CHANGE is coming to the IOPC, but there is still a long way to go, Essex Police Federation has said.<\/p>\n
PFEW leaders and senior managers from the police watchdog met recently to discuss areas in which the investigative body needs to improve.<\/p>\n
Ensuring IOPC investigators have a better understanding of Post-Incident Procedure, speeding up decisions around whether officers are witnesses or suspects, a lack of empowerment for individual investigators and inadequate disclosure training were all on the agenda.<\/p>\n
Essex Police Federation Chair Laura Heggie said: \u201cHopefully the IOPC has taken it on-board, and hopefully things do change.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe have started to see some changes, but there is still got a long way to go. The IOPC is still slow with decisions on referrals \u2013 deciding whether or not they\u2019re going to be investigating a case or passing it back to the force.<\/p>\n
\u201cMany times the updates that we\u2019re getting are almost meaningless.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey come across as just a tick-box exercise. It will literally be, \u2018We are still investigating and the officers are still witnesses at this time\u2019, which doesn\u2019t let the officers know how far along the investigation is.\u201d<\/p>\n
Some high profile cases have taken the IOPC more than five years to conclude, putting officers and their families as well as the members of the public involved through hell.<\/p>\n
Laura added: \u201cWe had an investigation following a Post-Incident Procedure that the IOPC investigated which was finally concluded recently.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat investigation has taken 10 months for them to decide that there was no misconduct identified for any of the officers or police staff involved and there was no learning identified for either the organisation or individual officers.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo basically that\u2019s 10 months for them to say you did your job and you did it well.\u201d<\/p>\n
It is the wait to discover their fate that can be so damaging to officers, their families and their careers.<\/p>\n
Laura added: \u201cWe get the fact that there\u2019s got to be an investigation and that\u2019s good that there\u2019s an investigation. In the incident which took 10 months to resolve, there was nothing identified that went wrong or anything that the officers could have necessarily done better.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat\u2019s still 10 months that those officers have been kept waiting to see if they are a key police witness or if that\u2019s going to change to, \u2018you\u2019re now a suspect\u2019. That\u2019s a horrible 10 months for them.<\/p>\n
\u201cChanges to that are needed and are needed quickly.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"