Finger The Fuzz
Describe your idea:
A new site which allows you to make complaints against the police. It guides you through the relevant questions and then submits the complaint to the IPCC – who in the first instance will normally forward it to the relevant police authority. It also publishes your complaint, and creates an ad-hoc e-mail address for responses and requests for further details to the user, which are also published, in the same way as WhatDoTheyKnow.com. Published complaints can be browsed or searched by authority and by type of complaint.
What problem does it solve?:
The IPCC does have a complaints form online (http://www.ipcc.gov.uk/index/complainants/forms/form_complaint.htm) but it has some usability problems. The main problem with it, however, is that complaints made are not public. If you have been beaten up by a police officer you can register a complaint but you do not know if large numbers of complaints have been made against the same force or even officer. You may suspect the treatment you received was tacitly their usual operating procedure, but no-one can be sure until a pattern of similar complaints emerges. As a result the police are far less accountable for their actions. This site would help to hold them to account.
Type of idea: A brand new project
Interesting! Although I guess the problem is that a complaint and any reply is bound to contain alot of personal details?
most complaints would be about the Police or particular officers acting illegally or improperly – which could be libellous if not true. The site admin could not normally know whether or not allegations are true until they have been investigated.
I have real concerns about this.
Im sure that most Police forces accross the country get a complaint every now and then which is blatently mallicious.
Mallicous complaints can have a terrible effect on someones reputation etc;
This site could be abused in that it makes the matter VERY public.
The site would require a lot of moderation.
I think also the Police and the IPCC (in England & Wales) would oppose such a site as is suggested.
Some complaints against officers can lead to criminal prosecution and I would be uneasy about having key evidence posted all over the internet.
An alternative proposal would be to maintain a database with a record for every complaint after an arbitrary start date (not just those submitted through the site) with fields for facts which can be obtained under the FoI Act (reference number, date, investigator, result, badge number(s) of officers subject to complaint, etc.) and allow members to annotate them with free text. This alternative follows the TheyWorkForYou model rather than the WriteToThem model of the original proposal, but [nearly]
solves the problem stated in the original proposal. The FoI business might be done in collaboration with WhatDoTheyKnow. It’s probably not possible to get information correlating badge numbers with identifiable individuals, though.