Perspective with Heather du Plessis-Allan: We all know how this is going to end for Andrew Coster

Well, I think we can all see how this is going to end for Andrew Coster, and we could see that last night - he's gonna lose his job running a Government agency.

No one in charge can say that yet because of employment law, but it is absolutely going to happen - because there is no way that a man can do what he has done at the highest levels of police and then possibly continue to earn an income from the taxpayer. Him losing his job is the right outcome here.

But here's the question that I think is up for debate - is Andrew Coster a bad man? Or was he just bad at his job, showing poor judgment, incompetence, naivety, whatever?

And I'm going to suggest that it was actually the latter. He's not a bad man, he was just bad at his job. It doesn't seem like he did what he did because he wanted to hide what Jevon McSkimming had done, it sounded more like he tried to make it go away because he didn't believe that it was true.

It sounds like he believed McSkimming was just the victim of a really bad breakup - he'd ended an affair, she hadn't taken it well and now she was trying to destroy his reputation online, and so Andrew Coster seemed to have thought, maybe what he needed to do was try to prevent these horrible lies from destroying the career of a good man.

So he tried to hurry things up and shut things down and hide emails from ministers and not tell the people appointing the next Police Commissioner that there were complaints against McSkimming, and he got angry at police officers who tried to raise concerns.

Except, as it turns out, Andrew Coster was wrong. Jevon McSkimming was not a good man, he was a creep. And that woman's allegations should have been listened to.

She wasn't destroying the career of a good man, she was alerting authorities to a bad man. 

But Andrew Coster was a police officer, and it is 101 of policing to investigate allegations and listen to complaints, not shut them down, so he failed at the very basics of his job.

And unfortunately for him, while he may not be a bad man, he ended up doing things that I think we can agree are bad things - misleading, shutting down good police wanting to raise concerns, protecting a creep.

Now I don't know, is there really that much difference in the end between being a bad man and being someone who thinks they're doing the right thing - but doing bad things?

For him, the outcome is actually pretty much the same, whether he was bad or bad at his job. He has lost his job and he's lost his reputation.

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