Courts not in the digital age yet and still relying on paper, delays and bureaucracy, inadequate police evidence, meaning trials take longer and cost more. In polite terms, Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary (HMIC) last month reported that ‘there are still a number of issues’ in courts and the criminal justice system. While it might not matter to security managers if courts and police are inefficient, it does if you’re providing them with CCTV as evidence of a crime at your business.
In a joint review, HMIC, and HM Crown Prosecution Service Inspectorate (HMCPSI), published Stop the Drift 2: A Continuing Focus on 21st Century Criminal Justice. As the name suggests, it was a follow-up to a similar report in 2010. As for CCTV, the inspectors wrote: “We routinely found that although CCTV evidence existed and was recorded on the case files, there was no proper description of its content, or what format was required for onward transmission. As a result, cases might not be managed efficiently upon reaching court because there was insufficient information available to the prosecutor to assess relevance and importance.” In other words, even if police ask for CCTV of a shop theft (and it’s a grumble of retailers that police don’t bother about so-called low-level crime), courts might not even be able to view it, if it’s in the ‘wrong’ format for their kit. Another problem the inspectors found was ‘restrictions on file size transfer’ between for example police and prosecutors.
The inspectors found other shortcomings in use of CCTV: “the lack of available equipment to convert the CCTV evidence into a compatible format for use by police, CPS and courts; the lack of suitable equipment to play the CCTV back, were consistently raised by forces; and the inability to send a CCTV clip across the CPS/police interface, because the clip file size was too big. In one area visited, we were told of a case where officers were unable to send a CCTV clip of a police officer being assaulted to CPS electronically. As a result, 15 still photos from the CCTV evidence were downloaded, scanned, and emailed to the prosecutor in order to obtain a charging decision.”
However, as the inspectors make plain, it’s not that police are particularly bad in use of CCTV; their case file paperwork is as often at fault in recording witnesses, or giving not enough (or too much) evidence. Indeed, the inspectors spoke of a ‘culture of overbuilding case files’, including to do with downloaded CCTV. The inspectors note that society has ever more VRE (Visually Recorded Evidence) that it can pass to police – such as images from smartphones. How is the criminal justice system to cope? Although as the inspectors say, that camera-phones are so widespread could help police to gather evidence – indeed, ‘a citizen in possession of a smart phone is likely to have more functions at his disposal than a police officer equipped to patrol the streets’.
To sum up: besides well-managed courts being a good thing for society generally, the aim has long been, as the inspectors say, to reduce bureaucracy so freeing up police time. As for use of private contractors, the inspectors found that ‘arrangements for the transfer of detainees to court by private companies are not always effective and often result in police officers transporting detainees to court themselves. In one area, this lack of flexibility meant that any person brought into police custody outside the private company’s contracted hours would have to be transported to court by police officers’.
For the 32-page report in full visit – http://www.hmic.gov.uk/media/stop-the-drift-2-03062013.pdf
