Misconduct Publication (1724A/25)
Request
- What is your current policy regarding the publication of details for upcoming police misconduct hearings?
- Specifically, when are these details made available on your website?
- How long are they retained and publicly accessible prior to the hearing?
- Following the conclusion of a misconduct hearing:
- When is the outcome published on your website?
- How long is the outcome retained in a publicly accessible format?
- What are the reasons and criteria for withdrawing this information from public view?
- At what point is the information removed from a format that is searchable by the public?
- For each of the following reporting years: 2020–2021, 2021–2022, 2022-2023, 2023–2024, 2024–2025, please provide the number of misconduct outcomes in which the name of the police officer involved was published and the number of misconduct hearings where misconduct was found.
Response
Please find our response below.
Question 1: Details of misconduct hearings are published on the West Midlands Police website in accordance with Regulation 36 of the Conduct Regulations - Misconduct hearings | West Midlands Police
Representations are sought from the parties (officer, Police Appropriate Authority (AA), Complainant, interested persons, witnesses, IOPC, and media) and having considered these, if the Chair requires notice to be given, the AA publishes the notice on the website as soon as practicable.
- Therefore, the timescales for publication will vary in each case.
- Notices remain on the website until the hearing has concluded, when they are replaced with an outcome notice which is added to the ‘Misconduct Hearing Outcomes’ section of the page linked above.
Question 2: The outcome notice is published following the conclusion of the hearing, usually the same day but sometimes the next day if it finishes late. The notice does not include the officer’s name. It includes the standard of professional behaviour breached and the outcome.
- The Chair must submit an outcome report to the Police Appropriate Authority (AA) within 5 working days of conclusion. If the Chair requires the AA to publish the report, it will be redacted if necessary and approved. The report will be published as soon as practicable after the officer has been supplied with a copy of the report. The report remains on the website for 28 days when it is automatically removed.
- The Police (Conduct) Regulations 2020 Reg 43(8) states “Where the appropriate authority or the originating authority publishes a report in accordance with paragraph (6), it must publish the report on its website for a period of not less than 28 day”’ which is what is complied with. The outcome remains viewable however.
- Anonymised outcome notices from January 2023 onwards are retained on the West Midlands Police website.
Question 3: Please see below.
Finalised cases 2021
18 officer hearings - misconduct found in 17 of the cases
All hearings were heard in public
Finalised cases 2022
21 officer hearings - misconduct found in all cases
All hearings were heard in public
Finalised cases 2023
34 officer hearings - misconduct found in 32 cases
25 cases were heard in public and 9 cases were heard in private
Finalised cases 2024
47 officer hearings - misconduct found in all cases
34 cases were heard in public (of which 4 were held in public with conditions/restrictions and 1 had some private sessions) and 13 cases were heard in private
NB The cases heard in public would have published a report with the officer’s name.
Every effort is made to ensure that the figures presented are accurate and complete. However, it is important to note that this data has been extracted from a number of data sources used by forces for police purposes. The detail collected to respond specifically to your request may be subject to the inaccuracies inherent in any large scale recording system. As a consequence, care should be taken to ensure data collection processes and their inevitable limitations are taken into account when interpreting the data.
The figures provided therefore are our best interpretation of data which has relevance to your request, but you should be aware that the collation of figures for ad hoc requests may have limitations and this should be taken into account when those data are used.
If you decide to write an article / use the enclosed data we would ask you to take into consideration the factors highlighted in this document so as to not mislead members of the public or official bodies, or misrepresent the relevance of the whole or any part of this disclosed material.