Changes Are Needed Quickly On IOPC Investigation Times

11 September 2020

Change is coming to the IOPC, but there is still a long way to go, Essex Police Federation has said.

PFEW leaders and senior managers from the police watchdog met recently to discuss areas in which the investigative body needs to improve.

Ensuring IOPC investigators have a better understanding of Post-Incident Procedure, speeding up decisions around whether officers are witnesses or suspects, a lack of empowerment for individual investigators and inadequate disclosure training were all on the agenda.

Essex Police Federation Chair Laura Heggie said: “Hopefully the IOPC has taken it on-board, and hopefully things do change.

“We have started to see some changes, but there is still got a long way to go. The IOPC is still slow with decisions on referrals – deciding whether or not they’re going to be investigating a case or passing it back to the force.

“Many times the updates that we’re getting are almost meaningless.

“They come across as just a tick-box exercise. It will literally be, ‘We are still investigating and the officers are still witnesses at this time’, which doesn’t let the officers know how far along the investigation is.”

Some high profile cases have taken the IOPC more than five years to conclude, putting officers and their families as well as the members of the public involved through hell.

Laura added: “We had an investigation following a Post-Incident Procedure that the IOPC investigated which was finally concluded recently.

“That investigation has taken 10 months for them to decide that there was no misconduct identified for any of the officers or police staff involved and there was no learning identified for either the organisation or individual officers.

“So basically that’s 10 months for them to say you did your job and you did it well.”

It is the wait to discover their fate that can be so damaging to officers, their families and their careers.

Laura added: “We get the fact that there’s got to be an investigation and that’s good that there’s an investigation. In the incident which took 10 months to resolve, there was nothing identified that went wrong or anything that the officers could have necessarily done better.

“That’s still 10 months that those officers have been kept waiting to see if they are a key police witness or if that’s going to change to, ‘you’re now a suspect’. That’s a horrible 10 months for them.

“Changes to that are needed and are needed quickly.”