The IPCC: Under-financed, overstaffed and ineffective - Part 1

The Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC), the statutory body charged with ultimate oversight of complaints against the police is unfit for purpose. The report of the House of Commons Home Affairs Committee (HAC) might not quite have said so in as many words but it got pretty close and it was the only logical conclusion to be drawn.  Whilst the report's publication has largely been lost in the din of in/out referenda, gay marriage equality and the latest Coalition U-turn, this report cannot be allowed to be forgotten. You can read the full report here.

In Part 1, I consider some of the general themes that emerge from the report and in Part 2, I highlight some of the report’s startling statistics.

The position of the IPCC

To provide a little bit of context, the IPCC sits at the top of the hierarchy in the non-judicial resolution of complaints against the police. When a complaint is made, it is first dealt with by the Professional Standards department of the relevant police authority, who decide whether or not further action needs to be taken and if so, what form it should take. If a complainant is dissatisfied with that process, they can then appeal to the IPCC, who can remit the complaint to Professional Standards, take on their own investigation or remit the complaint and re-assess if a complainant is still unhappy.

There are thousands of people for whom the Committee's findings will come as no surprise, from those who have sought little more than a recognition of wrongdoing and an apology to those who have fallen victim to police corruption or lost loved-ones following contact with the police and have found the IPCC to be cruelly inept in aiding their fight for justice. As Marcia Rigg-Samuel, whose brother Sean death in custody at Brixton Police Station in 2008, told me towards the end of 2012:

‘The IPCC absolutely cannot survive the way it is now. It needs reform and it needs to regain public confidence. I’ve met so many families who have been in our position since Sean died and we have no faith in the IPCC. We can’t all be lying’

The Headlines

She and they were right. As the Committee observed:

“The public do not fully trust the IPCC and without faith in the Commission, damaged public opinion of the police cannot be restored. Unfortunately, too often the work of the Commission seems to exacerbate public mistrust, rather than mend it."

It is difficult to think of a more damning indictment. It strikes at the very heart of the IPCC’s purpose. You might think, to adopt the sporting vernacular, having lost the dressing room, Dame Anne Owens, chairperson of the IPCC and other senior colleagues might have found their positions untenable. Not a bit of it.

In it’s response to the report, she said:

“This report recognises that we do not yet have the resources or powers to do all that the public rightly expects and needs from us.   That is what we have been saying for a long time.
 "Without that, we will continue to struggle to meet the legitimate expectations of complainants and of families who have lost someone in tragic circumstances.
 "We are a demand-led organisation, and, as the Committee’s report shows, the demand for our services continues to grow. "The report rehearses many of the points I have already made publicly.  We want to be able to carry out more independent investigations"

In mitigation, it is fair to say that the problems of the IPCC are not all of its own making. In some ways, it was bound to struggle from its very inception. It has no power to compel officers to give evidence in an investigation, like the courts, there is nothing they can do about officers discussing events and clarifying discrepancies in their notes, and its recommendations have no binding force. It is also a public body having to deal with budget cuts. Indeed, it has had to lose a significant number of its temporary staff, including investigators, in an attempt to save money.  In the Committee’s words, the Commission is:

“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. Smaller even than the Professional Standards Department of the Metropolitan Police, the Commission is not even first among equals, yet it is meant to be the backstop of the system. It lacks the investigative resources necessary to get to the truth; police forces are too often left to investigate themselves; and the voice of the IPCC does not have binding authority. The Commission must bring the police complaints system up to scratch and the Government must give it the powers that it needs to do so."

All this while trying to resolve the problems that follow a frontline police complaints system, using Professional Standards departments, “that is not working effectively.”

Jobs for the boys

Even so, the Commission’s problems are more than structural. They run deep into the culture of the organisation. There is too great a willingness on its behalf to accept the police account of events and reluctance in pursing investigations within the framework that it does have – problematic though it is. As the HAC found, the IPCC often do not interview officers involved in cases of serious injury or death. Even when they do, they often choose not do so under caution, which may affect whether or not their evidence could be used in any subsequent court proceedings.

The HAC found that a third of its investigators (33%) and 11% of its other staff are former police officers. Is it too easy to attribute this as the reason for these cultural failings? Maybe. The Committee felt:

“It is natural that an organisation whose principal role is to investigate the police should recruit former officers, both for their investigative skills and their familiarity with police practices and procedures” 

But it stressed that:

 “[The IPCC]  must make every effort to cultivate its own investigative capabilities and to avoid becoming too dependent on former police officers to fill these roles. 

After all, there are other, similar, investigative bodies that could provide appropriately experienced staff, such as HM Inspectorate of Customs. The public perception is certainly that the IPCC is providing “jobs for the boys” and that as such, investigators, whether consciously or not, naturally favour their former colleagues.  This should be read against recent revelations that of those surveyed, half of serving police  officers would be “unwilling” or “unlikely” to report unacceptable behaviour by colleagues, including physical assaults on a detained person. The result is a culture in which some police officers believe they are above the law.

However, some of us play our part in contributing to this. Many people seem to feel that the institution of policing is beyond reproach. I recently attended a round-table discussion, hosted by JUSTICE, with Kier Starmer, the Director of Public Prosecutions and Baroness Helena Kennedy QC. I asked him why the prosecution rate of officers involved in deaths in custody or other contact with the police, for murder or manslaughter is so low and the successful prosecution rate lower still - (since 1990 3600 people have died following contact with the police and to date, no officer has been successfully prosecuted for either offence). 

Starmer’s explanation relied on the fact that the law of self-defence assess the reasonableness and proportionality of an individual’s response to a threat from their perspective and not with the benefit of hindsight.  This, he continued, meant that most cases were stopped after the prosecution case i.e. half-way through the trial, because the judge accepts that no jury properly directed could convict. That might sound plausible on the surface but says nothing: a) for the quality of the prosecution case, for which he is ultimately responsible and b) assumes that self-defence was or is an arguable defence in all cases. The more candid response came from Kennedy: the truth is, juries and magistrates find it hard to convict an officer who has been doing a job which many could not contemplate undertaking, especially in increasingly difficult circumstances (and particularly when they are standing in the doc in their finest uniform).  And so, the cycle goes on.

The long walk to redemption?

The fresh inquiry into the Hillsborough tragedy offers hope of redemption given that the Commission will be endowed with special powers to compel the attendance of witnesses, including police officers, as part of its investigations. Dame Owens certainly hopes thinks so:

 “[The Hillsborough Inquiry] will allow us to show what we can do and how we can do it.  We want that to be a model of how we go forward."

The reality is that the problems faced and caused by the IPCC are so systemic that one successful investigation simply will not be enough to save its reputation although, it might be a start.  The temptation to scrap it and start again is compelling and evidently justifiable. The Committee stopped short of this but did provide an important starting point in make recommendations addressing the problems that I have highlighted: giving the IPCC meaningful powers, reducing the levels of recruitment from the police, ending the differential treatment of officers as suspects in an investigation and giving it a budget commensurate with the breadth of its responsibilities.

Bearing in mind that the IPCC was created because its predecessor failed to command public confidence, whatever happens, and something must, the cycle of previous mistakes must be broken - for the sake of the thousands of good officers out there, the 3696 people (and counting) whose lives have or could have been saved but for the malfeasance of those in whom we place our trust and to ensure that our fabled commitment to the Rule of Law is vindicated. In a previous blog post, I asked, “who polices the police?” Apparently, they do.