Morning everyone.
Thanks for inviting me along today to explain a little about the Independent Office for Police Conduct – the IOPC – and its place within the wider criminal justice system.
I became Director General of the IOPC in January this year, when the new organisation came into being. It replaced the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC).
Though the name changed, the functions of the organisation remained broadly the same. We investigate the most serious and sensitive allegations against the police, as well as the most serious police incidents – including deaths in custody, shootings and fatal road traffic incidents.
We are also an appeal body, for complainants who are not satisfied with the way the relevant police force have dealt with their complaints. Whilst the functions remain broadly the same, I want the IOPC to have a stronger emphasis to the IPCC reflected in four areas:
- Our definition of independence;
- An increased focus on learning from our investigations;
- Improving the timeliness of our work; and
- Improving community/stakeholder relations.
You will notice that the name change has retained one key word and that word is ‘independent’. The Independence of my organisation is critical to its success. It is also hotly debated, almost on a daily basis.
We operate within a challenging environment. The system of police accountability, police oversight and police discipline is unfortunately, very adversarial.
Officers are supported by their Police Federation or Superintendent’s Association representatives. Bereaved families are often supported by one or more of the charitable groups who operate in this space; there may be coronial processes to negotiate, or criminal referrals to be pored over by the Crown Prosecution Service; and that’s ignoring the proxy trials argued out across traditional and social media by individuals and groups with their own strongly held beliefs, unshakeable loyalties and personal contexts.
It’s not surprising then that we often face charges of being both pro and anti police – sometimes at the same time, related to the same investigation.
Independence, it seems, is in the eye of the beholder.
But independence remains critical to our mission. I am determined that we remain clearly independent of both the police and complainants; of politicians and bereaved families. That’s the only way we can secure the trust of vested interests on all sides and hopefully their respect.
But I am also determined that independence isn’t confused with isolation.
Ivory towers or distance don’t ensure impartiality, but they can ingrain suspicion.
In our line of work, context is key. So I want my staff to better learn about that context in which they work. That means closing the distance between ourselves and police officers and ourselves and complainants.
I want our staff to develop a better understanding of what it’s like to be a police officer – whether that’s on the beat, or working a specialist role as detective, police driver, custody sergeant or firearms officer. I think a greater understanding makes them more effective and insightful in their work.
I also want our staff to understand the experiences of our complainants, which means having an insight into how different communities across England and Wales view the police and how they experience policing. With that in mind, I have asked my staff to identify the community groups and opinion formers in the areas they serve and to talk to them. I have also encouraged them to do volunteering work.
In addition, I want to ensure that our workforce is representative. I want our organisation to reflect the communities we serve. That means striving to increase diversity – particularly at senior levels and, in our case, it also means having a hard-working and committed cadre of former police officers in our team.
The place of ex-officers at the IOPC is sometimes held up as an example of bias towards officers – but I would refute that. Not least because I have read plenty of comments from police officers who don’t believe we have former officers in our ranks and if we only did, we wouldn’t be so biased against the police!
In fact, about a quarter of our people have a police background and this is far lower proportion of ex-officers than other police watchdogs around the world, including the offices for the Police Investigation and Review Commissioner in Scotland and the Police Ombudsman for Northern Ireland. Our most senior staff, including myself and the IOPC’s Corporate and Regional Directors, do not have a police background. But we know that former officers bring with them a great deal of relevant and useful experience. They understand how policing should be done and – critically – how it should not be done. I believe they are a strength to our organisation and an important part of our mix.
I’m clear that being independent shouldn’t prevent us from taking part in training exercises alongside police officers, as we have already done in the counter-terrorism arena, but neither will it stop us from meeting with community campaigners to talk about stop and search; or developing supportive and professional relationships with bereaved families, through our family liaison team.
Recruiting the right people, supporting them through training and development and giving them access to experiences that will develop their insight into the context for modern policing will all help instil confidence in us and our role.
I want a bolder and more grown-up approach to independence which I hope gets greater respect from all parties. But who we are on its own will never define us in the eyes of the public, or the police. We will also be defined by what we do. And I am keen to ensure that in this regard, we strike the right balance.
Before I joined the IOPC, I was seconded to work on the aftermath of Grenfell Fire as part of the Grenfell Response Team. I had responsibility for coordinating the response to the tower site. Importantly, I also led on community engagement and family liaison, working with the bereaved, survivors and wider community. They told me two things:
- They want justice and accountability to be done
- But they don’t want it to happen again to anyone else – the learning.
