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Recommendation - Metropolitan Police, February 2021

Metropolitan Police Service Ref: 2020/133709 Recommended 4 Feb 2021 Response due 1 Apr 2021
Welfare and vulnerable people

View on IOPC website ↗

Case background

Text published by the IOPC.

In March 2020, a woman called police because she was worried about her brother. She explained that he suffered from depression and that she had not been able to contact him for two days. The call was graded as ‘significant’ and officers attended. They conducted basic checks but decided not to force entry due to the time of night. There was an intention to return the next day. Despite the call remaining logged by the control room, redeployment to the address did not take place until three days later when officers discovered the man dead. The evidence suggests that he had taken his own life prior to the police receiving the call.

Recommendations and responses

1 indexed

Recommendation 1

Link to recommendation · Accepted

Addressed to: Metropolitan Police Service formally

Linked bodies: Metropolitan Police Service formally

IOPC recommendation

The IOPC recommends that the Metropolitan Police Service formally reviews their internal processes to provide for appropriate monitoring of outstanding calls and that sufficient controls are in place to ensure that policies and procedures are followed, and then takes any necessary action identified as a result of the review. We also recommend that as part of the new command and control system, the Metropolitan Police Service considers whether it would be feasible to set up automated prompts for the Control Room that would support them in monitoring the outstanding calls.

The IOPC was concerned to note, that over a period of three days, the Control Room appeared to be encountering difficulties meeting the demand of incoming calls. This may have led to a number of outstanding calls not being reviewed and officers not being deployed to priority calls. We were also concerned that this position was not escalated to senior personnel in line with policy.

Response published by the IOPC

Do you accept the recommendation?

Yes

Accepted action:

The Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) has reviewed and accepts the learning recommendation provided by the IOPC and intends to take the following action.

The MPS Command and Control (Met CC) will review its current processes for the monitoring of outstanding calls to ensure appropriate governance and scrutiny is in place.

The following actions will be carried out:

- Conduct a review of MPS Met CC Daily Management Meetings (held at 0900hrs and 2200hrs) to ensure the appropriate scrutiny of outstanding calls is in place.
- Conduct a review of the roles and responsibilities of Met CC Duty Officers and Controllers by 30th April 2021 to ensure there is clarity around outstanding calls and what the processes are for escalation in such circumstances.
- To engage with all MPS Basic Command Units’ (BCUs) Operation Rooms by 30th April 2021 to ensure Met CC controllers have the capability to escalate issues when necessary.
- The Met CC Senior Leadership Team (SLT) will engage with South East BCU SLT to feedback any concerns around demand & resources within their command by 31st March 2021.

In January 2021 the Met CC Change Manager requested that the new Command & Control Project considers configuration to include automated prompts to enhance monitoring of outstanding calls.

Check the original case on the IOPC website