In a text message to Little, Police Inspector Dean Silvester said Chung had turned up at the Karori search area and spread misinformation, had inappropriate contact with emergency services, and inappropriate contact with the missing persons family.<\/p>\n
Ray Chung called police’s claims “far fetched” and maintains he did nothing wrong. Photo \/ Mark Mitchell <\/p>\n
Chung has yet to comment to the Herald on the latest development in the saga. <\/p>\n
In a response to The Post, he disputed Silvester\u2019s claims.<\/p>\n
\u201cSilvester said I didn\u2019t identify myself as a councillor, how far-fetched is that? If I didn\u2019t, then why would Steve tell me what he was doing and spend so long on these calls?,\u201d Chung said.<\/p>\n
In a statement, Wellington District Commander Penelope Gifford said: \u201cclaims made by the Councillor about a senior officer\u2019s actions are completely false, unwarranted and have unfairly dragged the officer\u2019s integrity into question.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI am happy to meet with Cr Chung so he can discuss his concerns directly with me, but I will be making it very clear that the officer involved has my full trust and confidence as I know him to operate with the highest level of integrity,\u201d Gifford said.<\/p>\n
\u201cNever at any stage has a member of my staff been less than truthful with him.\u201d<\/p>\n
In a post on Facebook, Chung said all he did was \u201chelp constituents who were desperate,\u201d and accused media of incorrectly reporting he was searching.<\/p>\n
In May, Chung said he may have misspoken<\/a> when he told the Herald that day he was there to search for the man.<\/p>\n \u201cNo, I wasn\u2019t searching, I was out there, maybe I was thinking I was out there with the search or to look for the searchers, but no.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m scared of the water and so there\u2019s no way I was going to get into any water,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Documents released by the council about the incident last week<\/a> reveal Little planned to sack Chung over the scandal, before he ultimately resigned.<\/p>\n Ethan Manera<\/a> is a Wellington-based journalist covering Wellington issues, local politics and business in the capital. He can be emailed at ethan.manera@nzme.co.nz<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In a text message to Little, Police Inspector Dean Silvester said Chung had turned up at the Karori…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":515005,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[1443,806,1975,1863,138509,63947,2199,2562,12857,13982,1741,38290,26519,16843,3594,111,43,139,69,10932,675,7241,22393,137768,2687,5843,52,15900],"class_list":["post-515004","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-zealand","tag-about","tag-as","tag-at","tag-back","tag-brass","tag-chung","tag-city","tag-claims","tag-completely","tag-continues","tag-controversy","tag-councillor","tag-councillors","tag-false","tag-hit","tag-new-zealand","tag-news","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-officer","tag-police","tag-publicly","tag-ray","tag-rebuked","tag-saying","tag-senior","tag-wellington","tag-wellingtons"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/515004","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=515004"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/515004\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/515005"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=515004"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=515004"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=515004"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}