Officers urged to complete Use of Force forms

28 January 2020

Officers are being encouraged to complete Use of Force forms to increase public confidence in policing and avoid putting themselves at risk.

Hertfordshire Police Federation chair Geoff Bardell says that members who fail to fill out the forms, even for minor contact, could open themselves up to accusations that they have something to hide.

Geoff said: “Use of Force forms can provide protection for our members while serving to help increase public confidence in policing. There is also the added benefit that filling them out can help the Force identify where it could improve processes or officer training and if additional support is required.

“Where officers fail to complete the forms, even for minor contact, there can be suspicions that they are covering up something.”

Belinda Goodwin, secretary of the Police Federation of England and Wales’ wellbeing sub-committee, added: “If there is a complaint to Professional Standards or the IOPC they’ll ask, ‘have you filled in the form?’ and if an officer hasn’t done this straight away, their inference is there must be something to hide.”

The Home Office’s most recent Use of Force statistics (April 2018 to March 2019) showed 428,000 recorded incidents in which a police officer was required to use force, representing a 36.7 per cent rise. This has been put down to forces standardising reporting processes – something the Police Federation had previously called for.

Deputy Assistant Commissioner Matt Twist, the National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC) lead for self-defence, arrest and restraint (SDAR), has spoken out in support of the standardised form for recording low and high level uses of force introduced in April 2017.

“By filling out the form we get really valuable data that will improve transparency and increase public confidence in policing,” he explained, “It enables us to see what works well and what doesn’t. We’ve previously lacked an evidence base to back up our use of tactics, so that if we’re criticised over an incident, we’re now able to say that in 10,000 other cases there was no adverse outcome.

“Equally, if every time a particular restraint tactic was used it led to a serious injury, we’d know not to do it.”

Mr Twist said having one dataset for the whole country is a step forward but it can still take longer to fill out in some forces as they use different IT systems.

He said: “The Met’s online form can be filled out in a couple of minutes for a lower use of force and emails the officer a record of what was submitted. I know there are some systems that require officers to click through number of pages that may not be relevant.”

Mr Twist says he has no plans to mandate everyone to use the same IT but is pushing for the interface to be as ‘simple as possible, as well as intuitive and hierarchical to save time’.

He believes the recording of data will show over time that the vast majority of uses of force are at the lower end (hands on people and cuffs) rather than using batons and Taser. It should also demonstrate that drawing Taser is often enough to defuse a situation without a use of force being required.

He added that by ending the historical under-reporting of use of force, it will help the police service to develop the training given to officers, and ultimately reduce injuries.