Contact with a woman before she was assaulted - Greater Manchester Police, February–June 2016

On 7 June 2016, Greater Manchester Police (GMP) received a report that a woman had been badly assaulted, receiving fractures to her nose, eye socket and cheekbone. Her partner was arrested for the offence and later pleaded guilty to the assault. At the time of the incident he was already on bail for assaulting her in February 2016 and had been given an electronic tag. GMP had been receiving notifications that he was breaching his tag curfew every night for some weeks before the assault took place.

We investigated GMP’s contact with the woman between 30 January 2016 and 7 June 2016.

Our investigators took witness statements from officers who had contact with the woman, and examined GMP records in relation to several incidences of contact with the woman during the period under investigation.

We investigated four officers for potential misconduct for failing to take appropriate action to ensure that the man was arrested for breach of his bail conditions.

Evidence showed that, between 30 April 2016 and 6 June 2016 GMP were notified each night that the man was in breach of his bail conditions. Between these dates, GMP attended the man’s bail address three times to arrest him but he wasn’t at the address. On 21 May 2016, a GMP officer was informed that the man was no longer staying there. There is no evidence that GMP ever looked for him at a different address. By 3 May 2016 the task to find and arrest the man had been passed to a different team, but they were unable to take any action to find him. Our investigation showed that, following a restructure in the department, there was a high demand on the team at the time, which affected resourcing.

There is no evidence to indicate the police may have caused or contributed to the woman’s injuries. It is not known what would have happened if GMP had informed the woman that her partner was breaching his bail conditions or if more action had been taken by the police following the breach of bail notifications.

Based on the evidence available we found no indication that any person serving with the police may have behaved in a manner that would justify the bringing of disciplinary proceedings, or had committed a criminal offence.

However, we identified a number of areas of improvement for the force around breach of bail and safeguarding victims, particularly in cases of domestic violence.

Greater Manchester Police advised that they were conducting a pilot on safeguarding that they were planning to roll out across the force. It is expected that the learning from this investigation will feed into that pilot.