Police records, history and accountability

This is my blog on the Campaign for Records website which was published in May 2022

I’m not an archivist — my background is working with museum collections — but my interest was piqued when it dawned on me that most of this archive had come into the museum via informal means — and by informal I mean that it had not been transferred from the force’s records management system. Instead, they were private or individual donations from retired police officers, the relatives of officers who had since died or as the result of station closures and clear-outs when individual officers had taken an unofficial decision not to throw papers onto a skip. As a closed museum records were not accessible for research and the types of documents being preserved and the reasons for their preservation were extraordinarily haphazard. A number of discussions with the force’s records management department failed to change this; they – as with most police forces – adhered to guidance set out in the Management of Police Information (MoPI) which skimmed over the complex issue of archiving.

My time as the curator of this museum inspired my subsequent PhD thesis which employed the murder file as an exemplar to explore the often strange life cycles of regional police force records and the crucial roles of culture and memory (rather than any protocols) in determining what was eventually preserved. As I wrote I often stumbled down research rabbit holes: some I quickly climbed out of and skirted around, but one I was drawn into and continue to return to is the ongoing argument for making police records more accessible — not only for the growing discipline of policing history, but for the increasingly important dual requirements of accountability and transparency. Like government departments, police forces are publicly-funded, highly public facing organisations and upholders of the law who need to be able to clearly demonstrate principles such as integrity, accountability, openness and honesty — principles laid down in The seven principles of public life (or the Nolan principles). It’s difficult to understand how this can be achieved without access to records.

The Open University History Department (where I’m now a visiting fellow and consultant) has, for a number of years, been interested in the preservation of policing records. Part of the work of their Centre for the history of crime, policing and justice has been to participate in initiatives to press for the inclusion of police forces in the Public Records Act, a cause which was catapulted to the fore in the aftermath of the Hillsborough stadium disaster of 1989. Both the Report of the Hillsborough Independent Panel and the later report by Bishop James Jones recommended either inclusion of police records in the Public Records Act, or some other ‘appropriate solution,’ to ensure greater consistency and regulation around what police records were selected for preservation (and not the haphazard situation I had encountered).

Unlike Scotland, who not only revised their equivalent Public Records Act in 2011, but included Police Scotland in the new Act, or the Police Service of Northern Ireland who were included in the Northern Ireland version of the Public Records Act, in England and Wales there seems to be little appetite for such a move and it is increasingly unlikely that police records will become public records. Generally Hillsborough, as with many high profile disasters, has been the catalyst for campaigns towards greater accountability and this has included the drafting of the Public Authority (Accountability) Bill sponsored in 2017 by Andy Burnham — a Bill which has, as yet, to be passed by the current government (2022).

Conversely, returning to Bishop James Jones’ alternative ‘appropriate solution,’ positive moves have been made in drafting a new statutory code to replace MoPI which contains significantly more guidance (and therefore control) around the long-term preservation of police records. In terms of my personal research, I’d be interested to know how this will affect the future collection of the large tranches of records I identified above as informal deposits — I suspect they will dry up completely. Through collaborative research at the Open University, mapping of the current levels and status of police records held by county and city record offices has begun. Gathering such baseline data will enable us to assess whether the code will effectively increase the archiving of police records and the ability to access those records for any type of research — whether historical, journalistic, for policy implementation or public inquiries. Such information will contribute to wider and current debates around accountability, openness and integrity of all public-facing, publicly funded bodies and the symbiosis between this and the preservation of, and access to, records.

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