How about giving rapists life sentences? So high risk offenders stay in prison… those that get out and repoffend can be recalled the prison instantly
Important bit of text:
>But the majority of complaints led to a finding of no case to answer
So they were looked into, but the police did no wrong.
I’m a police officer and the vast majority of complaints are complete rubbish, but still have to get looked into.
I’ve had complaints of harassment from people I’ve never met, complaints of corruption from people because I was closing their crime due to lack of evidence, complaints of assault for putting cuffs too tight on a murderer, and all sorts. Someone abused me in the street and I told her that I don’t take advice on policing from drug dealers (she was 3 times convicted of drug dealing and under investigation for two more) – that got a complaint too.
Turns out that people don’t like being arrested and don’t like the prospect of being sent to prison, so they believe submitting a complaint will get them out of it. Similarly, crimes get shut all the time due to lack of evidence, and people think that submitting a complaint means it’ll get reopened and we will magic up some new evidence.
This is because lots of police complaints are, quite frankly, utter tosh. The nature of police work will, unavoidably, leave some people feeling like they’ve been wronged by the police. Be it the person who has been arrested but then released with no further action, the victim who has had their case unsolved, or the bystander who was told to go the long way home when they tried to walk through a crime scene. These people have every right to complain, but it doesn’t mean an officer has done any wrong.
In my career, I’ve been accused of causing grievous bodily harm, failing to investigate a rape, and inappropriate parking, to name a few.
All of these matters were investigated, with final reports written up about them consisting of dozens of pages detailing the investigation. In all of them, I was found to have done nothing wrong.
In the examples above, it was seen on CCTV that the supposed victim of GBH actually tripped over a curb and hit his head. The rape victim accepted that she hadn’t taken part in any of the followup contact that we tried to have with her, and that she had actually made the report to cover up a workplace fling. The parking complaint? I was busy dealing with a fight, so hadn’t had time to properly park.
There are of course, officers who do wrong, and they should be investigated and punished. But as with all places, and arguably moreso in the police, there are plenty of unfounded complaints, and a complaint should not be used as a blanket indication of wrongdoing
seems like the clowns need to find something new to complain about when there is nothing.
uk has many problems but police officer’s conduct is exemplary.
Do people think an investigation MUST result in a “case to answer” situation for it to be classified as good?
Are people wanting some sort of KPI “at least 10% of reports must result in disciplinary”….
I once got a complaint from someone for telling their son that if they kept stealing things, they’d get arrested.
I also once got a complaint for letting someone know that their MOT had expired – the car was on the driveway, I was taking a statement from the owner and I had run it through PNC as part of the investigation into it being criminally damaged, noticed the MOT had expired and thought I’d remind them as a courtesy – it was off the road so no ticket issued. They took that as a massive infringement of civil liberties…
I’ve also had complaints from freemen on the land for telling them that their common law court beliefs were nonsense and that at best they were the victim of a scam, and as a Sgt I even had someone call in to complain that the police kept waiting for him to drive (he was a disqualified driver) and then stopping him and dealing with him for doing so.
Needless to say, they all ended up as no case to answer, but they still all had to be recorded as complaints, regardless of how ridiculous, vexatious or based outside of observable reality they might be.
Consider how many drunk people get dealt with by the police in the UK this headline is pretty meaningless.
That about lines up with the rape conviction rate from accusations lol
Partee Ov Loor Und Ordah
I expect a high rate of failure as people they are dealing with are by definition dicks. So they will make spurious claims……THAT SAID 1% is taking the piss and something is clearly wrong!
I can’t imagine the majority of police complaints come from upstanding citizens.
It’s also worth pointing out that even where a complaint is made out, it won’t necessarily lead to full on disciplinary proceedings. If the issue is minor/an honest mistake, and can be fairly easily remedies, then the likely outcome is to fix it, say sorry, and provide some learning and feedback to the officer. A common one might be failing to update a victim in an agreed upon timescale – that could easily be the subject of a complaint but equally its easily fixed and just requires the officers supervisor to identify what caused the failure and address it with the officer in question – if it keeps happening it might be more of an issue but if an officer just has an unmanageable workload that might be something we can try to sort out.
Lots of people lie about treatment from police, so absolutely no surprise there.
TBH that 1% figure seems reasonable. I mean I’d expect at least 95% of the complaints to be people who broke the law and are butthurt.
If they’re successfully proceeding with 20% of the valid ones that’s not as bad as the headline is trying to make out. It’s better than they do at solving crimes.
