Surrey Chief Constable threatened watchdog over detective proceedings

18 October 2018

Surrey Police's most senior officer threatened the police watchdog with judicial review after it tried to force two officers through gross misconduct proceedings.

Chief Constable Nick Ephgrave revealed that he warned the former IPCC that they would face a robust legal challenge if they continued in an attempt to take action against a detective inspector and detective sergeant.

The case surrounded an incident in which a domestic abuse suspect committed a serious assault after he had been bailed.

Mr Ephgrave said: “It was very serious, nearly a murder. Because of that, it’s a DSI [death or serious injury incident] so we have to inform the IPCC. They come in and do an investigation and they come to me and say you need to put these two blokes on a gross misconduct board because of their decision-making, so I […] went through all their rationale and thought, you know what, I’d have done exactly the same thing.

“I wrote back to the IPCC and they said I don’t agree, I’m not doing it. Then the IPCC took a position where they said we’re directing gross misconduct […] I had a little chat to my deputy and we decided we’d write back and say well we’re not going to accept the direction and if you’re going to really push it, we’ll take it to judicial review.”

Their actions caused the watchdog to back down, he told the Police Federation National Detectives’ Forum Conference in Manchester.

He added: “Our business - your business - is about making difficult decisions, sometimes life or death decisions, with an imperfect set of information in a changing environment so sooner or later something is going to go wrong isn’t it? It doesn’t mean to say you’ve done anything wrong,” PoliceOracle.Com reported.

“I want to push this message with my people that as long as you record your rationale and as long as it’s not bonkers, and it never is in my view, if the worst were to happen, sometimes that’s policing, sometimes that happens.”