Sexual Misconduct Complaints
Date of request: 2 May 2021
Reference: 592/21
Request
- How many complaints of sexual harassment, sexual assault and rape were made against officers, community support officers and special constables between the calendar years 2016 to 2020?
- What was the outcome of each complaint? An allegation outcome could be: case to answer, discontinuance, dispensation, no case to answer, ongoing, withdrawn.
- Where there was a case to answer, what disciplinary action was taken?
- Please specify the allegation of each complaint.
Response
Please find below the number of alleged sexual offences and alleged misconduct relevant to your request, reported as a complaint or referred as a conduct allegation, which hasn’t met the criminal threshold for sexual offences, for the year 2016.
Complaints Received
| Complaints | 1 |
| Allegations | 1 |
Internal Investigations
| Conducts | 7 |
| Allegations | 10 |
Please find attached a summary of the complaints and internal investigations which have been listed in the above table.
Please find below a breakdown of the outcomes of the complaints and internal investigations listed in the table in the response to question one.
Outcomes
| De-Recorded | 2 |
| No case to answer | 4 |
| Case to answer | 5 |
Action Taken
| No Action | 5 |
| Retired/ Resigned | 2 |
I am not obliged to supply the information for the years 2017-2020 as you have requested.
The exemption applicable to this information is;
- Section 21 – Information reasonably accessible by other means.
This is an absolute and class based exemption and as such does not require a harm and public interest test. The information requested is publicly available to view on our website or by using the link below.
This serves as a partial refusal notice under section 17(1) of the FOI Act.
Please note that all conducts prior to February 2020 required a manual ‘key word search’ in order to identify those that pertain to sexual offences. This is because out of the 10 Standards of Professional Behaviour, there is not one specific standard that only relates to sexual offences. Due to the request asking for sexual misconduct, including sexual assault and sexual harassment, a ‘key word search’ for ‘rape’, ‘harass’, ‘assault’ and ‘sex’ was conducted. These have then been manually reviewed the results to remove any that do not pertain to sexual harassment, sexual assault and rape, as per your request. Therefore, any other allegations that do not clearly relate to those three categories have not been included.