Stupid is as stupid does: How the Police buried a complaint, only implicating themselves
- Grant McLachlan
- 3 hours ago
- 24 min read
A co-conspirator was caught whispering answers to a complainant giving evidence in the witness stand. Can you think of anything dumber? How the Police then tried to bury the serious crime was even dumber.
The malicious prosecution was a conspiracy to silence an investigative writer. Lois McPherson and Lorraine Martin demonstrated that, yet the Police's cover up reinforced evidence that they were also complicit.
There comes a point where the question stops being whether the New Zealand Police will properly investigate corruption in their own ranks and starts being whether they bother to hide it any more. The McPherson complaint — logged as PERVERTS JUSTICE on day one, handed to the same officer my published reporting was about, then handed sideways to her direct supervisor in the same unit, then closed two years later without the named suspect ever being interviewed — suggests that they no longer feel the need.
I have published, in detail and with primary documents, how the Warkworth Police ran a malicious prosecution against me. I have published -
How Detective Constable Jacqueline Fairbrass drafted witness statements before meeting witnesses,
How the 111 call recording, when finally released two years late, contradicted the complainant’s police statement, and
How Fairbrass and her supervising officer Sergeant James Gallagher QSM — a decorated senior cop and former IPCA investigator — chose to upgrade the charges to robbery rather than disclose the conflicting evidence.
I have published how the Mahurangi Police Station was being run by unsupervised vigilante volunteers, and how, the day after my acquittal, the station was abruptly closed.
I have published how the Crown Prosecutor and the trial Judge made a record on the bench that a complainant’s “support person” was caught feeding her answers under cross-examination, and how that support person turned out to be a woman who lives 150 metres from the alleged crime scene and three doors from the chief Crown witness.
Each of those articles is referenced. Each of those articles is sourced from documents the Police themselves disclosed. Each of those articles names individual officers and members of the public.
What has been the response?
Nothing. Or worse than nothing — escalation.
Every time I have lodged a complaint, the same officers have closed ranks. Every time I have complained to a watchdog, the watchdog has found a reason not to investigate. The IPCA, the Privacy Commissioner, Crown Law, and Police Professional Conduct have each had multiple opportunities to act on documented misconduct, and each has declined.
There is no point complaining to watchdogs that refuse to do their jobs. They lack the mandate, the resources, and the inclination.
So the Police have learned the lesson the system has taught them: it does not matter how blatant the offending is, because no one will hold them to account.
The latest example is so blatant it would be funny if it were not so serious.
The seriousness of the crimes
In a nutshell, I published an article about the modus operandi of a network of vigilantes who abused their connections with politicians, council staff, and local police. They even ran their own police station unsupervised and unvetted. The following day, they repeated their pattern to silence me. I filmed that and two similar incidents involving the same group. I was told to keep the footage close to my chest.
I was charged with assault and theft. The officer in charge, Constable Jacqueline Fairbrass, had tunnel vision from the start. After all, she responded to a 111 call at the home of the coordinator of volunteers at the local police station and the person claiming to be a victim was the mother of a senior cop.
When contradictory and fabricated evidence emerged, police delayed the release of it. Meanwhile, they used the fabricated evidence to justify upgrading the charges against me to robbery, where the starting point for sentencing was imprisonment. They then tried to plea bargain with me, offering to drop the theft and robbery charges if I pled guilty to the lesser charge of ‘male assaults female.’
At my trial, I produced footage of being assaulted with a weapon by the vigilante, and that she broke my nose with that weapon. When the complainant and the witnesses realised that my footage existed, they changed and then coordinated their evidence to counter it. The complainant passed a ‘secret note’ to Fairbrass, which Fairbrass handed to the Crown Prosecutor. As the complainant sat in the witness stand giving evidence, she had a support person who was caught whispering answers to her.
If it wasn’t for my footage – and the prosecution witnesses contradicting their police statements and each other – I would have been imprisoned.
