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
journal contribution
posted on 2018-05-04, 14:00 authored by Melanie-Jane Stoneman, Lisa JacksonLisa Jackson, Sarah DunnettSarah Dunnett, Louise CookeEvery 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 SocietyVolume
29Issue
8Pages
951-967Citation
STONEMAN, M-J. ... et al., 2018. Variation in detainee risk assessment within police custody across England and Wales. Policing and Society, DOI: 10.1080/10439463.2018.1467906Publisher
© The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis GroupVersion
- 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
2018-04-12Publication date
2018-04-26Copyright date
2018Notes
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
1477-2728Publisher version
Language
- en