Complaints referred to the IOPC (921A/20)
Request
- How many public complaints to your force were referred to and subsequently investigated by the IOPC, in each of the last two full calendar years (2018, 2019), plus 2020 to date, broken down by year, numerical number of accusations, and description of said accusation (e.g. assault, serious non-sexual assault, discriminatory behaviour, etc)?
- Breakdown of IOPC findings and recommendations and subsequent investigatations and action by your professional standards department, in each of the last two full calendar years, plus 2020 to date, broken down by year and case description (e.g. assault, serious non-sexual assault, discriminatory behaviour, etc)?
Response
Our data are not organised in such a way as to allow us to provide this information within the appropriate (cost) limit within the Freedom of Information (FOI) Act. This is because the IOPC findings are not centrally recorded on our systems, therefore each IOPC report would need to be manually reviewed in order to extract this information. Such a search, however, would exceed the appropriate limit (FOIA, s.12).
This means that the cost of providing you with the information is above the amount to which we are legally required to respond i.e. the cost of locating and retrieving the information exceeds the ‘appropriate level’ as stated in the Freedom of Information (Fees and Appropriate Limit) Regulations 2004.
In accordance with the Freedom of Information Act 2000, this letter acts as a Refusal Notice for this part of the request and if one part of a request exceeds the fees limit then S12 of the Act applies to the whole request.
Further information on section 12 of FOI is available here:
However, in accordance with Section 16 of the Act I have a duty to provide advice and assistance in relation to your request and can provide the information requested for question 1. In addition, I have provided WMP outcomes for the allegations. Please find this information attached.
This should not be taken as a precedent that additional information would be supplied outside of the time/fees legislation for any subsequent requests.
Every effort is made to ensure that the figures presented are accurate and complete. However, it is important to note that these data have been extracted from a number of data sources used by forces for police purposes. The detail collected to respond specifically to your request is subject to the inaccuracies inherent in any large scale recording system. As a consequence, care should be taken to ensure data collection processes and their inevitable limitations are taken into account when interpreting those data.
The figures provided therefore are our best interpretation of relevance of data to your request, but you should be aware that the collation of figures for ad hoc requests may have limitations and this should be taken into account when those data are used.
If you decide to write an article / use the enclosed data we would ask you to take into consideration the factors highlighted in this document so as to not mislead members of the public or official bodies, or misrepresent the relevance of the whole or any part of this disclosed material.