It was a malicious prosecution. It was a conspiracy to bring a false accusation against me. According to the Crimes Act, that is a crime that carries with it 14 years imprisonment – much more serious than what I was accused of – and Fairbrass was the architect, her colleagues emboldened her, the conspirators acted with impunity, and her colleagues covered it up.
The complaint
On 9 February 2024, in the fourth day of a four-day jury trial at the Auckland District Court, Judge T Singh issued a judicial minute (R v McLachlan, [2024] NZDC 2627) recording that the complainant’s authorised support person, Lois McPherson, had been caught whispering “you don’t know anything about that” to the complainant during cross-examination. The defence — myself and my barrister Tudor Clee — heard it. Crown counsel Taniela-Afu Veikune heard it. The court Registrar, Deeksha Ramesh, heard it. Singh J recorded it as fact in his ruling. McPherson was removed from the courtroom.
When McPherson was brought back before Singh J to explain herself, she gave an account that everyone present knew was untrue. Tudor and I had a choice: apply for a mistrial, or push on for a verdict. The judge and Crown Prosecutor said that they wouldn't oppose an application for mistrial.
By then, it was the second time I was offered a mistrial. I thought that the conspirators were trying to sabotage a trial so to claim that I "got off on a technicality." After two and a half years of malicious prosecution, we pushed on. I was acquitted on all charges.
What McPherson had done is a serious offence. Section 117 of the Crimes Act 1961 makes perverting the course of justice punishable by up to 7 years’ imprisonment. Section 115 makes conspiring to bring a false accusation punishable by up to 14 years. Tudor told the court he intended to file a formal Police complaint, and Singh J’s minute expressly preserved that right.
On 5 March 2024, Tudor filed the complaint via the 105 reporting channel. It was logged as Police file 240306/4529 under the case category “PERVERTS JUSTICE” — Police’s own classification, applied by Police’s own intake team, on day one. There was no question about what the complaint was. There was, on its face, an enormous amount of evidence: a Judge’s minute on the public record; three separate ear-witnesses (defence counsel, Crown counsel, and the court Registrar); my photographs from 1 October 2021 showing McPherson loitering at the same location where the original alleged offence had occurred; her undisclosed connection to the same activist network the trial had spent four days examining.
This was, by the standards of any prosecution, a gift-wrapped case.
The conflict
The complaint was assigned to Detective Constable Jacqueline Fairbrass — Queen’s identifier JFJW66 — at the Waitematā East Area HQ. Fairbrass was the officer in charge of the failed prosecution against me. She had spent two and a half years building the very case that the McPherson incident had occurred during.
Before the start of the second day of trial on 7 February 2024, the complainant Lorraine Martin had handed Fairbrass a “secret note” she had written, asking Fairbrass to give it to the Crown Prosecutor. Crown counsel later informed the Court of what had happened, and the note was disclosed to the defence. Fairbrass’s own notebook from that day sits in the Police file, with the right-hand column blacked out under section 6(c) of the Official Information Act.
She is, in other words, a witness in the very investigation she was assigned to lead.
Crown counsel Veikune saw the conflict immediately. On 21 March 2024 — two weeks after the complaint was lodged — he replied to Fairbrass in writing:
“Whilst this stems from the trial that you and I ran, it really is a separate ‘fresh’ complaint... there’s a clear conflict here and I shouldn’t go anywhere near this new potential charge, being a potential witness myself. Whether or not that applies to you too is of course something you’ll discuss internally at Police.”
That email is in the OIA file. It was a direct, unmissable invitation from a Crown Solicitor to the Officer in Charge to declare her own conflict of interest and step aside.
She did not. The file sat on her desk for the next three months.
The sit
Between 21 March 2024 (Veikune’s email) and 4 June 2024, the only entries in the Police narrative log are administrative. Fairbrass did not contact Tudor. Fairbrass did not contact the Court. Fairbrass did not contact McPherson. Fairbrass did not contact Veikune. Fairbrass did not, as far as the released file shows, take a single investigative step.
