HMP Britain

The IPCC have published the police complaint statistics for 2008/2009. There are many areas of interest and hopefully we’ll get round to discussing some of the more interesting aspects of the report. On a cursory glance, the following can be observed:

• Complaints to the police have risen 8% in the year.
• 944 children complained about the police.
• There were 1049 complaints about ‘improper disclosure of information’, 20% of which were substantiated.
• 1099 complaints (444 individual cases) were referred to the CPS. Just 32 were recommended for prosecution.
• Complaints about West Mercia Police have risen 200% since 03/04
• There is huge variability within the Police Forces as to how complaints are dealt with.

We can construct a few tables based on data about how many complaints there were per 1,000 officers for each force:

The usual suspects of poor policing are here (x% above average): West Mercia (66%), Surrey (47%), Dyfed-Powys (47%) and Lincolnshire (36%). Durham did best with 49% fewer complaints per 1000 officers than the rest of England and Wales.

A table for the number of complaints per 1m of population served can also be constructed from the IPCC report and Home Office statistics:

Related posts:

1. Analysis: UK Taser Usage Statistics Detailed look at Taser usage by UK Police Forces. Figures...
2. Lord Carlile’s Report on the Operation of Terrorism Legislation Lord Carlile, Parliament's Independent Review of certain Terrorism Legislation, accuses...
3. Statistics: UK Police Taser Use on Children In response to our Freedom of Information request, the Home...
4. Problems with Police Corruption and Data Security Nick Hardwick of the IPCC claims no force is free...
5. Sussex Police loses Richard Taylor Inquiry Report In early 2007, we sent Sussex Police an Freedom of...