The use of restorative conferencing in the police complaints procedure

Report: 8
Date: 11 September 2003
By: Commissioner

Summary

This report informs members of the pilot the Directorate of Professional Standards wish to undertake in examining the use of restorative conferencing in the complaints procedure.

A. Recommendation

The Committee are asked to support the pilot scheme to be run by the Internal Investigation Command, North East in the use of restorative conference in the police complaints procedure.

B. Supporting information

Background and business need

1. The use of the principles of Restorative Justice (RJ) in the Criminal Justice System has a well-documented history. A great deal of publicly funded research has been and is currently being carried out into its effectiveness. The use of RJ principles to deal with public complaints against the police is a recent development. The first major piece of research into this area is being carried out by Oxford University in conjunction with Thames Valley Police (TVP). The Interim Report and further emerging findings of this project have informed this proposal. It will be further monitored and this pilot, and indeed the work of Internal Investigation Command (IIC) generally, will be amended as necessary.

2. It is clear that informal resolution is the most appropriate method of disposal of the vast majority of public complaints. In fact, it is the appropriate disposal for the majority of complaints that are fully investigated at the complainant’s request. It is also generally more satisfactory for the complainant, the officer, the MPS and the Police Complaints Authority (PCA) than a full investigation. HMIC and the Home Office regard those forces with the highest proportion of IRs among the disposals of their complaints as more successful in dealing with complaints. Thus, Strand 2 of the IIC business plan for 2003 is, “To expand the use of informal resolution and limited investigation and identify alternative methods of disposal to ensure prompt resolution of complaints.” The use of restorative conferencing at appropriate points during the informal resolution process is one tactic that IIC hope to use to support this objective.

3. This pilot will therefore examine the effectiveness of restorative conferencing in assisting the informal resolution process.

Objectives and scope

Objectives

4. The objectives of this pilot are to discover whether:

• The use of restorative conferencing can increase the levels of informal resolution achieved by IIC
• The use of restorative conferencing can provide closure for complainants in particularly difficult and sensitive cases
• Informal resolutions achieved through conferencing are more effective in providing learning for officers and the organisation

Methodology

5. The DCI Operations at IIC NE assesses all complaints made on the eight BOCUs that form the NE quadrant of the MPS prior to the appointing of an Investigating officer (IO). In the vast majority of cases, the IO will meet with the complainant at an early stage and disposal options and investigative opportunities are discussed. This results in about 14% of cases at IIC NE being informally resolved (13% having been immediately informally resolved by Boroughs). When appointing an IO the Detective Chief Inspector (DCI) will indicate whether a conference may be appropriate. The IO will discuss the options with the complainant in the normal way. If the complaint is not resolved at this stage, the IO will then explore with the complainant whether they are willing to participate in a restorative conference with the officer(s) involved. If they are, then the officers will be approached. If all parties are willing to participate then a conference will be arranged.

6. Following their initial meeting with the complainant, the IOs will grade the complaint as follows:

• Where they believe a resolution would be achievable through the normal process with some additional effort.
• Where they believe a resolution might be achievable with some additional effort.
• Where they believe a resolution is definitely not achievable.
• This will give at least a subjective measure of the effectiveness of the procedure in different situations.

7. The conferences will be arranged by the IO but facilitated by trained officers from the Territorial Policing Restorative Justice Programme (TPRJP). Inspector Brain Dowling, the Programme Director, has agreed to this arrangement in principle. If the conference is successful, the complaint will be recorded as informally resolved. If it is unsuccessful then the complaint will revert to the normal system and be investigated.

8. Following every conference, whatever the result, the complainant and the officers involved will be asked to complete a short questionnaire indicating their levels of satisfaction with the process.

Scope

9. Conferences will only be attempted within the informal resolution process. If a complaint is not suitable for informal resolution, then it will not fall within the pilot. A conference will only be arranged once the normal attempts at informal resolution have failed. As can be seen from the above figures, IIC NE is already successful at achieving informal resolutions. There can be no business benefit from carrying out a resource intensive process such as a restorative conference to achieve a result that would be achieved anyway. A conference will be arranged for all appropriate cases where no resolution is reached at the first meeting, provided all those involved are willing to participate.

Organisation

10.

Project plan

11. The pilot will commence on 1 September 2003 and will initially run for six months. After this time an assessment will be made as to whether sufficient conferences have been run for any conclusions to be drawn.

Products

12. At this stage an interim report will be produced summarising:

• Progress to date
• Suggestions for improvements to the process
• Any initial conclusions relating to the objectives
• Recommendations as to future activity

Resources and benefits

Resources

13. No additional resources will be required in the first six months as the pilot will be managed using the current resources of IIC and trained facilitators provided by TPRJP.

