Police records: History and accountability by Angie Sutton-Vane
Angie Sutton-Vane is a Visiting Fellow at the Open University’s Centre for the History of Crime, Policing and Justice, she writes here about police records, their history and issues of accountability:
My interest in police records began whilst working as the curator of a police force museum. The small and closed facility held a diverse collection including a large archive of general orders, station ledgers, personnel registers and some more challenging files relating to the investigation of serious crimes such as murder. 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.
West Midlands Police - Hillsborough material search; image courtesy of West Midlands Police
The Open University History Department (where I’m now a visiting fellow) 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 to 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) [The Right Reverend James Jones, KBE: ‘The patronising disposition of unaccountable power:’ A report to ensure the pain and suffering of the Hillsborough families is not repeated, 2017, p.84]. Unlike Scotland, who not only revised their equivalent Public Records Act in 2011, but included Police Scotland in the new 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.
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 enquiries. 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.
*Regional police force records are not included in the Public Records Acts of 1958 and 1967. Metropolitan Police Service records lost their status as a Public Records Body in 2012 when the police authority function was transferred to the Mayor's Office for Policing and Crime (MOPAC).
Thumbnail image by Bruno Martins on Unsplash
Dr Angie Sutton-Vane
Angie comes from a museums and gallery background having worked at the National Galleries of Scotland, the National Maritime Museum, Heriot Watt University Collections and Archives and her last curatorial role was for a police force museum. Having fallen through the ‘educational net’ first time around she’s passionate about life-long learning and whilst working has completed a BSc in Conservation and Restoration, an AHRC-funded MRes in Material Culture and, most recently, an AHRC-funded PhD in History. Her current research explores the materiality and ethics of the archive, the preservation of police records and the writing of policing history, and the transformation, interpretation and display of objects gathered during criminal investigations. She divides her time between academic research as a visiting fellow in the Centre for the History of Crime, Policing and Justice at the Open University, freelance work and, in a voluntary capacity, as Chair of the Crime and Punishment Collections Network.
Follow her on Twitter at: @asuttonvane