GMP FAILED TO RECORD 80,000 CRIMES OVER 12 MONTHS
BLISTERING INSPECTION REPORT SLAMS GMP OVER FAILURE TO RECORD THOUSANDS OF CRIMES
● Hundreds of cases a day when people may have been denied justice, says blistering report ● High proportion of domestic abuse, harassment, and stalking incidents were not logged ● Force also failed to make sure all investigations were carried out effectively: SEE PAGES 4&5
GREATER Manchester Police is failing to record one in four violent crimes reported to it, according to a blistering inspection report published today – which also raises serious concerns about its approach to domestic violence and child protection referrals, as well as delayed, dropped and badly-planned investigations.
The police inspectorate, which had already warned the force about inaccurate crime recording in 2016 and 2018, as well as about its approach to vulnerable victims in 2019, says the situation has since ‘significantly deteriorated’ and has now told the force to address its concerns ‘urgently’.
Zoe Billingham, who authored the report on behalf of Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire and Rescue Services, told the M.E.N. that GMP are now one of the worst forces in the country for poor crime records, noting that usually there is a ‘flurry of activity’ after bad reports that is then sustained in the longer term. But GMP buck the trend in that regard and that’s one of the reasons I’m as worried as I am,” she said, adding that the force leadership have questions to answer.
The report looks specifically at the experiences of victims when they deal with GMP.
Its most striking finding, based on analysis of crime reports between April and June of this year, is that more than a fifth of reported crimes are never recorded, rising to one in four where violent offences are concerned.
Averaged out over the course of the year, more than 80,000 reported crimes are not being put on the books, it calculates.
GMP also fails to protect the victims of those crimes as a result, it concludes.
Crimes it particularly identifies as slipping through the net include domestic violence and referrals from agencies concerned about children or vulnerable adults, as well as stalking and harassment.
“The service provided to victims of crime by Greater Manchester Police, particularly vulnerable victims of crime, remains a serious cause of concern,” it says. “Over one in five of all crimes reported to the police in Greater Manchester are not making it onto the books.”
GMP’s crime reporting standards ‘have deteriorated substantially’ since it last looked at them in 2018, it finds. The conclusions come after GMP celebrated what it said was a drop in crime of almost a fifth in the first half of this year.
As well as strongly criticising its crime recording, the report also found investigations are inconsistent, with one in three failing to meet basic standards in the way they are carried out, while also too often being slow.
Where investigations are carried out, it notes ‘substantial delays in either contact with victims or the commencement of investigative activity, without any apparent rationale for these delays’ in some cases’. It finds ‘around half of investigations lacked sufficient supervisory oversight and planning’ and while recently the force had drawn up plans to improve that situation, they had ‘yet to take effect’.
Meanwhile ‘substantial’ numbers of cases are closed too quickly, it finds. And too many serious crimes, including some gun possession and more than 70pc of domestic violence cases, are being concluded with cautions or other out-of-court
outcomes, with four out of five victims not consulted on those decisions.
While it does not reference the force’s troubled new computer system, iOPS, issues with its impact on referrals from safeguarding agencies have been flagged previously by councils.
As well as failing to investigate a quarter of reported violent crimes, the force is ‘often not identifying victims as vulnerable at the point of contact’, it concludes, finding that in half the cases it sampled the risk assessment had not been completed. It is then ‘wrongly and prematurely closing substantial numbers of recorded crime investigations, including a high proportion of crimes involving vulnerable victims, as not supported by the victim, but without the evidence to show this to be the case’.
The report notes improvements – in particular, the accurate recording of rape and sexual offences crimes – and notes that more calls to 101 are now being picked up.
At its last review one in three were not answered, with the proportion now one in five. Half of those who do not speak to an operator go online instead, a finding it welcomes. But Zoe Bellingham, who carried out the inspection in September and October of this year, said she was ‘deeply concerned’ overall.
She said GMP are ‘one of the worst forces in the country’ for accurate crime recording, adding: “That means really large volumes of crimes are not making it onto the books. An awful lot of victims are not getting the service they should from the police.”
Asked why she thought that was the case, she said that question needed to be ‘put directly to the Chief Constable and the leadership team’, but added that it is ‘down to the leadership of the force to ensure the very basic building blocks of policing are in place’.
She was now pursuing the inspectorate’s escalation process, she said, which meant the ‘unusual’ step of another inspection in six months.
That could be escalated further, she said. HMIC’s escalation process can ultimately involve the Home Secretary if serious problems are not resolved, although she declined to describe what her next steps might be.