There’s an Interesting edition of Panorama on tonight – focussing on Police Misconduct – the programme draws on Freedom of Information responses from 47 of 53 UK forces for 2008-2010 which reveal that there had been –
- 1,915 Findings of guilt for misconduct: 1,915 and of these
- 382 were dismissed or told to resign as a result:
- In addition to these – there were 489 Further cases where officers resigned or retired without facing the discipline process – meaning that they probably would have been found guilty of misconduct.
Assuming these are not repeat offenders, this means that in this two year period nearly 2500 officers were found guilty of misconduct charges.
Given There are just under 150 000 full time officers in the UK (250 000 employees if we cound support staff) – so this means that in any two year period, 2% of them will be found guilty of misconduct charges (4/5ths of whom are allowed to stay). Keep in mind that the typical officer will serve longer than 2 years on the force, then the number who will eventually be found guilty will increase dramatically. Also, the above figures are just telling us about the ‘misconduct officers’ who get caught.
There is other evidence such as the fact that there have been 333 deaths in police custody in the last decade but not one prosecution that suggests that there might in fact be a culture of turning a blind eye that allows misconduct to occur in a systematic way – this in turn raises the worrying prospect that the police are no more deserving of our respect than the criminals they are suppossed to be protecting the public from – as many members of the police force will themselves break the rules when they deem it to be convenient