There are a shocking number of “Well 99% of those complaints must have been bullshit” comments considering that this week a police officer is finally being brought to justice after committing 48 rapes over twenty years.
Maybe we need to consider the people who had a legitimate grievance and didn’t even come forward with a complaint because a >99% chance of being hated by a serving police officer who gets away with it is not worth the <1% of the police officer being punished in any way.
This headline seems a bit disingenuous
People have already discussed that these complaints have been looked into with no misconduct found or some complaints may be purely malicious
Another angle is alot of complaints are likely to be low level for example someone wasn’t happy with the way an investigation was handled, how they were spoken to etc etc
In my experience these type of complaints are the most common and are rarely handled by disciplinary proceedings due to the low level of the incident. Complainants are asked what resolution they would be happy with and this can include being offered the chance to speak with the sergeant responsible for the officer to discuss what happened or an apology from the officer themselves if it is found that the officer’s behaviour wasn’t what was expected by the force
The statistic itself seems pretty bad when put into a headline like that but there’s many different layers to it
This is a pointless statistic. I have no information on what percentage ought to have led to disciplinary proceedings. Same with almost anything about crime and justice.
What might be interesting to know is what an independent auditor might make of the outcomes given the evidence to trawl through.
We don’t know
– How many cases which should have led to action didn’t?
– How many cases are blatantly vexatious?
– How many complaints which don’t lead to disciplinary proceedings were because officers have left the force, retired or died?
– How many people didn’t bother complaining because either they had no faith in the process or felt that being found guilty gave the police the right to do whatever?
– How many people complained to a local senior officer and were satisfied with informal processes.
This comment thread reminds me of why women are not safe.
Sexually assaulted. Police don’t do anything.
Sexually assaulted by Police themselves. Still don’t do anything.
Public. You’re a liar. You wanted it. You shouldn’t be out that late. You flirted. You provoked him. You exist.
My ex was stalked by an ex who joined the police post their relationship. Started “innocently” by him turning up at random events she was at and went as far as him parking outside her place for hours on end. Lasted about 6 months on and off and the police were not interested. Only ended when she went dark online and moved.
It ruined our relationship unfortunately, but she was scared witless and that’s the worst part.
all news seems to be about our police recently yet they’ve been like this for a long while
​
wonder what the cause was
Got beaten, sprayed in the face, permanent nerve damage in both hands, bruises all over my body, phone smashed on a kerb, 8 police on me, rearrested every 20 odd hours to hold me in cells for 3 days. All because I was walking home drunk at 5am and told 2 police to leave me alone.
Made a formal complaint the day I was released, gf took pictures as proof with the complaint and nothing ever happened, tried follow it up and there was never a senior officer in any of the buildings I could speak to. This was 3 years ago
Yeah most complaints are bullshit, this figure isn’t really a suprise
“I’m a policeman and complaints are normally wrong”
Repeated a lot in this thread, which is incredibly worrying.
This is the issue, if you start with this attitude, you assume there is nothing wrong with ignoring complaints against police and the really serious stuff slips through the net.
Yes, you can provide examples where spurious claims were made, guess what, there are plenty of examples where serious issues were just left to die by police.
Guess which has more serious consequences?
Let’s also consider the parliamentary review of the ipcc which concluded that it was:
“woefully underequipped and hamstrung in achieving its original objectives. It has neither the powers nor the resources that it needs to get to the truth when the integrity of the police is in doubt.”
IOPC is not fit for purpose. This piece is a little lazy, but the point stands… if you are mistreated by the police in the uk, its a lottery if you ever find justice.
Edit: updated ipcc in last paragraph
Police in a nutshell – we investigated ourselves and found no wrongdoing. 🙄
Oh wow, that’s an incredibly low number. I complained once when an operator refused to give me an incident number for when I was reporting an online threat of violence, and that complaint was upheld, I didn’t realise that was so unlikely – I wouldn’t have bothered complaining had I known about this figure.
Now while recent events clearly show this number should be a bit higher, it’s not even nearly a bad stat.
The quality of complaints that regularly come in are very low but are still investigated anyway but found to have no case to answer:
– excessive force from someone who decided they’d run from or assault officers,
– people not happy about doors being put in,
– even people who have reported things to the police “just to log it” and are then surprised that the serious crimes they have disclosed to police have resulted in action taken.
These kind of things will make up the vast majority of complaints because that’s what the people we regularly deal with are like. Even some SA complaints and the like will be completely fabricated. Again, 1% is clearly too low, but the right number isn’t that much higher.
