Police commissioner Howard Broad does not believe there is a conduct issue among Southern police, despite five officers being convicted of criminal charges so far this year and another still going through the courts.
In Dunedin yesterday for a police awards ceremony, Mr Broad said police kept very good data on officers' conduct and if they spotted any trends in behavioural issues they addressed them.
The Southern police district's management were constantly checking officer behaviour for any underlying trends or concerns, and he was confident there were no problems.
"I don't think there's any issues that need looking at more than what's happening at district level."
That six southern officers had faced court proceedings this year - one for indecent assault, two for assault, one for perjury, one for wilfully attempting to pervert the course of justice and one for fraud - was more a matter of timing of the court proceedings, than indicative of a bigger problem, he said.
With regard to this week's sentencing of the second officer, Dairne Cassidy, involved in the cover-up of an Alexandra officer's guilt in a 2005 crash, for which an Alexandra teenager was falsely blamed, Mr Broad said it was never good to have police before the court, but a service failure of a reasonable proportion had occurred.
Action needed to be taken on it and he was pleased the matter had been brought to light and dealt with.
Police were embarrassed about the whole thing, and obviously apologised to the young man falsely accused, he said.
Having something like that happen was quite a rare thing, but policing was a tough job and people did get in to spaces where they did wrong.
Cassidy, who was in charge of the crash investigation, was found guilty of wilfully attempting to pervert the course of justice after she failed initially to disclose a statement made by the officer who caused the crash, Neil Ford, in which he had described his at-fault driving.
Cassidy admitted the charge against her, but also claimed she had been bullied by her superior officer not to disclose Ford's comments.
Sentencing her, Judge Paul Kellar said that in not disclosing the comments she had been acting from a sense of misguided loyalty and that she seemed to have been "overborne by a commanding officer not to disclose the statement".
Mr Broad said he could not comment on a judge's comment, but there was a risk in organisations that collegiality and comradeship could be perverted out of a misguided sense of loyalty.
That had been a big problem in international policing organisations, but NZ Police had worked hard to prevent that sort of culture developing here.
