Source · IOPC Learning Case

Recommendation - West Yorkshire Police, November 2021

West Yorkshire Police Ref: 2020/145757 Recommended 5 Nov 2021 Response due 31 Dec 2021

The complainant was voluntary interviewed in relation to having on his possession an offensive weapon when trying to enter his work place. Following a voluntary interview, the Criminal Justice System sent him a court summons. They sent the letter to a previous address, so he did not receive this and did not attend court. As such there was subsequently a warrant for his arrest. The evidence suggests that the Officer in Charge of the criminal investigation failed to verify and …

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Recommendations

1 total

Recommendation 1

The IOPC recommends that West Yorkshire Police reviews if there is a current process for verifying and updating a person’s address details, when they attend for a voluntary interview. If there isn’t a process, or the process is not adequate, then we suggest that they implement a clear process, which needs to be documented in an appropriate format, such as a policy. This process could include the verification of the address being done via a prompt and a tick box to audit this, for each encounter. This follows an IOPC review into the way a court summons was sent to the complainant’s previous address, meaning that he was not aware of it and did not attend Court when he should have done. There was no audit of the complainant’s address details being verified on the police systems during his voluntary interview. Do you accept the recommendation? Yes

Addressed to: West Yorkshire Police

Linked bodies: West Yorkshire Police

Accepted

Force response

Accepted action: West Yorkshire Police have a standard process for all persons interviewed, whether in custody or as a voluntary attendee; this process involves that the interviewing officer, or if dealt with through custody this may be the detention officer, confirms the address of the suspect as part of the interview process. As part of the electronic recording of the event, be that on a Custody record or on a Voluntary Attendee record, the officer is required to verify that the address listed is the current address of the suspect, this is a mandatory requirement before the record can be validated and if it is omitted the officer will not be able to close the record down. This requirement is part of induction training and ongoing refresher training for voluntary attendance. In view of your specific recommendation to document the process in policy, the following guidance has now been added to the Voluntary Attenders Policy: