Police Complaints System "Not Meeting Today's Needs"

Mon, 22 March 2010 Courtesy of: Police Oracle

The system that deals with complaints against the police is not fulfilling its remit and must be overhauled if it to remain relevant to the realities of the 21st Century.

In a stark assessment, Jane Furniss, Chief Executive of the Independent Police Complaints Commission, accepted that neither the public nor officers were being served well by the status quo and acknowledged that change was needed.

Both the Association of Chief Police Officers and lawyers have backed the CEO. They believe action is needed to change the emphasis on how complaints handling is dealt with.

“the current legislation asks who is to blame and how they can be punished, rather than how can things be put right again”

Furniss told PoliceOracle.com that the current system had been designed to meet the needs of society more than 30 years ago and was incompatible with 21st Century expectations. But she stressed that new statutory guidance would be published on the IPCC website on April 1, which aimed to bring the system more up-to-date.

She pointed out that misconduct had to be found in order for a complaint to be upheld under the status quo. The system did not seek to examine honest mistakes nor offer any way to immediately redress the inconvenience or hurt caused to those affected.

Furniss said: “We give the police huge powers to come into our lives – they can knock on our doors and insist on coming into our homes. Clearly we need to be assured that when something goes wrong there is a process available to investigate it.

“However the current legislation asks who is to blame and how they can be punished, rather than how can things be put right again. It was built to address the problems of the 1970s and 1980s and had recording complaints at its heart.

“Under the new guidance, we are not saying that we will not look at misconduct, but the first option will be looking at how the problem can be fixed. And we’ll also ask how we can learn any lessons from what has happened.

“If, last night, your front door was kicked down because police officers thought your house was actually a drug den, what you would probably want to know is ‘can my door be put back on its hinges, can I have an apology and can you reassure my children that this will not happen again on another evening’.”

John Feavyour, Cambridgeshire’s Deputy Chief Constable and ACPO National Lead on Complaints and Misconduct, welcomed Furniss’s comments. He believed that the revised guidance being released in April would be a positive step forward.

He added: “All too often, people who complain about the police end up even more dissatisfied with the service they’ve received than at the start of the complaints procedure. These revised procedures secure training and learning for officers where appropriate as well as a better set of outcomes for complainants.”

Barrister Stephen Cragg, of Doughty Street Chambers, also shared the view that the system was less effective than it could be. He pointed out that more needed to be done to bring procedures up to standards, emphasising that the European Human Rights Commission was now taking more interest in how complaints were being handled.