The recent case of Ewing v Cardiff and Newport Crown Court [2016] EWHC 183 (Admin) relating to restrictions on members of the public taking notes in criminal hearings in the Crown Court will have application in relation to similar restrictions in police misconduct hearings. The starting position is that note taking will be permitted – and a chair should not require observers to ask for permission before making any.
Public hearings in police misconduct hearings are new. As a result, panel chairs are just working their way around what is required and when to exclude the public. The bar for excluding members of the public and not naming officers is very high – as made clear by Solicitors Regulation Authority v Spector [2016] EWHC 37 (Admin). It concerns solicitors but the principles are transferable (with some key caveats, which I have not gone into here). The result is that there will be a strong presumption that police misconduct hearings be heard in public, including permitting all members of the public and the naming of all persons involved. A panel chair does have a power to restrict the public elements of a hearing but only in exceptional circumstances.
A review of the reported legal decisions 2014 relating to policing demonstrates that many of the old risk areas for litigation continued to trouble chief police officers, and increasingly Police and Crime Commissioners (PCCs). While it is difficult for a force to protect itself from litigation following unpredictable major events, such as the London riots, there are particular aspects of policing where forces continue to face repeated litigation, or trends suggest that claims are likely to increase in the future.
The public scrutiny of police activity, and the rights of individual members of the public to bring action when their rights are infringed, are truly fundamental features of open democracy. A certain amount of civil litigation is probably an inevitable feature of modern policing. However, Chief Officers and PCCs ought to be examining carefully whether there are aspects of their police operations that are generating excessive civil claims. Reducing the incidence of such claims ought to improve the standards of policing as well as reducing the annual drain on policing budgets caused by legal claims and their associated costs.