Complaining about police treatment
Advice
There are laws which state how such complaints must be handled, these are the: -
It is common for the police to try and manage complaints about the phone, typically explaining away any issue as “policy”, “protocol” etc. If you do have a serious complaint, you should address it to the complaints team at the relevant force. Once the police receive your formal complaint in writing they have 15 working days in which to record it and to send you a copy of the complaint record, how long the investigation itself will take will vary on the circumstance but a timescale of 9 months is not uncommon.
If you do not know the I.D numbers, names or identities of the officers involved you can make your complaint anyway. Just describe the officers and the time and place you encountered them. The force must make reasonable efforts to locate them and provide you with their names as part of your complaint record. They may offer to “look into it” (forget it), investigate it (look at it before forgetting it), or actively investigate (get someone more superior to look at it, then forget it). Ultimately the Police are hardly likely to look hard to find against another member of their local force.
Here is a listing of the various constabulary’s complaints department emails: -
Once you have been sufficiently frustrated by a lack of investigation you may refer the complaint to the Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC). For information, the IOPC will only look into the complaint is about a senior officer who after review would be liable to criminal and/or misconduct proceedings, or involves serious matters such as a death or serious injury whilst in custody, again this is a tactic used to protect themselves against prosecution.
How we can help
Lestons can help you compile a complaint based on their rules of fair treatment and duty of care; however, you should remember that this would be done by other officers and as such there is an obvious bias here so having an impartial investigation is highly unlikely.
To gain our assistance you need to open a case, this is done by taking advantage of our free consultation service, activated by the link at the top of the page, should you wish to start a case the caseworker will send you the suitable payment link.Please note your caseworker can only give generic advice, their role is to act as your point of contact, they will also issue you with your Password and PIN, these will be needed to log onto your client dashboard. From your dashboard you will be able to manage and view every aspect of your case, upload documents, images, files etc. Please note your caseworker can only give generic advice, their role is to prepare your details for handling by our legal team and to act as your point of contact.