Victim advocate and Gotingco family spokesperson Ruth Money talks to Lisa Owen about whether New Zealand needs to change the way we deal with the "worst of the worst" offenders.
RAW DATA: The Nation transcript: Lisa Owen interviews Ruth Money
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Lisa Owen: Ruth Money is a victim advocate and spokesperson for the Gotingco family. Good morning. Let's talk about the report. Can you briefly remind people what are some of the things that the Corrections Department could have done better.
Ruth Money: We presented to the inquiry team and we asked them to go offshore and come back with an investigative or inquiry piece around best-practice monitoring and management of high-risk sex offenders. Sadly, the report tells a bit of a story, really, of how the New Zealand standards managed Robertson. There is a little bit of offshore talk but nothing in terms of what we believe and our experts believe are the core issues, which is how we should be monitoring these people.
So how should we be monitoring them?
Closely and person-to-person. We should have live GPS data. We didn't have that at the time of Blessie. We should have person-to-person monitoring. It was considered and turned down for Robertson.
So what does that mean? When he left the house he would have had somebody with him?
Absolutely. Absolutely. And it proves that we should have had that. Within two days of his mother leaving the country and leaving essentially person-to-person monitoring him, he breached and nothing happened about that. There was no strict enforcement of anything over that breach.
So why do you think Corrections didn't do that?
We don't have the skills and the capability. We are blase when it comes to high-risk sex offenders. We need to be proactive in our policing and proactive in our management of these people, and we're not. We do not have the capability.
Because they would say that, and the report says that they managed him beyond the mandatory standards and they also considered some of these restrictions but said that they would be overly restrictive on him.
Mm. And that just shows that we don't have the capability nor the knowledge in our system to be able to delivery that. Yes, they're hard people to manage. That doesn't mean that the public doesn't expect you to manage them. We expect you to do a very good job with these one-percenters or these high-risk guys, and you're not doing it.
Well, what the report seemed to be saying was that these 27 things that could have been done better, even if they had been done better, nothing, according to them, would have stopped him from killing. He was determined.
Incorrect. He was determined to hurt someone as the one-percenters or high-risk are. That doesn't mean that we should go, 'Oh, we're defeated and we're not going to try.' That means that we should use our proactive policing and our proactive management, and that's where the system failed this family. And that's where the system will fail the public again. We shouldn't be complacent. We can't put our hands in the air and say, 'Oh, they're difficult to manage. We're not going to try.' He would have been managed completely differently overseas. The UK, the US. They didn't even look at that here. We have not learnt from that, and that inquiry does nothing to fix the system.
So what do they do overseas with these people?
Person-to-person monitoring. 24-hour, seven-days real-time monitoring. They are using dynamic assessment tools rather than static or just static. We expected our probation officers to have discussions with Robertson and other high-risk offenders about their sexual deviancy. That should be done through polygraphs. That's the only way to prove what these people are actually behaving like. That's the only way and that is the way that the US and the UK manage these people. But we're not even considering it. And those recommendations— There are 27 recommendations and one of them talks about more training around high-risk sex offenders, and that's going to come in next July. Far too little, too late.
We're running out of time, but I do want to ask you. Antonio Gotingco. He has launched a fund for civil action. You've been involved in things like this before. Can he win this?
Yes, he can. That inquiry — all it does, actually, it serves to highlight that we don't get it. Our system doesn't get it, and it needs to get it for public safety.
Thanks for joining me this morning, Ruth Money. I appreciate your time.
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