On 4 June 2024 — three months later — Tudor called 105 looking for an update. The 105 service request was forwarded to Fairbrass with a note: “CLEE/Tudor was wanting to speak to you regarding this matter.” Six days passed. On 10 June 2024, Tudor finally got Fairbrass on the phone. When asked about his complaint against McPherson, Fairbrass asked Tudor:
“What do you want done with it?”
Tudor immediately followed up the conversation in writing:
“This is a formal complaint based, the facts of which are contained in a Judicial minute confirming that the Crown Prosecutor also heard the comment… Given there is a Judicial minute I expect this matter dealt with promptly… We discussed that it isn’t appropriate for you to carry out the investigation given you were the Officer in Charge of the related case. Please update me with who the new OC will be in this matter so I can ensure this is dealt with promptly.”
Tudor’s email is in the OIA file. He had to put it in writing. The Crown Prosecutor had already told her she had a conflict; her senior officers had not lifted a finger; she had had three months and done nothing. It took the complainant’s own counsel, in writing, to dislodge the file from her desk.
Even then, where it went next was almost worse.
The handover
Between when Fairbrass charged me and the trial, Fairbrass was no longer at Warkworth. She had been promoted to Detective Constable and was working in the Adult Sexual Assault Team (ASAT) on Auckland’s North Shore — in the same Waitematā Police District as Warkworth. After Tudor’s email, the file was passed up one rung in her own chain of command: to her direct supervisor, Detective Sergeant Geoff Patterson, also based at ASAT Waitematā.
That is the moment any reasonable system would have recognised the structural problem. The complaint was about an officer’s conduct as Officer in Charge of a failed prosecution. Reassigning that complaint to her own ASAT supervisor in the same district is not solving a conflict of interest — it is rebadging it. Patterson, whatever his personal probity, was being asked to investigate a complaint in which his own subordinate was a witness, in which the substantive investigative work would inevitably involve her, and in which an adverse finding would be a finding against his unit.
He did, to be fair, make a token start. On 1 July 2024 at 10:18 am he emailed the Auckland District Court — auckland.dc@justice.govt.nz — requesting the trial team’s information for case CRI-2021-044-002983. The Jury Case Manager, Litara Lotoaso, replied within two hours. By the next morning, Crown Solicitor’s office partner Henry Steele of Meredith Connell had taken over from Conrad Purdon as the Crown contact and confirmed “no opposition from the Crown.” On 12 July 2024, Tudor sent Patterson and Steele a careful four-paragraph email setting out, point by point, what the complaint was about and — critically — that the in-chambers exchange immediately after the McPherson incident, in which McPherson gave her contradictory “explanation” to Singh J, had not been transcribed and was the single most important missing piece of evidence:
“If that chambers discussion including her comments is not provided I suggest you seek it as it is highly relevant given there is no relationship whatsoever between what the Court accepted was heard and what she claims to have said.”
On 18 July 2024, Patterson forwarded Tudor’s email internally to two new names — Nicholas (Nick) Poland and Timothy (Tim) Williams — with a casual “Cheers, Geoff.”
Then he too sat on it.
For the next nine months, the released Police file contains nothing. No statements. No interviews. No further correspondence with the Court. No request for the chambers transcript. No approach to McPherson. Nothing.
The “investigation”
What finally broke the silence was not Police initiative. On 3 May 2025 — ten months after Patterson’s last visible action — a witness statement was taken at North Shore Police Station, electronically. The witness’s identity is redacted under section 9(2)(a) of the OIA. On 29 May 2025, a second witness statement was taken in person at North Shore Policing Centre by an officer with QID ADFN20, again with the witness’s identity redacted. On 5 June 2025, Tudor was finally invited to give his own statement, by email; he signed it in person on 17 June 2025 at the front counter at North Shore, witnessed by Vicki Harrison (VHBJ38), the statement having been taken by Detective Constable Katie Hay (KHEL35).
