Source · Select Committees · Home Affairs Committee
Recommendation 44
44
Accepted
Paragraph: 268
Police forces' inconsistent data collection obscures ethnic disparity in misconduct cases.
Recommendation
It is completely unacceptable that forces’ data on ethnic disparity in police misconduct has been inconsistent and incomplete to the point where it cannot be understood or acted upon. We are appalled that it has not been possible for us even to assess the extent of racial disparities in the misconduct system fully due to inadequacies The Macpherson Report: Twenty-two years on 183 in data gathering by forces. We welcome the recent agreement between the Home Office and NPCC to gather more comprehensive, comparable information this year. However it is unacceptable that it has taken a full six years after HMICFRS warned about the problem for the Home Office and the majority of individual police forces to manage to establish effective, comparable ways of collecting data. Remarkably, the IOPC had not deemed it necessary to gather information by ethnicity in advance of us raising the issue with them. This combined failure by the Home Office, national policing organisations and police forces to conduct rigorous and systematic analysis of misconduct data for so long demonstrates the complacency regarding this issue across the police service.
Government Response Summary
The government welcomes the NPCC's new Race Action Plan (May 2022), which commits to ensuring misconduct data is published consistently and fully broken down by ethnicity for all forces. The Home Office will also review the police misconduct system in summer 2022.
Paragraph Reference:
268
Government Response
Accepted
HM Government
Accepted
The Home Office welcomes the work of the National Police Chiefs’ Council and the College of Policing in developing a new Race Action Plan for policing to address the issues of disproportionality in the police misconduct system. The new Race Action Plan, which will be published in May 2022, will set out a range of measures to improve outcomes for Black people in policing, including developing a clear plan to address the disproportionality in police misconduct cases, and ensuring misconduct data is published consistently and is fully broken down by ethnicity for all forces. In addition, the Home Office will work with the National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC) and the Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC) to review the police misconduct system to ensure that it is fair and effective in upholding the highest standards of integrity in policing. The Home Office will set out the terms of reference and timeline for this review in summer 2022. The Home Office agrees that there is a clear racial disparity in the number of officers being dismissed from police forces. However, it should be noted that the police misconduct system was reformed in 2020 to introduce legally qualified chairs to ensure the independence of decision-making at misconduct hearings. In addition, changes to the police complaints system in 2020 has also strengthened police accountability and transparency. The Home Office has also made significant improvements to its data collections to enable greater scrutiny of police activity broken down by ethnic group. The Home Office also supports the actions outlined in ‘Inclusive Britain’ to improve accountability and tackle disparities including removing unnecessary barriers that prevent increased use of body worn video, and supporting the development of a new, national framework for how the use of police powers are scrutinised at a local level.