No surprises to the Cassandras of FWR but still a dispiriting read.
Four years on from a super-complaint over officers’ violence against women and girls, a new report finds little progress has been made on promised reforms
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On Wednesday, the legal charity the Centre for Women’s Justice (CWJ) will publish a damning report, titled Police Perpetrated Domestic Abuse. Has Anything Really Changed since the 2020 Super-Complaint?
A super-complaint is a mechanism to identify and address systemic issues in policing. In 2020, the super-complaint, largely upheld, drew on the experiences of 19 women spanning 15 of the 43 police forces in England and Wales that now employ around 150,000 officers.
Common themes then included failures to investigate complaints, workplace victimisation of women who were themselves police officers and victims arrested when the abuser made a counter claim. A police review in 2022 found that only 40% of reports of police perpetrated domestic abuse (PPDA) resulted in a misconduct investigation and only eight cases out of 122 were referred to the Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC). Criminal charges occurred in only 9% of cases.
Following the super-complaint, reforms were promised. So, almost five years later, is PPDA now properly recorded, investigated, addressed and monitored to ensure justice for victim-survivors and to restore trust in the police?
“Change is slow and making it happen is a giant enterprise,” says Harriet Wistrich, the founder and director of CWJ . “Each force is led by a chief constable with his or her own priorities. A few forces are really trying but others aren’t doing very much at all. Many of the women, caught in a horrendous web, are experiencing exactly the same problems as we first encountered in 2020.”
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2024/sep/14/how-uk-police-still-ignore-domestic-abusers-in-their-ranksO