Q4 2022: Average Police Report Turnaround Times

The NetWatch police report turnaround times for Q4:2022 are now available for download at the link below.

Given that we request many thousands more police reports and other pieces of police evidence than any other organisation we are well placed to collate and report on turnaround data. When we began this tracking project in 2021 we decided to start off by just looking at the average turnaround times on standard crime and collision police report requests and report this by force.

We knew from the off that this wasn’t the most reliable statistic to use, simply because one long running investigation could hugely skew the average for a force. To remedy this to some extent we quickly added the ‘median turnaround time’ statistic.

The current data shows the usual fluctuations with some forces averaging slightly longer response times, and others making improvements. Most notably Sussex Police have seen an improvement from averaging a turnaround time of 88 days in Q3 to 52 days in Q4 of 2022. The median data indicates that this is a genuine ‘catching up’ on outstanding requests given it shifts from 104 days in Q3 down to 29 in Q4. As such it appears that the fulfilment team at Sussex has done a great job in clearing their caseload.

More forces have also moved to digitised processes over recent months, and with both Surrey and Sussex digitising their processes since our last report, we would expect this to positively impact their turnaround times. Particularly with ongoing postal strikes which inevitably have an impact on response times for forces that rely on the postal service to issue reports and receive forms.

We are looking at changing our metrics slightly for stats from 2024, and whilst we will still use averages we will also try to dive a little deeper to look at outliers, and total fulfilments to provide a more accurate picture.

In the meantime please use the download request button below to receive a copy of the turnaround statistics by force.