Police Complaints Authority

The Police Complaints Authority was set up in April 1985 as an independent public body responsible for overseeing complaints against police officers in England and Wales. It was to be replaced on 1 April 2004 by the Independent Police Complaints Commission, with greater independence (it is said) and increased powers.

When I was attacked by my next-door neighbour, an ex-policeman, in March 2002, and the police sergeant who attended the incident refused to allow me to sign a statement, I contacted the PCA for advice. A short exchange of emails with Richard M. Offer ensued, with prompt and helpful advice, and I was able to make a formal statement about the assault in the course of filing a complaint through the PCA.

Judging by my own experience, the PCA's relations with members of the public were exemplary. What happened subsequently, however, was very unsatisfactory.

The PCA sent my complaint to Sussex Police, as a result of which I was visited by an acting police inspector, PI Barrasford, who only asked me if I wanted the sergeant punished. He declined to look at a box-full of unwanted correspondence which was part of the harassment to which I had been subjected for three years. He did not tell me that the police would not be altering the lies which they had recorded about me, that I had been involved in an "altercation". Though I had been complaining about criminal behaviour by my next-door neighbour since 1999, the police had accepted his lies and retained a false record of the attack on me for doing what a judge had given me permission to do.

So the intervention of the PCA provided no more than a token response from Sussex Police, which was perhaps a result of the Police Complaints Authority having too little authority, a state of affairs which led to the PCA being replaced by the IPCC.