By that point, fifteen months had passed since the complaint was lodged.
Tudor’s signed six-page statement is the most substantial unredacted document in the entire 331-page release. He set out 63 numbered paragraphs. He named Singh J, Veikune, Ramesh, McPherson, Lorraine Martin, and others. He swore on oath that “the allegation was fabricated.” He listed exactly what he had handed Police:
the Judge’s minute,
the secret note,
the Notes of Evidence of trial, and
the photographs from 1 October 2021.
At paragraph 61 he disclosed that he had also reported the matter to “the Chief Justice as well as the Bar Associations.” At paragraph 62, he listed each piece of evidence he had given Police. At paragraph 63 he wrote: “I have had no further involvement in the matter to date.”
That is to say: as of June 2025, fifteen months in, the only thing the complainant’s counsel had been asked to do was sign the statement he had already submitted at the start.
After 17 June 2025, the file goes silent again. Eight more months pass. On 19 February 2026, the OIA release is prepared and the case status is recorded as “Assigned (Case Completion Process)” — i.e. closed without charges. There is no log entry, anywhere in the released file, indicating that the suspect — Lois McPherson — was ever interviewed.
She was never approached. She was never warned. She was never charged.
What was redacted, and what wasn’t
If you only read the headline numbers — 331 pages released — it sounds like a thorough disclosure. It is not. The pattern of what has been blacked out tells its own story.
Section 6(c) (“would be likely to prejudice the maintenance of the law”) has been used over Fairbrass’s notebook from 7 February 2024, the body of Patterson’s Initial Action Report, the body of every witness statement, and the contents of multiple multi-page documents. Section 6(c) is a serious withholding ground that requires real, articulable prejudice to law enforcement. It is hard to see how it survives the file going into “Case Completion Process” without prosecution. There is no investigation left to prejudice.
Section 9(2)(h) (legal professional privilege) has been claimed over an entire multi-page block sitting between Patterson’s Initial Action Report and Tudor’s first email. Privilege belongs to the client, who can waive it. That block is structurally where any internal advice on how to handle the conflict of interest itself would live.
Section 9(2)(a) (privacy) has been used over witness names but not over the suspect’s name. Lois McPherson is named openly in the narrative log; Tudor’s lawyers, the registrar, and Crown counsel are blacked out. That is the inverse of how privacy redactions normally work in a complaint file.
Meanwhile, the unredacted parts confirm that:
The case was logged as PERVERTS JUSTICE on day one;
The Crown Prosecutor flagged the conflict of interest in writing within two weeks;
The Officer in Charge ignored that advice and sat on the file for three months;
The file was then handed sideways to her own supervisor in the same unit in the same district;
The supervisor took one round of administrative steps in July 2024 and then sat on the file for nine months;
A new investigator finally took statements in May–June 2025;
The suspect was never approached; and
The file was closed without charges.
The website Police avoided
In the course of her preparation, Detective Constable Hay would presumably have wanted to read the publicly available material on the case. Tudor’s own statement at paragraph 8 told her that the complainant “was being manipulated by members of various community groups in Snell’s Beach to set up my client in retaliation for damaging news articles he published online about them.” Section 00018 of the OIA release has, in Lorraine Martin's handwriting, the URL www.klaut.media/single-post/eco-terrorism-snells-beach-style — the exact article that triggered the original September 2021 attack on me, and that I had been telling Police about for over three years.
So I checked. Across the tens of thousands of sessions of traffic on klaut.media from 2018 to 2026, no visit ever came from a police IP address. Not one. No officer clicked through from a Police intranet, a SharePoint, or any other government domain. During the entire period Detective Constable Hay was actively taking witness statements (May–June 2025), there was no traffic at all from any police IP to any of my investigation articles. During the entire nine-month period Patterson held the file (July 2024 – April 2025), there was no traffic from any government IP block to the eco-terrorism URL Lorraine Martin and Tudor Clee had specifically identified.
