PSNI Change of Policy on Sharing Data with the Home Office

This month the PSNI announced a new approach to sharing information with the Home Office, a piece of work that was years in the making and that will hopefully make the experience of dealing with the PSNI, particularly as a victim of or a witness to crime, better for our migrant communities.

The new approach means a few things; PSNI officers are explicitly instructed not to ask an individual’s immigration status when they come into contact. In the past, officers were encouraged by policy and by the Home Office to contact them to check on the immigration status of anyone they contacted. Not only was that an obvious barrier to coming forward to police as a victim or as a witness, but it also had an overall chilling effect; it communicated both to migrants and to people of colour in Northern Ireland – whether or not they are migrants – that instead of being seen as an individual they are seen first as and foremost as a problem. That approach smacked of institutional racism and, announcing the new approach, the Deputy Chief Constable did not shy away from using that term.

The main significance of this change in approach, however, is that it represents a recognition of the problems with how things used to be done and the damage done to relations between minoritised communities and the PSNI. While the previous policy was operational tens of thousands of referrals were made to the Home Office, even when the individuals referred were victims of crimes like domestic abuse and racially motivated hate crimes. The damage that the previous policy did cannot be overstated, and while a lot of work remains to be done to restore any kind of faith in the PSNI, the fact that they have taken it seriously is an important step. They have even gone so far as to block Home Office numbers from PSNI phones to ensure that the training, service instructions and direct emails to officers cannot fail to be embedded.

This work has been painstaking, and WRDA is proud to have been part of a handful of organisations in the community sector who worked closely with the PSNI over a period of nearly three years in changing their systems. All of this stemmed from alerts raised by migrant women’s organisations in Britain and locally it was spurred by the work of investigative journalist Luke Butterly at The Detail, and you can read his article on the change here: https://www.thedetail.tv/articles/psni-data-sharing-migrant-victims-crime-institutional-racism