Minister ‘Trying To Have It Both Ways’ In Ordering Police To Take Swim Test – Labour

The 149 police officers who graduated without being
assessed on their swimming ability will now go through the
test over the next four months.

It comes after Police
Minister Mark Mitchell “made [his] expectations clear” that
the constables return to undergo the assessment.

On
Wednesday, police confirmed 76 constables who graduated from
Wing 383 and 73 from Wing 381 were unable to complete the
test while at the college.

Police told RNZ the
constables from Wing 383 were unable to complete the test
due to health and safety risks posed by the cryptosporidium
outbreak across the Wellington region, while those in Wing
381 were unable to take part because the pool was
unavailable.

In a statement, Police College director
Superintendent Penelope Gifford told RNZ the water
competency test was not a graduation requirement.

“The
swim assessment is designed to ensure recruits are aware of
their own abilities and limitations in water. This becomes
important operationally to help inform their decision-making
if they need to respond to a critical water incident,”
Gifford said.

“In the swim assessment recruits are
asked to swim out, dive down to retrieve a brick and tread
water holding the brick. We also assess whether they can
swim 50 metres in under a minute and tread water for five
minutes.

“Those constables will undertake the swimming
assessment over the next four months.”

Mitchell was
unavailable to be interviewed, but in a statement said the
officers should still be assessed.

“It is a reasonable
expectation that our police officers as part of their
training undergo a water competency assessment. I have made
my expectations clear that the officers still receive this
assessment. How police do that is an operational
matter.”

Labour’s police spokesperson Ginny Andersen
said Mitchell was right to take a public safety approach,
but she accused him of trying to deflect.

“He’s saying
it’s an operational matter, but then he is the one who has
directed… those police officers to come back and receive
that swimming training. So he’s kind of trying to have it
both ways,” she said.

Andersen said it seemed to be
part of a trend that showed police were facing pressure to
deliver on the coalition’s promise to recruit 500 additional
officers by 27 November.

“This comes straight off the
back of three
police recruits not passing their physical assessment test,
yet still proceeding through college, and it indicates
that there appears to be political pressure being applied to
the college to try and deliver the promise of 500 more
police,” she said.

Police on Monday said those three
recruits being accepted into the college was “a clear breach
of the recruitment policy”, and they would carry out an
audit covering the past six months to see if there had been
further breaches.

In response, Mitchell said there had
been no political interference with police or the
recruitment programme, and he and Associate Minister Casey
Costello – who has delegated responsibility for meeting the
target – had been clear that police training standards were
not to be dropped.

He had also said recruitment
standards were relaxed under the previous Labour government,
“for example by dropping the required swim standard and
dropping standards around low-level offending”, but Andersen
said that was a police decision resulting from their review
into whether the training was fit for purpose.

Police
confirmed to RNZ that as of 21 April they were still 475
officers short of the 500 additional officers target, noting
that did not include the 334 recruits still at Police
College.

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