14. If the pilot shows that conferencing is a useful tactic then it may be necessary for IIC to have some staff trained as facilitators. TVP currently have one Inspector working three days a week dealing with all aspects of restorative conferencing for their Professional Standards Department. They dealt with roughly seven hundred complaints and ran twenty-two conferences last year. They run conferences for any complaint suitable for informal resolution if those involved are willing to participate.

15. IIC dealt with approximately 4200 complaints last year. IIC NE dealt with approximately 1000 of these. As we are applying tighter criteria than TVP, it can be expected that the MPS will arrange proportionately less conferences, perhaps one third as many. Therefore it is predicted that somewhere in the region of 40 for IIC as a whole and 10 for NE will be carried out. If it is decided to continue the pilot on NE alone, a facilitator working 1.5 days a week is likely to be required. If it is decided to extend the pilot across IIC, a full time facilitator may be necessary. Obviously, the first stage of the pilot will make these figures clearer.

Benefits

16. Potential benefits are:

• Greater public satisfaction with the complaints process
• More impactive learning opportunities for officers, potentially leading to service improvement and a reduction in complaints
• Skills learned during the pilot may improve the informal resolution process
• Increase in the proportion of complaints informally resolved

17. This leads to:

• More timely resolution of complaints
• Less time and resources spent on investigations
• Focusing of resources on complaints that are more serious and those that are capable of proof
• Increase in substantiation rates for full investigations

18. It is important to emphasise that these latter benefits can only be realised if restorative conferencing results in a higher rate of informal resolution than would otherwise have been achieved.

Constraints, assumptions and risks

Constraints

19. The major constraint is that it is likely that the number of suitable complaints for which all concerned are willing to take part in a conference is likely to be small, as with the TVP experience.

20. The number of conferences will be maximised by:

• Enthusiastic leadership by the project manager, informed by the experience of TVP and TPRJP
• Training for all IIC NE investigators in how the process works and in presenting it to complainants and officers. This will be carried out on 4 September 2003 by the project manager
• Early liaison with the Federation both centrally and on the Boroughs affected to try to elicit their support. The Federation have agreed to support the pilot and all IIC NE IOs will be holding meetings with Federation Representatives from their Boroughs at the start of the pilot, following the training mentioned above

21. The project is also constrained by the difficulties in assessing the effectiveness of restorative conferencing. Proper assessment requires large scale, randomised and controlled trials. This is clearly not possible without considerable resources, significant interference in the currently successful business of IIC and the collaboration of academic researchers. Even when such trials are set up, research has identified that there are many factors that can affect the results that are difficult to eliminate. It appears from the early findings of the Oxford / TVP study that such an investment would not be proportionate to the potential benefits.

22. Of the twenty-two conferences arranged by TVP last year, sixteen resulted in informal resolutions and two proceeded to full investigation; the others were held at different stages of the process. In the opinion of the TVP project manager, it is likely that this would have been the result of dealing with these complaints in the normal way. As described above, TVP try to deal with all complaints by conferencing when appropriate and so no initial attempt had been made at resolution before the conference. TVP has an informal resolution rate for complaints of about 30%. This does not appear to have been affected by their move to the use of conferencing. The IR rate for the MPS is already roughly equivalent.

23. This pilot is not sufficiently large or sufficiently scientifically rigorous to produce valid data on satisfaction rates. The data produced by the satisfaction questionnaires will provide only an indication of how those participating feel about the process.

24. There are large-scale national research projects into the effectiveness of RJ in various situations already underway, as well as the Oxford / TVP research specifically into RJ and the complaints process. It is likely that these studies will provide sufficient objective data to inform future decisions about RJ. It is therefore believed that to attempt a more scientifically valid trial would represent a considerable waste of resources and an unjustified disruption the business of IIC.

25. Provided that all those involved in this project and anyone seeking to make decisions based on its findings are aware that this will be a largely subjective assessment of its benefits, then the information generated may still be useful.

Assumptions

26. It is assumed that restorative conferencing is a valid process that is capable of resolving some disagreements and is therefore safe to use. Although the benefits of restorative justice have yet to be properly quantified and no assessment has been made of their durability, this is a relatively safe assumption. There is considerable agreement that restorative conferences are at least of some benefit in some situations and the Oxford / TVP study has shown the technique can usefully be applied to complaints.

Risks

27. The proposals for this pilot have been reviewed by the MPS Directorate of Legal Services and no legal risks have been identified. The PCA has also reviewed this document and have agreed the proposals, again identifying no risks.