The investigators investigating a complaint about how a complainant’s network had targeted a journalist for his published reporting did not, on the visible record, read his published reporting.
The other people reading
In the same fifteen months that Detective Constable Fairbrass and Detective Sergeant Patterson were sitting on the McPherson file without reading my reporting, two other organisations were reading my reporting closely enough to act on it.
On 15 February 2024 — six days after my acquittal — I lodged a complaint of assault against Lorraine Martin, with a letter from Tudor expressly asking that Warkworth Police not be involved given the history of the case. The complaint, however, went to Warkworth Sergeant Dan McDermott. Late on the Friday afternoon of 10 May 2024, Sergeant Dan sent a fob-off letter dismissing my complaint as a "review", signing as the Officer in Charge of "Wellsford & Mangawhai" rather than naming his Warkworth role. He had not asked me for additional evidence. He had relied only on what could be attached to the online complaint form. He had preferred witnesses the jury had just rejected as not credible. And — on the visible record — he had not visited my published reporting on the case once. Across the entire 15 February to 31 May 2024 window in which McDermott's "review" was conducted, my analytics record zero visits from any Warkworth-area IP and zero footprint from any New Zealand Police network address.
A fortnight later, however, Auckland Council took an active interest in my website.
On 16 June 2024 — three months into Fairbrass’s silent custody of the McPherson complaint — I published an article accompanying the relevant chapters of Unleashed. The article carried an interactive Google My Maps embed showing the locations of incidents in the Snells Beach matter and the proximity of clusters of people involved — “where officials lived in proximity to those who lobbied them.” The article and the map sat together for four months. Then, between mid-October and early November 2024, the map disappeared. The article remains live. The map does not.
The traffic data shows what happened. Across the period of the McPherson investigation — March 2024 to February 2026 — Auckland Council staff visited my reporting on the Snells Beach matter at least 240 times, drawn from two distinct enterprise IP blocks the Council operates. The first is a Zscaler-routed block from the Council’s Auckland CBD headquarters on Albert Street: 30 different staff sessions, 120 visits in total, beginning before the McPherson complaint was even lodged. The second is a multi-site enterprise block running between the same Auckland CBD office and the Council’s Warkworth Service Centre on Baxter Street: 20 visits, with the same /24 IP range observed at both locations.
The Warkworth attribution is the giveaway. NZ Police network traffic uses Wellington-allocated government IP ranges and the All-of-Government Network. Commercial APNIC blocks shared between an Auckland CBD office and a Warkworth office on the same /24 are not Police: they are a single Council enterprise WAN.
On 20 September 2024, thousands visited my website to read the article "Warkworth's celebrity crooked cop culture", following my appearance on 1News during the 6pm bulletin.
The day after that article ran, the Mahurangi Police Station in Snells Beach was emptied. Then, the council took an interest, shielding the vigilantes who ran the police station. As court documents demonstrated, the council had encouraged the vigilante behaviour.
On 26 September 2024, the Council’s own Animal Management section read The corrupt dog ranger — the article in which Council’s own enforcement officer was named.
On 3 and 4 October 2024, four different IP addresses inside the Council’s CBD Zscaler block read the map article in a coordinated burst — alongside Auckland Council: too big to care, too complex to control, The corrupt dog ranger, and Small minds in small communities — five sessions in 24 hours, all from staff inside the same organisation, all reading the same constellation of council-critical material. That is not curious browsing. That is the pattern of communications, legal, or enforcement staff being directed at the same body of material because it has been escalated internally.
Then on 15 October 2024, the Warkworth Service Centre IP visited the map article three times in a single day, including once via a Facebook share. That was the last meaningfully engaged visit recorded. The week of 21 October has zero visits to the article. November 2024 records zero visits. December records four. The audience has not lost interest. The asset has been removed.
