Response to a man reporting committing an assault - Lancashire Constabulary, August 2018

On 30 August 2018, a man attended a Lancashire Constabulary police station saying that he had assaulted a shopkeeper three weeks earlier. Three police officers dealt with him at the station and conducted checks on him and the incident he described.

All checks returned negative responses. The officers advised the man that they would pass on his details and the man agreed to come back to the station the following morning.

After the man had left the police station, CID identified that the man was wanted in relation to the offence, and informed an officer at the police station.

Around the same time, Lancashire Constabulary received a call reporting the man had gone back to the scene of his previous offence and assaulted the same shopkeeper by throwing a brick at him. He then returned to the police station and was arrested.

Our investigators obtained and reviewed relevant police call recordings, radio transmissions, incident logs and crime reports. They also interviewed and obtained accounts from the officers who dealt with the man at the police station. All were treated as witnesses throughout the investigation. We also conducted an audit check on the force’s systems.

Evidence indicated that:

• The officer in charge of the initial assault did not update the log with the information provided regarding the forensic results or with the results of the intelligence checks conducted.
• Two other officers had information available regarding the man being wanted for the offence reported, but missed it; the officers also had the option to arrest the man on the basis of his confession to a serious offence, but did not record anything in the log regarding their interaction with the man, including their decision not to arrest him. One of these officers has subsequently transferred to Greater Manchester Police.
• Another officer also had information available regarding the man being wanted for the offence reported, but missed it. He also had the option to arrest him; the officer was also personally aware of the incident and that the man was a named suspect.

Given that the evidence indicated that a number of Lancashire Constabulary officers missed important information on the log and also omitted to contemporaneously record important information about actions and decisions, we recommended that the force should share the learnings highlighted by our investigation. We completed our investigation in May 2019.

After reviewing our report Lancashire Constabulary agreed that all three officers serving with the force would receive management action. The force also advised that learning from this case would be shared with operational staff immediately, and later included in a force-wide learning article to be circulated to all staff.

Greater Manchester Police confirmed that the other officer had received management action by way of ‘words of advice’.