28. However, several risks are apparent and these are:

• That no conferences will be held because complainants are not willing to participate. This will be managed by appropriate training of IIC NE staff and enthusiastic leadership by the SMT and IOs.
• That no conferences will be held because officers are not willing to participate. This will be managed by training IIC NE staff, and liaison with the Federation.
• Officers’ rights will be protected by using restorative conferencing strictly within the Informal Resolution Regulations. Both officers and complainants will be asked to sign the Form 3352, Record of Complaint, that they are willing for the complaint to be informally resolved. This will place the process firmly within the regulations. This provides officers with the guarantee that nothing that they say during the process can be used as evidence during any subsequent misconduct proceedings. This is the procedure used by TVP.
• Consideration has been given to further managing these risks by the use of written protocols with the Federation and written information for complainants and officers. However, as described above, the process is being carried out entirely within the IR regulations; obviously, these are clearly documented. There are also information leaflets for complainants and officers. Writing further documents and getting agreement to them is likely to introduce considerable delays. Considering the small numbers of people likely to be involved, a personal explanation of restorative conferencing with confidence in the regulation of the process provided by the documentation already in place for informal resolution is likely to be just as effective. This is the system in place in TVP. Therefore, no additional documents will be produced at this stage.
• That the process will be discredited amongst officers by complainants requesting full investigations despite participating in a conference. This risk can be partially managed by the use of trained facilitators to guarantee the quality of the conferences. However, the risk will remain, as the conference must take place within the IR Regulations. This is essential to comply with Police Regulations and to protect officers. The Home Office was consulted at an early stage by TVP and was not prepared to allow any flexibility within the Regulations.
• That conferences will not result in resolution but will further entrench the positions of officers and complainants. This is a risk because complaints are different to the situations that conferences are normally used in. Conferences are most effective when used in situations where there is an ‘offender’ who has harmed a ‘victim’. Indeed, research has shown that the more serious the harm, the more successful the conference is likely to be; reparation is more likely to be agreed and the victims desire for vengeance is more likely to be reduced. There is no clear offender / victim relationship in most complaints. If there were, and especially if serious harm had been done, informal resolution would not be appropriate.
• This risk will be managed by ensuring that all participants have a clear understanding of the process and their role within it. Unless it is clearly appropriate, no offender / victim relationship will be set up, explicitly or implicitly. The conference will be aimed at resolving a disagreement between two parties. The TVP experience has shown that this is feasible.
• That resources will be wasted in carrying out conferences and no performance improvement will result. TVP have found no measurable performance improvement in the terms defined in objective one and conferencing is a resource intensive procedure. This risk is managed in the design of the pilot. TVP did not set out to improve their performance in the way IIC are seeking to. The scope of this project is deliberately narrow; only resources that are already available are being used and the focus is on complaints where a resolution has not been achieved in the course of normal discussions. It will therefore be possible to assess whether conferencing might contribute towards more effective performance before significant resources are committed to it.

C. Equality and diversity implications

1. It is believed that the pilot itself and in fact any move to widen the use of restorative conferencing in the complaints process will have no equality or diversity implications. It can be seen from the methodology and scope of the pilot that it is intended to offer a conference to all complainants where no resolution is reached at the first meeting. A conference will then be arranged provided that all the relevant parties agree.

2. It may be that some disproportionality emerges in the relative numbers of conferences arranged involving complainants from different communities. It is likely that this will reflect the current reluctance of some communities to engage with the complaints process and police service in general.

3. Every effort will be made to encourage all complainants in suitable cases to participate in a conference. It is hoped that this will counter any suggestion of either deliberate or unwitting discrimination will occur. It is also hoped that as conferences start to take place, the willingness of the police service and police officers to engage in direct dialogue with dissatisfied members of the public, to be open to criticism and to learn from their mistakes will in fact increase confidence and trust in the police service. It is possible that this will be most impactive where confidence and trust is lowest.

D. Financial implications

1. The DCI Operations within IIC NE assesses all complaints currently and the extra time required to consider the potential for a restorative conference will be negligible.

2. Additional time will be required for IOs to seek participation in and to arrange conferences. It is anticipated that this extra time will also be minimal and can be met from within current budgets.

3. TPRJP has offered to provide facilitators at no cost to IIC for the initial pilot. Their facilitators are MPS staff, so no extra cost to the MPS will be incurred.

4. If it is necessary to train IIC staff in facilitation, TVP has offered to provide training, as has TPRJP. If external training is required, it will cost in the region of £400 to train the one facilitator. This will be met from existing budgets. It must be noted however, that this cost will depend on whether the trial is successful, that there is a need to train facilitators for IIC and if external training is necessary.

E. Background papers

None.

F. Contact details

Report author: DCI Andrew Dunn, Directorate of Professional Standards, MPS.

For more information contact:

MPA general: 020 7202 0202
Media enquiries: 020 7202 0217/18

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