Cleveland Police had highest rate of complaints across England and Wales, IOPC reveals
By Saghir Hussain ·
Cleveland Police top the complaint tables again. The IOPC's latest data puts the force at the highest rate of complaints per 1,000 officers across England and Wales. Not a surprise. Not an anomaly. A pattern.
The technology gap nobody talks about
I've said it before and I'll say it again: AI is the most important technology of our lifetime. But in British policing, we're deploying it faster than we're building the guardrails. Cleveland isn't an outlier — it's the canary.
Forces are rolling out facial recognition, predictive analytics, automated triage for 999 calls. Some of it works. Some of it doesn't. But the oversight framework hasn't caught up with the procurement cycle. The IOPC investigates after things go wrong. Who's checking the algorithm before it goes live?
A sergeant in Middlesbrough told me last month: "We're buying kit we don't understand, from vendors who won't show us the code, to solve problems we haven't properly defined." That's not innovation. That's negligence with a marketing budget.
Complaints are data — if you bother to read them
The IOPC recorded 1,247 complaints against Cleveland Police in the last reporting year. That's not noise. That's signal. Every complaint is a data point about where trust fractures. But forces treat complaints as HR problems, not intelligence assets.
Run the numbers properly. Map complaint types against deployment of new tools. Correlate stop-and-search spikes with facial recognition watchlist hits. Cross-reference use-of-force reports with predictive policing heatmaps. The pattern would tell you where the safeguards are failing — before the headlines do.
Instead, we get annual reports filed in drawers and PCCs issuing statements about "lessons learned." Lessons aren't learned. They're repeated.
The small business test
Here's the test I apply: would a small business in Stockton or Hartlepool accept this error rate from a supplier? If your payment processor had Cleveland's complaint ratio, you'd switch providers by lunch. If your cloud host had this many unresolved incidents, you'd be on the phone to lawyers.
But you can't switch police forces. The woman running a corner shop on Linthorpe Road doesn't have a procurement team. She has a 999 number and a hope that someone competent answers.
AI could fix this. Properly audited, transparently governed, independently tested AI could flag biased officers, predict misconduct patterns, route complaints to investigators who actually investigate. The technology exists. The political will doesn't.
So we'll get another IOPC report next year. Cleveland will likely top the table again. And the vendors will keep selling "solutions" to forces that can't evaluate them.
The question isn't whether AI belongs in policing. It's whether we're grown-up enough to govern it. Right now, the evidence says we're not.
What's your force's complaint rate — and do you know what tools they're running?