Recommendation - Surrey Police, April 2022
We identified organisational learning following a review of a complaint where a member of public was approached by police officers while attempting to leave a layby in his car.
IOPC reference
Recommendations
The IOPC recommends that Surrey Police updates relevant force policies relating to complaint handling [and body worn video (BWV) if appropriate] to include searching for BWV footage relevant to a complaint received and marking it as evidential as part of the initial handling of that complaint. This update should be communicated to all officers who may be involved in handling complaints.
This follows an IOPC review where BWV was viewed by the complaint handler, but was then auto-deleted from the force system after 30 days as it had not been marked as evidential in order to be retained for a longer period. This meant that it could not be viewed by the reviewer of that complaint, or for a subsequent complaint related to the same incident. While force policy states that footage should be retained as evidential if it assists with investigating public complaints, it does not provide any guidance about when this could be done during the complaints handling process.
Do you accept the recommendation?
Yes
Accepted action:
The above recommendation was verbally updated to complaint handlers during morning briefing.
Additionally, all persons involved in complaint handling were updated directly (by email on 14th April 2022) of the new policy ie to ensure that any footage relating to / reviewed in handling a complaint is marked as evidential / linked to an (Niche) occurrence and therefore preserved within NICE (our BWV repository) to ensure it remains available for later review by others.
Instructions on how to do this were also attached.
A reminder of the above will also feature in the next PSD quarterly newsletter (May) endorsed by the Deputy Head of PSD.