Within the same investigation window, Auckland Council staff had read the reporting carefully enough across two of their offices to identify a specific embedded asset, escalate it within their organisation, and have Google remove it within a fortnight. That is the speed at which the system can move when it wants to.
But I kept a backup of the map and recreated it using a format that can't be taken down. It is important to demonstrate how clusters of bored Boomers conspired to commit serious crimes that the Police and Council (many of whom were neighbours to the vigilantes) not only condoned, encouraged, but actively obstructed justice to protect.
Compare with the Police. The same fifteen months in which Council staff visited my Snells Beach reporting more than 240 times produced zero visits from any NZ Police IP, and zero on-site searches for any of the officers named in the file. The Police had the URL of the eco-terrorism article in handwriting on page 318 of their own file. They had been told the article existed, by the complainant’s counsel, in a sworn statement at paragraph 8. They had three years between the original 2021 incident and Tudor’s 2024 complaint to read what I had been publishing about Snells Beach. They had fifteen further months between the complaint being lodged and Tudor signing his statement. No officer assigned to file 240306/4529 left a footprint reading the journalism the file was supposed to be about.
The contrast is instructive. Auckland Council — whose staff and enforcement officers are named in my reporting, and whose Warkworth office sits in the heart of the area I write about — read the work carefully, identified a specific asset, and arranged for that asset to disappear. The Police — obliged to investigate a perverting-justice complaint arising from a trial about that same reporting — did not, on the visible record, read it at all.
Stupid is a word with two meanings. It can mean incapable of action. It can also mean strategic about which actions are worth taking. The McPherson file shows the first kind. The takedown of the map shows the second.
Fairbrass and Gallagher
It would be a mistake to treat the McPherson complaint in isolation. It is the latest in a sequence — and the same names keep appearing.
The documented record of Fairbrass’s original investigation, in the malicious prosecution of me, is by now extensive. Some of what it contains:
On the evening of the alleged offence — 18 September 2021 — Fairbrass arrived at Diane Taylor’s home at 6:11 pm and spent 44 minutes there without recording a single description of the alleged offender in her notebook. She rang Victim Support for the complainant at 9:43 pm. She did not make first contact with me until 20 September 2021 at 1:11 am. By the time she did, she had already designated Lorraine Martin as “the victim” and recorded it as such.
On 20 September 2021 at 2:42 am — five and a half hours after closing the file for the night — Fairbrass emailed Martin a draft witness statement and the following request:
“Please email me any photos of bruising that begins to show no matter how insignificant it may seem. If you do seek medical attention, please retain any copies of the details.”
A neutral investigator photographs injuries that exist. Fairbrass solicited photographs of injuries that might develop. The phrase “bruising that begins to show” is an instruction to a complainant to watch for bruising, not a description of bruising the officer has already documented. The final disclosed photographs showed no visible injuries. Fairbrass admitted under oath at trial: “I do remember once I’d taken this photo they didn’t really show much of it up.”
The same morning, Fairbrass also emailed the chief Crown witness, Paul Shanahan, his draft witness statement at 3:36 am. The draft was not a blank form. It was a partially completed narrative — with leading questions in square brackets for him to fill in. Some of the bracketed prompts:
“At about [time?] I heard a commotion. [Description of the commotion that made you look?]” / “The old women [what happened to her when she was hit?]” / “I could see them both clearly… they were only about [how many meters?] away from me.”
Each of these is leading. “Description of the commotion that made you look” presumes there was a commotion. “What happened to her when she was hit” presumes she was hit. The witness was not being asked what he saw; he was being given a story to confirm. He duly filled in the blanks — and a neat ten metres became the supposed distance from which he claimed to have witnessed the event. Cross-examination at trial later established that his actual position on the beach was forty metres away, into the late-afternoon sun, with his line of sight obstructed by sand dunes, a Pohutukawa, and a picnic table.
