On 20 April 2023, the Independent Police Conduct Authority published ‘The Review: Policing of the Protest and Occupation at Parliament 2022’. In that report we outlined that we received 1,905 complaints relating to the protest. Of those we determined that 19 complaints required either a specific investigation or further enquiries to determine what further action should be taken. These complaints were about specific incidents where the issues raised were unlikely to be sufficiently addressed during our broader investigation, and which appeared to warrant further examination by the Authority.
We confirmed we would report the outcome to each complainant at the conclusion of each of the investigations and would provide a summary of our findings on these matters on our website in due course. We have now completed all these investigations and can provide a summary of our findings.
We received two further complaints following the publication of our general report, both concerning an officer’s use of force on a person’s head during arrest. We had already been investigating the actions of this officer as part of a complaint from another man arrested in a similar manner.
This means we have dealt with 21 matters and have today released our report setting out a summary of the findings. There are 17 investigations set out as two of the investigations each covered three similar incidents.
There were six matters we considered about events on 10 February, which was the day Police first tried to clear Parliament grounds. All of these were about Police use of force on protesters. In three of the six matters we found the Police use of force was justified, in two investigations that the use of force was excessive and in one case could not make a finding.
We investigated three incidents which occurred between 21-23 February 2022. Two cases concerned uses of force on people and in both cases we found the force used was excessive. The third case concerned Police actions concerning a family driving a van and we found those actions were reasonable (including smashing one of the van’s windows).
There were 10 complaints about events on 2 March, which was the day Police undertook a large-scale operation involving about 600 Police officers to clear protesters, vehicles, and structures from the protest site.
Eight of these were about Police use of force on protesters. In five of the eight cases we found the Police use of force was justified, in two cases that the use of force was excessive and in one case could not make a finding. One case related to the impoundment of and damage to a vehicle, and the other case concerned the arrest of a young person who was heading home and not involved in events.