Baroness Casey's Report on Misconduct: October 2022

By Baroness Casey

Misconduct data, extracted from the Met’s Centurion systems This dataset contains information on all allegations (18,589), cases (10,252), and officers/staff (12,856) involved in misconduct issues (formally) from April 2013 – March 2022. The difference in these numbers is due to the fact that one case may involve several allegations against several individuals. And, as several officers may also be involved in more than one conduct case in the time period, the number of individual officers and staff in the data is actually 8,917. These allegations are only internal, i.e. initiated by Met staff, officers, or their families, not complaints from the general public, which are held on a different dataset. This dataset includes information on the nature of the allegation, the outcomes and decisions made, information on the subject of the allegation and key data around times, dates, and jurisdictions. The Review has taken an exploratory approach to this complex dataset, conducting descriptive statistical analysis on all components of the data to identify trends, changes, and outliers. It should be noted that this data is significant, but can never be fully accurate as many variables depend on the recording practices of individuals, which can vary between people and time. Nevertheless, the numbers are so significant that we are confident in our conclusions. The basis of our analysis is financial years (Apr-Mar), we measure the number of allegations/cases which have been received in each financial year. Some other performance analyses measure instead the number of case/allegations which have been finalised in a specific year. We have chosen the former approach for two reasons (1) it gives us a person-centred understanding of the misconduct system i.e. the experience of those making complaints / being complained about (2) it allows us to look at the impact of changes to legislation which do not apply retrospectively i.e. if a case was received in 2015, the rules changed in 2016, and the case was finalised in 2017, the 2016 rules would not apply. However, because we count all allegations and cases made in the period, not just the finalised ones, the closer we get to the contemporary day, the higher the percentage of cases/allegations which have not yet received an outcome becomes. Because of this, throughout, we have included red lines to indicate where the unknown percentage is too large to draw conclusions for that year.

London: Metropolitan Police, 2022. 21p.