By Half of officers guilty of gross misconduct avoid sacking
Analysis of three years of police watchdog reports has found that half of police employees who are charged with gross misconduct avoid being sacked.
Out of 118 cases where the standards breach was proven by force disciplinary panel only 55 led to the sack.
The panels were held after the Independent Office for Police Conduct found a case to answer for misconduct.
The IOPC succeeded the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) in 2018 with the intention of making the handling of complaints more independent and transparent.
It can direct police forces to hold disciplinary panels when its investigations find evidence, however, police forces have final say on sanction.
Janet Alder has yet to see an individual punished after her brother choked to death while handcuffed and lying face down and unconscious in a pool of blood in a Hull police station despite a group of officers stood chatting nearby.
Four of the five officers retired on a full pension before a misconduct hearing could take place.
Two Humberside Police detectives later faced a misconduct investigation after it emerged they had listened into legal conversations between her and her barrister during Christopher’s inquest in 2000.
Both were found not guilty as they had been acting on orders from superiors.
To this date, there has yet to be a misconduct investigation into the handling of Christopher’s body by South Yorkshire Police.
The wrong body was returned to the family by the force in 2000, though the error was not discovered until 2011.
Out of 418 cases where the IOPC found a case to answer for misconduct, force disciplinary panels agreed misconduct had taken place in 148 cases and gross misconduct in 118.
Of the employees proven to have committed gross misconduct, 55 were sacked, 40 received written warnings, while four are recorded as ‘other’. The rest retired or resigned before their misconduct panel was heard, the IOPC reports say.
Of the police employees where the lesser charge of misconduct was proven, 16 faced no further action.
Guidance was introduced in February 2020 stating a proven misconduct case should amount to a “at least a written warning” in a bid to toughen up sanctions.
However, longstanding critics argue that recent reforms have not gone far enough to tackle cultural problems in policing.
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