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Variation in detainee risk assessment within police custody across England and Wales.pdf (2.2 MB)

Variation in detainee risk assessment within police custody across England and Wales

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posted on 2018-05-04, 14:00 authored by Melanie-Jane Stoneman, Lisa JacksonLisa Jackson, Sarah DunnettSarah Dunnett, Louise Cooke
Every time a person is booked into police custody in England and Wales, they are assessed for risk of harm to themselves or others. National guidance is provided on what questions should be asked as part of this process; however, each year there are still instances of serious adverse incidents, self-harm and deaths in custody. The purpose of this study is to look at the extent to which the national guidance is being followed and the extent to which the risk assessment process varies between police forces. A Freedom of Information request was sent to all 43 police forces in England and Wales asking for information on their risk assessment process. This data was then analysed alongside findings from police custody inspection visits conducted by Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary. This study provides evidence that the risk assessment process is not consistent across police forces in England and Wales. Not only does the process vary from the national guidance, the content and delivery differs considerably between police forces. The findings highlight a practical problem for police forces in ensuring that risk assessment processes are conducted to a consistent standard and reflect national guidance. The study is, to the authors’ knowledge, the first time that this data has been collated and compared

Funding

This work was supported by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council [grant number EP/M507908/1].

History

School

  • Business and Economics

Department

  • Business

Published in

Policing and Society

Volume

29

Issue

8

Pages

951-967

Citation

STONEMAN, M-J. ... et al., 2018. Variation in detainee risk assessment within police custody across England and Wales. Policing and Society, DOI: 10.1080/10439463.2018.1467906

Publisher

© The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group

Version

  • VoR (Version of Record)

Publisher statement

This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/

Acceptance date

2018-04-12

Publication date

2018-04-26

Copyright date

2018

Notes

This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

ISSN

1477-2728

Language

  • en

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