Powers
The statutory powers and responsibilities of the Commission are set out by the Police Reform Act 2002, and it came into existence on 1 April 2004, replacing the Police Complaints Authority. It is a Non-Departmental Public Body (NDPB), funded by the Home Office, but by law entirely independent of the police, interest groups and political parties and whose decisions on cases are free from government involvement.
Since 1 April 2004 the IPCC has used its powers to begin 353 independent and 759 managed investigations (as of 31 March 2009) into the most serious complaints against the police. These included deaths in police custody, shootings and fatal traffic incidents.
It also handles more than 4,500 appeals a year from members of the public about the way their complaint was dealt with by the local force, or its outcomes.
Read more about this topic: Independent Police Complaints Commission
Famous quotes containing the word powers:
“Dear to us are those who love us, the swift moments we spend with them are a compensation for a great deal of misery; they enlarge our life;Mbut dearer are those who reject us as unworthy, for they add another life: they build a heaven before us, whereof we had not dreamed, and thereby supply to us new powers out of the recesses of the spirit, and urge us to new and unattempted performances.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
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—John Cheever (1912–1982)
“The Powers whose name and shape no living creature knows
Have pulled the Immortal Rose;
And though the Seven Lights bowed in their dance and wept,
The Polar Dragon slept,
His heavy rings uncoiled from glimmering deep to deep....”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)