Criminal justice bogged down in paperwork
Police blame ‘needless’ tasks for 50 per cent rise in the time it takes to decide on charging suspect
CRIME victims are having to wait 50 per cent longer for suspects to be charged because police say they are overwhelmed by “needless” paperwork.
Detectives say they are wasting weeks getting cases “trial ready” before being referred to the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) for a decision on whether to charge the suspect.
Ministry of Justice (MoJ) data show it is currently taking 419 days on average between the victim reporting an offence and the CPS authorising police to charge the suspect.
That is a 49.6 per cent increase on the 282 days in 2019 – before a case even enters the court system.
One veteran detective said that “officers are just screaming at me saying this is unworkable” and that victims were kept waiting for “months longer than they should”. Delays from point of entry into the courts and trial completion are also up, from 246 days in 2019 to 387 days, largely as a result of the pandemic, according to MoJ data.
Police say the paperwork includes cases where the criminal offers to plead guilty, or where there is no chance of a conviction because of lack of evidence.
This can require officers to prepare files of hundreds of pages of “third party” evidence such as the victim’s years of contact with social and health services and thousands of data files from digital communications that may not even need to be put to the court if the suspect pleads guilty. Detectives say all the evidence has to be reviewed and redacted to remove people not involved in the case or pixelate images in officers’ body-worn camera footage – a burden that even Suella Braverman, the Attorney General, has admitted is “excessive, onerous and disproportionate”.
“A lot of those inquiries we have to do to make it ‘trial ready’ are onerous and take days or months,” said Kevin Marshall, 51, a veteran detective in Norfolk, with nearly 30 years’ experience.
“Officers are probably spending at least 50 per cent more time at a desk in front of a computer screen.” He said victims were kept waiting for “months longer than they should,” citing a 2018 case now scheduled for trial in 2023.
The change in CPS rules in 2020 stems from a series of cases that collapsed after fresh evidence emerged at trial that should have been investigated earlier. Police say the balance has now tilted too far in the other direction.
In Devon and Cornwall, a poll found a quarter of the force’s detectives said they were considering quitting, citing the extra paperwork. Word of the bureaucratic pressures has spread, deterring recruits in a branch of policing where 20 per cent of the 29,000 detective roles are already unfilled. Glyn Pattinson, chairman of the Police Federation’s national detective forum, demanded an urgent rethink to streamline processes and adopt a lighter touch review of cases before decisions were taken to avoid wasted work.
The CPS said the public rightly expected thorough police investigations that pursued all reasonable lines of inquiry.
“Sometimes that requires more time and work. This avoids unnecessary delays later on and means fewer dropped cases, which is in the interests of all parties involved,” it said.