Almost 150 constables who graduated from police college were unable to complete the swimming test while at the college. Photo: 123rf.com
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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