This has informed my approach to what we do.
Our primary role, and the reason the IPCC was first established in the wake of the MacPherson report, was to secure public confidence in the police complaints system.
And that confidence depends upon accountability and we must not lose sight of that foundation stone for our organisation – the need for the police to be held accountable when things go wrong. The police have powers and they must use these powers properly, appropriately and responsibly. They must police with the trust and confidence of the public.
Confidence in us, and more importantly confidence in policing, will not be secured if a perception takes root that the police can act with impunity. Those individuals and families who feel that they have been wronged by the police will want justice to be done. And if they have been wronged, they deserve justice to be done.
But as I have mentioned about Grenfell, I have yet to meet a bereaved family who is solely concerned with justice. They also want to ensure that other families are spared what they went through. They want lessons to be learnt. And so, without losing our focus on accountability, we want to better understand the learning from our investigations.
I want the IOPC to become, and to be seen as, a force for change within policing. In many of our investigations, we do not find that an officer has a case to answer for misconduct or criminality, but there are almost always lessons that can be learned, whether locally or nationally that can avoid the situation happening again from our investigation.
I want our investigations to be seen as a way to drive improvements in policing and not just seen to be about scrutinising the actions of individual officers.
With that in mind, we have identified a number of themes that are of concern to the public and to the police – themes that if we look at will hopefully give the public greater confidence in the criminal justice system. So, alongside the most serious cases, which we are obliged to take on, we will be looking at the following themes:
- police using their power for financial, sexual or information gain;
- domestic abuse;
- discrimination;
- mental health which is a significant factor in deaths in custody and following police contact; and
- ‘near misses’ in custody.
The aim is to focus on learning and prevention and feed that back into the system of training that is overseen by the College of Policing, with whom we work closely. Our aim is to reduce these problem areas through our learning.
As well as a shift in focus towards learning, we must do all we can to bring about a step-change in the timeliness of our investigations. A number of changes are already underway to speed up our processes in terms of how we allocate cases, keep the same investigator, resource investigations, process appeals, draft reports and improve our relationship with police professional standards departments.
We are now completing roughly a third of our investigations within six months and two thirds within a year. For the first time last year (since 2011/12), we closed more cases than opened – which is good progress, but we still have more to do.
One of my frustrations is that we are often blamed for the time it takes to complete investigations when in fact we are only responsible for one part of the system.
This is because we actually have a very tightly-defined and quite limited role. We investigate serious incidents involving the police and serious allegations against officers. We also adjudicate when the public appeal the decisions on complaints that forces themselves make.
At its most basic level, that’s it. We’re not judge and jury, we’re investigators. We give an opinion, based on the evidence, but we don’t reach conclusions about Officers’ conduct, that’s a matter for independently-chaired disciplinary panels – which are convened by the forces themselves to their own timescales. We’re not responsible for charging decisions, or the time taken to reach them, which are a matter for the CPS and we obviously have no remit over the Coronial process.
We are an important part of a system with many different players. And we can only address the timeliness issues that fall within our remit.
I have volunteered to do a piece of work for the Ministerial Board on deaths in custody, looking across the wider system to identify all of the interfaces that contribute to delays. I am very willing to accept that my organisation must lead by example (and we will), but as you will appreciate, to get this right we will need to secure support from others in the system.
Speeding up our work will reduce the impact of long proceedings on everyone involved. The officers under investigation, of course, but also the complainants and the bereaved families who are waiting for answers.
Finally, in our challenge to operate independently at all times, we cannot lose sight of the human side of our work. I’m sure we all spend a chunk of our time discussing ‘customer service’ or ‘stakeholder engagement’. But perhaps the most sensitive aspect of our work at the IOPC is family liaison – which is work I am keen to develop.
I began this morning by setting out the adversarial nature of police complaints and conduct investigations. But in the eye of that storm are the families and individuals who didn’t ask to be there.
Through our family-liaison work, we aim to provide them better support, as we are looking for answers to their questions. We have run family listening days to understand how we can better do that and ensure we provide the information they need in those difficult early days. Our role requires us to be scrupulously independent as we search for the truth – even if that truth may ultimately disappoint them. But independence should never get in the way of humanity and empathy. As we embark in a new strategic direction, my hope is that the IOPC will come to embody all these.
Thank you.