In November 2022 the Suzy Lamplugh Trust launched a super-complaint against the police finding systemic issues in the response to stalking across England and Wales.
The super-complaint, a measure used to highlight wider problems or trends in policing, was brought 10 years on from a change to the law that made stalking a specific offence.
The complaint identified four areas of concern.
1. The misidentification of stalking
2. Flawed investigations and NFA (No Further Action) decisions
3. The failure to offer or refusal to apply for a Stalking Protection Order
4. The lack of response by police following breaches of protective orders (including Stalking Protection Orders, Non-Molestation Orders, Restraining Orders, bail conditions or other)
The super complaint has been subject to an investigation with the results due later this year.
Last week, Claire Waxman who has had her own personal experience of stalking, having been victim of a sustained stalking campaign for 20 years, was appointed as the Victim’s Commissioner by the Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime (MOPAC), published a review on the Metropolitan Police’s response to stalking titled, The London Stalking Review.
It is fair to say the publication of this report was something of a surprise to those responsible for investigating the super complaint, which demonstrates one of the issues, a lack of joined up thinking.
Stalking is a criminal offence in the UK, albeit the legislation is recognised as being confusing, poorly understood and badly administered.
The legislation was introduced in 1997 and can be found in sections 2, 2A, 4 and 4A of the Protection from Harassment Act 1997. Despite this, there is no legal definition of stalking. There are in simple terms three offences contained within the legislation, harassment, section 2a stalking and section 4a stalking, with additional aggravating factors contained within separate legislation.
This is the starting point for the problem, in that police officers are often confused about the differences between each offence, with offences being mis identified and often serious offences being treated as lesser offences. This is compounded by the UK prosecution authority, the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) agreeing plea bargaining and reducing charged for a guilty plea. This has a hugely negative impact of the victim, as well as causing accuracy issues when conducting due diligence and research on perpetrators.
I can speak with some significant experience of having had responsibility for stalking investigations whilst a Metropolitan Police officer, and more recently, investigating and acting as an advocate for private clients.
An interesting fact identified by the Suzy Lamplugh Trust is that only 1 in 50 victims who reported stalking to police resulted in a conviction. This is dramatically improved when an advocate supports the victim, with convictions rising to 1 in 4 cases. However, policing is still reluctant to engage with advocates, a fact I can evidence with a recent case in which despite serving the officer in charge of the investigation with a legal letter signed by the victim asking that I be involved, the Detective Sergeant refused to engage with me having conducted what they called a ‘risk assessment’. This decision caused greater anxiety in the victim who was concerned the police were not respecting her decisions.
It is no surprise to me that the London Stalking Review identified that as many as 45% of victims withdraw their complaint, with those who have experienced the more serious offences twice as likely to withdraw.
A further cause of increased anxiety for victims is the way police respond to their complaint. Imagine, if you can, that you are the victim of a stalker. To provide some context, remember that stalking behaviour is explained by the word FOUR, fixated, obsessive, unwanted and repetitive behaviour. It very often causes paranoia and hypervigilance.
You then involve the police, who eventually inform you that an officer will attend and report the complaint. But they don’t tell you what the officer’s name is, what they look like, or whether they are male or female. To put this in context, Uber provide more information about the driver you’ve booked than the Police do, when tasking an officer to help a victim. Let’s assume they do turn up and report the offence, there is a good chance that your investigation will be investigated by a Police Constable, rather than a Detective, and that Constable may change as the original officer is now off duty for a week. That new officer isn’t known to you, and the report hasn’t been confirmed as a stalking investigation yet. Your contact with the officer investigating is at best sporadic and no risk assessment appears to have been done, as no one mentions anything. You, as the victim, don’t know who to contact and don’t want to be seen as a pain by consistently calling 101, the non-emergency number. When the police do call, it will be on a restricted number, which mindful that is how the stalker also contacts you, causes your stomach to drop whenever the phone rings, and you are understandably reluctant to answer.
Is it any wonder so few victims pursue with their complaint?
A further surprise is that the London Stalking Review recommended that police use the outdated S-DASH risk assessment. The S-DASH is a risk assessment tool that has been shown to have no validity at all. Even the College of Policing acknowledges that “The DASH model has not been subject to systematic empirical evaluation since its implementation.”
Having shared this with several of the world’s stalking experts, they were all surprised that the police were being advised to continue to use this method and goes someway to understand why and how the police often mismanage the risks faced by stalking victims. For reasons only known to the College of Policing, they regularly refer to the excellent and universally highly regarded and validated Stalking Risk Profile, (SRP) which includes the Screening Assessment for Stalking and Assessment (SASH), and yet fail to recommend its use to UK Policing. I will admit being biased as I have had completed the SRP training (which is excellent) and use it when assessing a stalking case.
Another significant issue identified by the London Stalking Review is that the ‘specialist Stalking Threat Assessment Centres (STAC) can only review cases that have been identified as a S.4a case.
A S.4a case is defined as one in which there is sufficient evidence that the victim has experienced fear of violence or serious distress or substantial adverse effect on their usual day-to-day activities.
This is clearly a subjective view and one that I believe those involved in the criminal justice system get wrong. The reason I know they get this wrong, is because I used to get it wrong too. I recall when working in Parliament looking at communication offences that required what was legally termed ‘grossly offensive’ material. What became apparent was that the threshold for ‘grossly offensive’ was very different to those of us from the criminal justice system than the to the public. In essence, the public were telling us that they were grossly offended, and we (the criminal justice system) were telling them they weren’t. When you are immersed in crime and hostility for years, your threshold for what is offensive and harmful rises.
I now see this same problem occurring in defining stalking offences. Victims are experiencing fear of violence or serious distress or substantial adverse effect on their usual day-to-day activities, but the police are telling them (according to their subjective view) that they are not. Therefore, stalkers are not being properly investigated, specialists are not being engaged and the wrong charges are being presented, and perpetrators are being convicted of lower offences and not being properly sentenced.
As a side note, I have employed global experts in stalking who have assessed the behaviour to be stalking, only for inexperienced police officers, supported by the STAC unit, to decide that it wasn’t stalking and refuse to classify the crime as anything but harassment.
When you spend time with victims of stalking, it is not unusual for them to play down the impact they experience. They can do this for several reasons such as because they don’t want to be seen as ‘weak’ or vulnerable, because they don’t want the perpetrator to get into trouble, or because they don’t want to lose their jobs, being just three examples.
It is critical that police offices take time to truly understand the impact the stalking has had on a victim and to ensure that it is evidenced in a statement, or a separate victim impact statement.
The super complaint was submitted in 2022, and sadly some 2 years later, very little has changed. The police continue to let down victims of stalking, partly due a lack of training, partly due to a lack of understanding and partly because the 43 Home Office police forces in England and Wales plus those in Scotland and Northern Ireland fail to agree on national standards, deliver a consistent service and treat stalking as the extremely serious offence that it is.