A coordinated narrative emerged across three witnesses — Shanahan, Corinne Keast, and Jason Marshall — that the alleged offender had been seen “fiddling with” the camera. The “fiddling” detail was the keystone of the prosecution theory: that the camera was stolen so that incriminating photographs of a dog could be deleted. There was a problem with that theory. The camera was dead. Fairbrass herself testified at trial: “I tried to turn it on and it wouldn’t come on… I couldn’t get any action from it.”
A camera that will not turn on will not display photographs. Photographs cannot be deleted. Memory cards cannot be reviewed. Yet three coached witnesses — including one who claimed from fifty metres to have seen the offender “deleting photos” on a screen — testified to “fiddling” they could not have seen on a device that did not work.
There is a marker, in Fairbrass’s own contemporaneous notebook, of where the falsification began. On the page recording 18 September 2021, the correct spelling — MCLACHLAN — appears at 6:12 pm where Shanahan provided the surname. At 7:06 pm, the same notebook records “Grant MCLAUGAN not home.” The misspelling appears at the precise entry where the file later established that Fairbrass had falsified the visit sequence. The same misspelling — MCLAUGAN — appears in exactly one other document on the file: the witness statement of Corinne Keast. No other witness uses that spelling. It is a tell.
Fairbrass’s own sworn statement of 28 September 2021 contains a further provable falsity. She stated, of her phone call with me on 20 September 2021:
“MCLACHLAN phoned me back immediately. I explained I needed to talk to him and requested he email me with a time that suited on my next day shifts. He agreed and I did not engage in any further conversation with him.”
Phone records prove the call lasted 4 minutes 32 seconds. A four-and-a-half-minute call is not a brief scheduling exchange. What was actually discussed was my account of being assaulted by Martin — the very counter-narrative Fairbrass’s investigation was about to suppress.
The camera that triggered the case had its own arc. In Martin’s 18 September notebook statement, no value was given. By her draft statement of 20 September it was worth $217. In her sworn statement of 26 September it was worth $567. By the time of trial in February 2024 it was worth $798. In October 2021 I purchased the same camera model from Amazon for $85. Fairbrass never sought to verify any of the escalating valuations. She simply accepted whatever Martin said the camera was worth — and the prosecution’s theory of seriousness escalated with it.
Inexplicably, Fairbrass maintained that the camera was damaged. During cross-examination, she maintained that the hatch was damaged and wouldn’t close. On 18 September 2021, however, she took four photos of the camera flat in her hand and the hatch was closed, showing no signs of damage. On 8 March 2022 at the Warkworth Police Station, Fairbrass then took photographs of additional damage to the same camera where the hatch was completely torn off and there were dislodged panels. These photographs were only disclosed days before the trial and the camera was not produced as an exhibit during the trial.
The single most damaging item of evidence appeared eighteen months late. In June 2022, the 111 call from 18 September 2021 was finally transcribed. The transcript records Martin saying, multiple times, “his name is Grant McLACHLAN… everybody told me who he was.” That directly contradicted the police statement Martin had since signed, which described the assailant as an unknown male. The 111 call was exculpatory and disclosable. It was withheld for a further nine months — the recording was not provided to the defence until 24 March 2023.
In the period between Fairbrass and Sergeant James Gallagher QSM obtaining the 111 transcript and disclosing it, the charges against me were upgraded — from theft to robbery (Crimes Act 1961 s 234, ten-year maximum, imprisonment starting point). The Police then offered me a plea deal: drop the robbery if I pleaded guilty to male assaults female. The robbery charge had no evidential basis, and the contemporaneous evidence had already destroyed the central premise of their case. The robbery charge’s function was leverage.
I declined. I went to trial. I was acquitted on all charges.
In August 2024, I published the article about Fairbrass. In July 2024 I had already published the article about Lois McPherson. Both articles set out the conduct in detail with primary documents. Both articles named the officers and witnesses. Both articles were widely read. Neither has been the subject of a complaint, a defamation letter, or a correction request.