26 comments
How about giving rapists life sentences? So high risk offenders stay in prison… those that get out and repoffend can be recalled the prison instantly
Important bit of text:
>But the majority of complaints led to a finding of no case to answer
So they were looked into, but the police did no wrong.
I’m a police officer and the vast majority of complaints are complete rubbish, but still have to get looked into.
I’ve had complaints of harassment from people I’ve never met, complaints of corruption from people because I was closing their crime due to lack of evidence, complaints of assault for putting cuffs too tight on a murderer, and all sorts. Someone abused me in the street and I told her that I don’t take advice on policing from drug dealers (she was 3 times convicted of drug dealing and under investigation for two more) – that got a complaint too.
Turns out that people don’t like being arrested and don’t like the prospect of being sent to prison, so they believe submitting a complaint will get them out of it. Similarly, crimes get shut all the time due to lack of evidence, and people think that submitting a complaint means it’ll get reopened and we will magic up some new evidence.
This is because lots of police complaints are, quite frankly, utter tosh. The nature of police work will, unavoidably, leave some people feeling like they’ve been wronged by the police. Be it the person who has been arrested but then released with no further action, the victim who has had their case unsolved, or the bystander who was told to go the long way home when they tried to walk through a crime scene. These people have every right to complain, but it doesn’t mean an officer has done any wrong.
In my career, I’ve been accused of causing grievous bodily harm, failing to investigate a rape, and inappropriate parking, to name a few.
All of these matters were investigated, with final reports written up about them consisting of dozens of pages detailing the investigation. In all of them, I was found to have done nothing wrong.
In the examples above, it was seen on CCTV that the supposed victim of GBH actually tripped over a curb and hit his head. The rape victim accepted that she hadn’t taken part in any of the followup contact that we tried to have with her, and that she had actually made the report to cover up a workplace fling. The parking complaint? I was busy dealing with a fight, so hadn’t had time to properly park.
There are of course, officers who do wrong, and they should be investigated and punished. But as with all places, and arguably moreso in the police, there are plenty of unfounded complaints, and a complaint should not be used as a blanket indication of wrongdoing
seems like the clowns need to find something new to complain about when there is nothing.
uk has many problems but police officer’s conduct is exemplary.
Do people think an investigation MUST result in a “case to answer” situation for it to be classified as good?
Are people wanting some sort of KPI “at least 10% of reports must result in disciplinary”….
I once got a complaint from someone for telling their son that if they kept stealing things, they’d get arrested.
I also once got a complaint for letting someone know that their MOT had expired – the car was on the driveway, I was taking a statement from the owner and I had run it through PNC as part of the investigation into it being criminally damaged, noticed the MOT had expired and thought I’d remind them as a courtesy – it was off the road so no ticket issued. They took that as a massive infringement of civil liberties…
I’ve also had complaints from freemen on the land for telling them that their common law court beliefs were nonsense and that at best they were the victim of a scam, and as a Sgt I even had someone call in to complain that the police kept waiting for him to drive (he was a disqualified driver) and then stopping him and dealing with him for doing so.
Needless to say, they all ended up as no case to answer, but they still all had to be recorded as complaints, regardless of how ridiculous, vexatious or based outside of observable reality they might be.
Consider how many drunk people get dealt with by the police in the UK this headline is pretty meaningless.
That about lines up with the rape conviction rate from accusations lol
Partee Ov Loor Und Ordah
I expect a high rate of failure as people they are dealing with are by definition dicks. So they will make spurious claims……THAT SAID 1% is taking the piss and something is clearly wrong!
I can’t imagine the majority of police complaints come from upstanding citizens.
It’s also worth pointing out that even where a complaint is made out, it won’t necessarily lead to full on disciplinary proceedings. If the issue is minor/an honest mistake, and can be fairly easily remedies, then the likely outcome is to fix it, say sorry, and provide some learning and feedback to the officer. A common one might be failing to update a victim in an agreed upon timescale – that could easily be the subject of a complaint but equally its easily fixed and just requires the officers supervisor to identify what caused the failure and address it with the officer in question – if it keeps happening it might be more of an issue but if an officer just has an unmanageable workload that might be something we can try to sort out.
Lots of people lie about treatment from police, so absolutely no surprise there.
TBH that 1% figure seems reasonable. I mean I’d expect at least 95% of the complaints to be people who broke the law and are butthurt.
If they’re successfully proceeding with 20% of the valid ones that’s not as bad as the headline is trying to make out. It’s better than they do at solving crimes.
