Police Complaints Board

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The Police Complaints Board (PCB) was the British government organisation tasked with overseeing the system for handling complaints made against police forces in England and Wales from 1 June 1977 until it was replaced by the Police Complaints Authority on 29 April 1985.

Until its creation, complaints were handled directly by the police forces concerned, although the Home Secretary could refer a serious complaint to another police force for investigation. This mechanism had been set out in Section 49 of the Police Act 1964. The investigating force would forward a report to the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP), who could decide to prosecute the offending policemen. The Police Complaints Board was created because it was felt that this process was not sufficiently independent, especially following corruption scandals involving the Metropolitan Police in the mid 1970s.

The new board was established by Section 1 of the Police Act 1976, and could scrutinise the report and satisfy itself that justice had been done, or instruct the Chief Constable of the force against whom the complaint had been made to take disciplinary proceedings against the offending police officers. However this caused resentment within the police community since it exposed policemen who had been exonerated by the DPP to double jeopardy. The 1981 Brixton riots, and the Scarman report on it which investigated, amongst other things, allegations of racism against the police led to further pressure to reform the PCB.

The result was that the board was abolished and replaced by the Police Complaints Authority in the Police and Criminal Evidence Act (PACE) of 1984. A significant change was that the PCA was given extra powers allowing it to supervise police investigations into complaints, which has been taken further in its successor, the Independent Police Complaints Commission which replaced it on 1 April 2004 and which has the ability to carry out its own independent investigations.

The PCB did not cover Northern Ireland, which was the responsibility of a separate body, the Police Complaints Board for Northern Ireland also set up under the Police Act 1976. Nor did it cover Scotland, which retained the mechanism set up by the Police (Scotland) Act 1967.