Then, when my lawyer laid a complaint about a crime committed in a trial at the Auckland District Court, that complaint was assigned to Detective Constable Fairbrass. The same officer my published articles were about. In the same Waitematā District as Warkworth. Working in the Adult Sexual Assault Team — the unit that handles New Zealand’s most sensitive cases of “he said, she said.” When Crown counsel told her she had a conflict, she did nothing. When my lawyer told her in writing she had a conflict, the file went sideways to her own supervisor, who sat on it for nine months.
That is not a system failing under stress. That is a system that no longer feels the need to pretend.
Stupid is as stupid does
There is a particular kind of audacity in handing a perverting-justice complaint about a witness in a trial to the trial’s own Officer in Charge — and then, when challenged, handing it to her direct supervisor in the same unit. There is a particular kind of audacity in classifying a complaint as PERVERTS JUSTICE on day one and then, two years later, closing it without ever interviewing the named suspect. There is a particular kind of audacity in claiming s 6(c) “maintenance of the law” redactions over the contents of a file you have just decided not to prosecute.
It is audacious because they know nothing will come of it.
The IPCA has the statutory mandate to investigate Police misconduct and routinely declines to do so on the most threadbare grounds. The Privacy Commissioner, who is meant to protect citizens from misuse of their personal information by state agencies, has, in my experience, taken a remarkably narrow view of what counts as misuse. The Solicitor-General has the supervisory power over Crown prosecutions and takes the view that complaints about police-led prosecutions are matters for the Police. The Auditor-General audits Police spending but not Police conduct. The watchdogs do not bark, and the people they are supposed to be watching have noticed.
The result is not subtle. When a system stops fearing accountability, the misconduct gets dumber, not smarter, because there is no longer any pressure to hide it. You do not bother declaring a conflict of interest when no one will check. You do not bother interviewing the suspect when no one will audit the file. You do not bother reading the journalist’s published reporting when no one will ever ask whether you did. You hand a complaint about your subordinate to yourself and you write “Cheers, Geoff” at the bottom.
Stupid is as stupid does.
The corruption is not sophisticated. It does not need to be. The people the Police are corrupt around — IPCA, the Privacy Commissioner, the Crown Solicitor’s office, the Office of the Auditor-General — have shown for years that they will not lift a finger. The officers know it. The witnesses know it. The political networks the witnesses move in know it. And so the offending escalates, and the cover-up gets sloppier, because there is no longer any cost to being caught.
The McPherson file is a 331-page monument to that fact.
I will continue to publish the evidence. Other people will continue to read it. At some point, the pile of documented misconduct on this site will be too large for the agencies that are meant to act on it to keep ignoring. Or it will not, and the country will have answered a different question — not whether corrupt cops can be more stupid, but whether anyone in New Zealand is left who is willing to do anything about it.
Either way, the file speaks for itself.
See for yourself:
Related reading
• R v McLachlan: What was Constable Fairbrass thinking? — klaut.media
• R v McLachlan: How Lois McPherson and Lorraine Martin perverted the course of justice — klaut.media
• Eco-terrorism, Snells Beach style — klaut.media
• Small minds in small communities — klaut.media
• Photo evidence thwarts farcical prosecution — klaut.media
• R v McLachlan: The corrupt dog ranger — klaut.media
• R v McLachlan: The expensive camera — klaut.media
• R v McLachlan: Who turned the Keasts? — klaut.media
• Unleashed: Paul Shanahan’s perjury — klaut.media
• Unleashed: Locations of the Snells Beach racket — klaut.media
• Warkworth’s celebrity crooked cop culture — klaut.media
• The serious crimes that Police won’t prosecute — klaut.media
• Crooked cop culture: how New Zealand Police condoned a culture of wrongful convictions — klaut.media
• 1News: Police aghast unsupervised volunteers opened community station to public — 1news.co.nz
