Number of police complaints increasing, but Home Affairs has confidence

Tuesday 24 October 2023

Home Affairs believes the high number of complaints made against police shows the system is working.

The number was a record 162 in 2022, a figure that has grown every year since a low of 71 in 2019.

The committee was pressed on the issue in a Freedom of Information request.

A separate, but related, successful FOI appeal also revealed that there have been nine complaints against senior officers, ranked at Superintendent or above, in the last 10 years.

They can be time consuming, with one of them taking 25 months to resolve. Two of these complaints are ongoing.

The FoI asked whether Home Affairs could explain why Guernsey police receives more complaints than any other police force in Britain, more than double Jersey and quadruple the Isle of Man in the latest available figures.

“The legal framework and recording processes in relation to complaints made against police in the jurisdictions mentioned are entirely different,” the committee said in response.

“Without a standardised method of collating information it is not appropriate to make such comparisons or seek to extrapolate reasoning from them.

“Guernsey Police are diligent in recording minor and informal complaints, as well as those that may be considered by other police forces to be frivolous or even malicious.

“Forces from these, and other, jurisdictions frequently offer mutual assistance with internal investigations. No particular disparity in complaint volumes is obviously apparent.

“Inspections by His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary have highlighted that the supporting legislation may benefit from review, but had no issue with the actual volume of complaints.”

Pictured: Head of Law Enforcement Ruari Hardy and the 2022 annual police report.

A breakdown of complaints made against Guernsey Police is published in the Bailiwick Law Enforcement Annual Report.

They show how the figures can vary, but the last three years were the only time they sustained consistently above 130.

The figures do not necessarily indicate the total number of people complaining.

They can include multiple complaints made by the same person.

“The Committee considers that the number of complaints recorded demonstrates that the complaints process is accessible to the public, and it is satisfied that all complaints are dealt with professionally.

“Further, the Police Complaints Commission, independent of Guernsey Police and the Committee for Home Affairs, carefully review the matters referred to them. In addition, during the HMIC inspection process, inspectors have full access to departmental records, policy and processes.”

Home Affairs told to disclose information it wanted kept private 

In an FoI request dating back to February, Home Affairs had declined to answer what the average time it was taking for Guernsey police to resolve complaints against officers ranked at Superintendent or above on a year-to year basis for the last decade was.

But an independent appeal panel ruled that it should.

The committee said of the nine complaints, in three of the cases it could not determine how long it took because the information did not have to be recorded at the time.

Three others took an average of 13 months, but the average does not reflect that each was different.

One took four months, one 12 months and the other 10 months.

Another complaint that had been under consideration for eight months was withdrawn.

Initially refusing to answer, Home Affairs argued that the number of complaints made was sufficiently low that it could applying two exemptions from the FoI code to justify withholding the data.

One was because it was “personal data which would require the disclosure of information directly relating to individuals’ employment”, the other was that ”providing further qualifying data and breaking these figures down by year, whilst the information is pseudonymised, has the potential to result in the unwarranted disclosure of personal information about an individual and would constitute a breach of the Data Protection (Bailiwick of Guernsey) Law, 2017".

But the appeals panel said that given the number of these complaints, and the number of senior officers who have been in post over that period, it would be possible to provide pseudonymised data without compromising any officer holding the relevant ranks, now or in the past. 

“It should be noted that the data requested did not seek the outcome of any complaint made and focussed solely on the ‘average time taken’ for a complaint to be resolved.

“Further, the significance of the roles in question, and the level of accountability that comes with those roles, means there is a clear public interest in complaints made against those officers.”

It also said that data protection legislation should “not be used to override the accountability of those holding senior roles and the public interest in that accountability”.

“When offered a senior role, officers should be made aware that it comes with a greater degree of accountability and scrutiny and that that may involve the disclosure of information of the type requested here. It is the suggestion of the Panel that this should be made clear to the holders of senior posts across the States of Guernsey in order to ensure that the Freedom of Information Code is not undermined.”

The panel did not uphold other aspects of the appeal.