The Learning the Lessons Committee is a multi-agency committee established to disseminate and promote learning across the police service. Its members are: ACPO, APA, Home Office, IPCC, HMIC and the NPIA. The Committee produces bulletins with articles containing lessons from investigations.

Woman raped after delayed response

A woman called the police to report that there was a drunk man in her house who was behaving aggressively and would not leave. The call handler did not think that the woman was in danger because she said that she knew the man and had let him in, there was no urgency in her tone of voice and the call handler could hear the man talking in the background. The call handler did not record what the woman had said about the man being aggressive and did not ask her what she meant by this. She assessed the call as grade 2, requiring a response within 90 minutes.

When the call was sent to the dispatcher, she wrongly recorded that no officers were available. She did not make a blanket call for available officers on the radio as she had been told not to do this by management and, based on the information recorded by the call handler, she did not think the matter was urgent. The dispatcher’s shift then ended and she handed over to a second dispatcher. Once more, despite officers being available, he did not send anyone to the woman’s house for over an hour, almost two hours after the woman’s call.

The force’s operational information system did not allow for incidents that were approaching their time limit to be flagged up with a supervisor, nor did the force graded response policy include information on target times for responding to calls. Staff were aware of response times, but there was a general perception that there was a 90 minute window available to deal with a grade 2 call, not that officers should be dispatched as soon as possible and in any event within 90 minutes.

When the officers arrived at the woman’s house, they found that the man had raped her.

Key questions – for officers/staff:

• As a dispatcher, do you understand that officers should be dispatched as soon as practicable and the required time limit is a maximum?

Key questions – for policy makers/managers:

• Does your force graded response policy include information on response times?

• Does your operational information system software allow for supervisors to be alerted when incidents that have not yet been resourced are approaching their time limits?

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