuggery disguised as grievance. The same sergeant also joked during one of the class discussions previously that the frontline called Police National Headquarters the “shit castle,” which seemed cynical at the time but reads differently now.

Years later, I learnt that police had begun running their own in-house intelligence courses. In a way, it felt inevitable. When training is designed inside the same walls, it becomes more about confirming what the organisation already believes than inviting new thinking. The result is a kind of mirror-imaging. A tidy set of tick-box modules that reassure rather than disrupt.

Over time, it became clear that the culture at the top is not about one individual; it is the product of years of accumulated entitlement. Successive leaderships inherited a way of operating where certain privileges were taken for granted, and where informal understandings often carried more weight than formal rules. That does not mean every commissioner behaved the same, but the environment was permissive enough that boundaries could be stretched without much resistance. The present case only surfaced because someone finally crossed a line that even this long-standing culture could not absorb. It is the breach of that unwritten limit, not the existence of the culture itself, that brought everything into the open.

This is also why our public language around misconduct often avoids the word corruption. Officials prefer phrases like “serious misconduct,” “failure of integrity,” “atrocious behaviour,” or “cultural integrity problem.” Even when a minister briefly calls something corruption, the word is walked back quickly. Aotearoa New Zealand reserves that term for clear financial wrongdoing, so the deeper cultural failures at senior levels end up labelled softly, as if the language itself might protect the institution’s image.

But the drift remains. Institutions do not collapse suddenly. They weaken slowly through small exceptions, silent accommodations, and the steady movement of people who have learnt which behaviours are rewarded. And when those at the top lose their footing, the entire structure tilts with them. Our first responders continue to do their jobs well. It is the leadership culture above them that keeps sliding away from the standards the public assume it holds.