CAPO officers study how UK complaint handling system works
To study how the complaint handling system in the UK works and to identify the good practices that Complaints Against Police Office (CAPO) may make reference to, Superintendent (SP) Wong Chui-hoi and Chief Inspector (CIP) Kwan Chung-yin from CAPO visited Greater Manchester Police (GMP), London Metropolitan Police (MET) and the UK Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC), which oversees the police complaints system for England and Wales, from October 2 to 5.
"CAPO continuously enhances and streamlines the complaint handling mechanism to meet public, as well as Force members', expectations. The Hong Kong and UK systems share striking similarity but at the same time have distinctive differences. The visit gave us a great opportunity to gain an insight from our UK counterparts who, just like CAPO, have also gone through substantial changes and challenges in the past few years," said SP Wong.
During their visit, SP Wong and CIP Kwan had in-depth discussions on initiatives for complaint handling and prevention with officers of the Professional Standard Departments of GMP and MET. They also visited a local police division in Greater Manchester to find out the views and sentiments of frontline officers on complaints handling.
In London, SP Wong and CIP Kwan met the Deputy Chair of the UK IPCC Ms Deborah Glass to learn more about the system from IPCC's perspective. During the meeting with different stakeholders, they introduced the police complaint handling mechanism in Hong Kong.
Overall, the visit enabled the CAPO officers to not only bring home the good practices adopted by the two UK police forces such as enhancing mutual understanding with IPCC and complaints prevention for further study, but also reinforce the co-operation and understanding between CAPO and its UK counterparts.
SP
Wong presents a Force souvenir to Ms Glass