I've updated my analysis of charge rates for rapes recorded in successive financial years in England and Wales, incorporating the most recent data (published 23 July). Charge rates continue to improve.

I'm blown away by the camera on this really quite modest phone.

The Review may want to revisit an issue discussed in the 2015 Sheila Drew-Smith review of the governance of the then-IPCC, namely whether the IOPC should have a requirement to work to secure the trust & confidence of police officers as well as the wider public. www.gov.uk/government/p...

"sentencing in England and Wales is today 54% more punitive than in 2005", having taken account of the offence mix (@jpinasanchez.eurosky.social) www.sentencingacademy.org.uk/wp-content/u...

A couple of examples

The latest IOPC 'Deaths during or following police contact' report has been published for 2025/26 (covers England and Wales). Always worth a close reading, esp Ch5 on deaths in or following police custody. Mainly drug/alcohol/MH involved cases, some with underlying health issues.

Data from assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/6a5e57... via www.gov.uk/government/s... Quite a lot of notes/caveats.

Now offences involving knives or sharp instruments. The similarity of the trends in the Met and West Midlands seem notable.

If you missed it, the Home Office recently published revised Most Similar Force groupings gov.uk/government/p... These are more properly thought of as most similar force areas, as they take no account of resources etc. The Met (London) is not very much like anywhere else.

Note the coverage of these data, and the comparability of MPS data pre/post Q1 2024/25, due to an IT system change in Feb 2024 (with implications for flagging crimes as involving firearms).

Some notable consistencies between the MPS and Merseyside in particular, apart from the surge in firearms offences in Merseyside that peaked in the year to Q2 2022/23 (coinciding with when 9-yr-old Olivia Pratt-Korbel was murdered).

I've been having a rummage through the latest police recorded crime data published by the Home Office on Thursday. I thought this was interesting - looking at how trends in offences involving firearms compare between the MPS and comparator forces.

The London Policing Ethics Panel has published a new report on AI in the Metropolitan Police. www.policingethicspanel.london/uploads/4/4/...

Revisiting an old blog on 'making sense of "senseless" youth violence' www.police-foundation.org.uk/2015/12/maki...

"Afterwards, gang members bragged about the murder in drill rap videos, jurors heard." Were those lyrics art or evidence? BBC News - Drill rappers jailed over gang row teen murder www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

'effectively create the NPS as policing’s staff college' - noting that CoP will be absorbed into the NPS - struck me as odd on a first read, including for the military analogy.

It also seems odd that direct entry is back when the service made it very clear that, having tried it before, it didn't want it. One DE Supt, for example, passed the Strategic Command Course with flying colours but no-one would appoint them as an ACC and they ended up leaving.

Reading the new Police Leadership Commission report, published by the College of Policing, and I can't help reflecting on the failed experiment with professionalisation that was supposed to help policing meet the challenges of an increasingly complex world.

Some further details that highlight some of the reasons why chief officers face a heightened risk of being accused of misconduct and such accusations being formalised

Among the findings, we said this in our 2015 study of chief officer misconduct

From the Police Leadership Commission: how many of the 78 involved a case to answer, and of those in how many were the allegations upheld?

Looks pretty rundown on Google maps

I say that as one of the authors of a College of Policing-commissioned study of chief officer misconduct that was published in 2015, and which arose in no small part from concerns about the number of chief officers being investigated. eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/12...

The quotes are from Lord Blunkett, talking about a theme from his review of police leadership. My initial thought is this is exactly where policing was at the time the College of Policing was established and the Code of Ethics was first drafted.

The London Policing Board is at 1000. The Commissioner's report includes this chart showing that the number of police officers per capita in London is now lower than at any point since at least 1981 - and heading even lower.

As an aside, the report on mental health homicides produced for the Nottingham Inquiry was unable to examine ethnicity due to data gaps cdn.websitebuilder.service.justice.gov.uk/uploads/site...

As ever, the question that needs to be asked is 'disproportionate compared to what?' Do Black people experience psychotic disorders at a higher rate than White? If they do, how does the rate at which they are sectioned compare, relative to the incidence of psychosis?

David Lammy: "I actually think we've moved on from that period of institutional racism... I don't personally recognise [IR] as the appropriate description today" x.com/i/status/206...