§ Mr. Meacherasked the Attorney-General what has been the number of complaints made against the police by persons alleging assault, for each month of this year; for each month's figures, how many of these led to prosecutions by the Director of Public Prosecutions; what percentage this was in each case; how many of the prosecutions led to convictions; and what percentage this was in each case.
§ The Attorney-General[pursuant to his reply, 24 November 1980]: I am now able to give some of the information requested by the hon. Member. The annexed table shows monthly figures for new files opened by the director concerning complaints of assault against police officers. A file may, however, contain complaints by more than one person against more than one officer if they are all the subject of the same police report.
Complete figures are not yet available for the number of prosecutions initiated as a result of the files received in any one month as only completed prosecutions are recorded, and there are no figures for pending or uncompleted proceedings.
Consequently it is too soon to give a percentage of the number of cases received over the last few months which have been prosecuted. However, it is possible to give the number and percentage of prosecutions which ended in convictions, and this is included in the table.
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Month Number of complaints assault (files opened) Number of completed prosecutions recorded to date Number of convictions Percentage of convictions per prosecutions March 205 2 1 50 April 180 0 — — May 178 1 0 1 June 203 1 0 0 July 209 2 2 100 August 177 0 — — September 180 0 — — October 209 0 — — November 187 0 — — 2,176 9 5 55.5