There are a shocking number of “Well 99% of those complaints must have been bullshit” comments considering that this week a police officer is finally being brought to justice after committing 48 rapes over twenty years.
Maybe we need to consider the people who had a legitimate grievance and didn’t even come forward with a complaint because a >99% chance of being hated by a serving police officer who gets away with it is not worth the <1% of the police officer being punished in any way.
This headline seems a bit disingenuous
People have already discussed that these complaints have been looked into with no misconduct found or some complaints may be purely malicious
Another angle is alot of complaints are likely to be low level for example someone wasn’t happy with the way an investigation was handled, how they were spoken to etc etc
In my experience these type of complaints are the most common and are rarely handled by disciplinary proceedings due to the low level of the incident. Complainants are asked what resolution they would be happy with and this can include being offered the chance to speak with the sergeant responsible for the officer to discuss what happened or an apology from the officer themselves if it is found that the officer’s behaviour wasn’t what was expected by the force
The statistic itself seems pretty bad when put into a headline like that but there’s many different layers to it
This is a pointless statistic. I have no information on what percentage ought to have led to disciplinary proceedings. Same with almost anything about crime and justice.
What might be interesting to know is what an independent auditor might make of the outcomes given the evidence to trawl through.
We don’t know
– How many cases which should have led to action didn’t?
– How many cases are blatantly vexatious?
– How many complaints which don’t lead to disciplinary proceedings were because officers have left the force, retired or died?
– How many people didn’t bother complaining because either they had no faith in the process or felt that being found guilty gave the police the right to do whatever?
– How many people complained to a local senior officer and were satisfied with informal processes.
This comment thread reminds me of why women are not safe.
Sexually assaulted. Police don’t do anything.
Sexually assaulted by Police themselves. Still don’t do anything.
Public. You’re a liar. You wanted it. You shouldn’t be out that late. You flirted. You provoked him. You exist.
My ex was stalked by an ex who joined the police post their relationship. Started “innocently” by him turning up at random events she was at and went as far as him parking outside her place for hours on end. Lasted about 6 months on and off and the police were not interested. Only ended when she went dark online and moved.
It ruined our relationship unfortunately, but she was scared witless and that’s the worst part.
all news seems to be about our police recently yet they’ve been like this for a long while
​
wonder what the cause was
Got beaten, sprayed in the face, permanent nerve damage in both hands, bruises all over my body, phone smashed on a kerb, 8 police on me, rearrested every 20 odd hours to hold me in cells for 3 days. All because I was walking home drunk at 5am and told 2 police to leave me alone.
Made a formal complaint the day I was released, gf took pictures as proof with the complaint and nothing ever happened, tried follow it up and there was never a senior officer in any of the buildings I could speak to. This was 3 years ago
Yeah most complaints are bullshit, this figure isn’t really a suprise
“I’m a policeman and complaints are normally wrong”
Repeated a lot in this thread, which is incredibly worrying.
This is the issue, if you start with this attitude, you assume there is nothing wrong with ignoring complaints against police and the really serious stuff slips through the net.
Yes, you can provide examples where spurious claims were made, guess what, there are plenty of examples where serious issues were just left to die by police.
Guess which has more serious consequences?
Let’s also consider the parliamentary review of the ipcc which concluded that it was:
“woefully underequipped and hamstrung in achieving its original objectives. It has neither the powers nor the resources that it needs to get to the truth when the integrity of the police is in doubt.”
IOPC is not fit for purpose. This piece is a little lazy, but the point stands… if you are mistreated by the police in the uk, its a lottery if you ever find justice.
Edit: updated ipcc in last paragraph
Police in a nutshell – we investigated ourselves and found no wrongdoing. 🙄
Oh wow, that’s an incredibly low number. I complained once when an operator refused to give me an incident number for when I was reporting an online threat of violence, and that complaint was upheld, I didn’t realise that was so unlikely – I wouldn’t have bothered complaining had I known about this figure.
Now while recent events clearly show this number should be a bit higher, it’s not even nearly a bad stat.
The quality of complaints that regularly come in are very low but are still investigated anyway but found to have no case to answer:
– excessive force from someone who decided they’d run from or assault officers,
– people not happy about doors being put in,
– even people who have reported things to the police “just to log it” and are then surprised that the serious crimes they have disclosed to police have resulted in action taken.
These kind of things will make up the vast majority of complaints because that’s what the people we regularly deal with are like. Even some SA complaints and the like will be completely fabricated. Again, 1% is clearly too low, but the right number isn’t that much higher.