Police have admitted ‘mishandling’ a case of assault involving a father (a “prominent Tauranga professional involved in charity work”) and his eleven year old son, but the sequence of events is disturbing.

Stuff report Police mishandle assault on 11-year-old.

The boy told police that after a dispute over a phone in November, 2012, his father slammed his head twice on to the concrete floor of their garage, dragged him up some stairs, banged him against the walls, dragged him across the lounge floor, sat him down and slammed his head on to the kitchen table.

He ran from the address, went to his grandmother’s house and was taken to Tauranga Hospital with bruising to his neck and arms and swelling and bruising to his head.

He also complained of headaches and sore eyes and according to his mother, still suffers headaches, nausea and fatigue.

But the handling of the case included:

• Police failed to return the boy’s mother’s phone calls.
• Police failed to keep the mother and her son informed of the fact they were reducing the charge against the offender.
  The offender was originally charged with assault on a child but police did a plea bargain and reduced the charge to common assault.
• A senior officer admitted police had watered down the summary of facts.
  Police admit their summary of facts presented in court, which talked about the victim “falling over a suitcase” as his father “marched him to the dining room . . . to join the rest of the family for the evening meal . . . did not reflect the full seriousness of the assault”.
• The father pleaded guilty last year and was discharged without conviction.

So police kept diminishing the case to the extent that the man got off without a conviction with permanent name suppression. And it didn’t end there.

Police further enraged the boy’s mother last week when Loper said in a statement to the Sunday Star-Times that the charge was reduced because police believed there was no prospect of a conviction on the original charge due to a lack of “evidential sufficiency”.

“I’m shocked and disbelieving,” said the mother. “In the time they sat with me they never once said lack of evidence was why they downgraded the charge.

“They said it was to protect my son from going to trial. He wanted to go to trial and to tell the judge what happened to him. His words were ‘apparently I’m just a child and what I say doesn’t matter’.”

Lopez told the Star-Times:

“Police take all assaults on children extremely seriously and this was no exception”.

There seem to be disturbing exceptions to dealing with this assault seriously from the victim’s point of view. But the ‘reputation’ of the man who assaulted the boy was taken seriously.

Judge Josephine Bouchier permanently suppressed his name, after his Queen’s Counsel argued that convicting and naming him would damage his reputation and affect his charity work.

That’s not the end of it.

The offender has subsequently pleaded guilty to charges of breaching protection and parenting orders by making unauthorised contact with his son. He will be sentenced in the Auckland District Court later this month.

The timing of this isn’t clear but it must mean either the assault occurred while breaching a protection order, or more likely after the assault a protection order was put in place and the father has breached it.

Whichever it was surely that’s reasonable grounds for beefing up rather than watering down the assault charges.

Instead a man who allegedly bashed his son’s head into a concrete floor and a table – the boy received verified head injuries – was able to get off the assault charge.

Loper said in his apology letter that Turner would make time to meet the victim, now 13, and explain the decision to change the charge was “based on securing an acknowledgement of guilt only and was not reflective of the content of [the victim’s] interview.”

An acknowledgement of guilt was secured which led to the man securing permanent name suppression and securing a discharge without conviction.

Justice and the boy seem to have been very poorly served.