I mentioned in one of those threads that I'd begun a spreadsheet to collect the reports and then fell (probably mercifully) silent.
That silence wasn't (for once) me giving up after starting with enthusiasm. I've been steadily collecting cases ever since. I've got a weekly google alert for every police force in the country and my goodness, do I get a lot of alerts.
Currently I have 387 reports of misconduct. Apart from the cases reported in the threads I linked to above, I didn't do any historic searching. Everything since then has been stories that have hit the news in some way, or stories that came up in my search for more information.
Only three forces haven't appeared so far - the City of London Police (with 970 officers as of 2022), Durham Constabulary (with 1,295 officers as of 2022), and the Ministry of Defence Police (with 2,594 officers as of 2022). The other 45 forces have all had at least one report. Despite its prevalence in the press, when you compare the number of reports to the number of officers, the Met is barely middle-of-the-pack (highlighted in red in the graph below). Essex Police has by far the highest percentage of officers hitting the press for misconduct.
- Percentage of Officers by force.png (19.62 KiB) Viewed 200 times
I've come up with my own categories of misconduct as the ones used by the police are really vague and unhelpful. Probably not surprising if you've followed the other threads, sexual offences - everything from perving on colleagues to rape of children - is the most common report. Bigotry (either online - WhatsApp groups are very popular for racism, sexism, homophobia, ableism, xenophobia, transphobia and general c.ntery, or IRL) is also very popular and is a great way to catch multiple officers from the same force.
- Offences.jpg (18.71 KiB) Viewed 200 times
There's more to be said, and more cases coming in all the time. If you find any please feel free to add them, there's a tab called 'crowdsourcing' where you can do so.
I'll post periodic updates when I have time and inclination.
You may ask why I've got it out for the police. It's because they're given a position of power and authority to uphold the law and instead a disturbing number of them abuse those positions to hurt people and then use those positions to protect themselves from the consequences of their actions. I've read about the horrific to the pathetic - one case I added tonight was an officer stealing an ornament from someone's garden (he got a written warning), another older case was someone stealing toilet roll from the police station where they worked (she had retired before a misconduct hearing was called). There are multiple officers who've stolen from dead people. There's loads who've accessed police databases to spy on friends, family, neighbours, online dates, or just to be nosy. Some have even shared that information with friends and family, and in some cases with the criminals they're supposed to be catching. There's a scary number who have tried to form sexual relationships with vulnerable people who they've met in the course of their duties. These stories would be bad in any job, but police are supposed to protect us and instead they're doing the opposite. They are using their positions to get the opportunities to commit these crimes and using their positions to protect themselves. It's not 'a few bad apples'. It's not 'the exception'. It's evidence of a culture of impunity and I think that, at the very least, someone should be paying attention.
