Tuesday, December 11, 2007



Another nail in Rickards' coffin

In the wake of his second acquittal on historic rape charges stemming from his time as a young police officer in Rotorua, Clint Rickards harshly criticised the investigation against him, calling it a "shambles" and saying that he would have been embarassed to have led it. He then lodged a complaint with the Police Complaints Authority. Now the PCA has come back and praised the investigation, saying that it reached "a high standard of excellence for an historical criminal investigation of its scale" and recommending that its procedures be adopted in other investigations. Another nail in the coffin of Clint Rickards overinflated ego...

As for the persistent claims (from e.g. Willie Jackson) that the prosecutions were all about race, please. Rickards was not prosecuted because he was Maori - he was prosecuted because there were credible allegations that he (and others) had committed a serious crime. Likewise he was not driven from the police force because of his race, but because on the most charitible interpretation, he was an exploitative arsehole who abused his position to sexually exploit young girls (or, less charitibly, a rapist who got away with it due to the passage of time and the actions of his corrupt mates). Whichever way you look at it, such behaviour is simply incompatible with a position of public trust such as membership in the police. And that applies whether you are brown, white, yellow, green, or polka-dotted.