CHAPTER 9: LAW ENFORCEMENT
a proposed course of action. The staff were described as knowledgeable and
increasingly technically capable, and IOCCO’s recommendations as sensible.
(b)
Gloucestershire Police reported to us that in the previous year they had had
three visits from IOCCO of five, five and four days respectively.
(c)
The NCA spoke highly of IOCCO, as did the LGA.
9.102. A number of voices however drew my attention to problems caused by the supervision
of two Commissioners’ offices: IOCCO for RIPA Part I and the OSC for RIPA Part II.
In particular:
(a)
The NCA, the LGA and IOCCO all made the point that the distinct
responsibilities of the two offices meant that they lacked what was described
as “total oversight of the proportionality of the intrusion”. It may be hard, in
other words, to judge whether a RIPA Part I request is proportionate (in the
sense of being the less restrictive alternative), without detailed background
knowledge of the directed and intrusive surveillance, CHIS etc. which may have
been devoted to the same operation and which falls under the jurisdiction of a
different Commissioner.
(b)
I was also told, again by both the NCA and the LGA, that there are differences
of approach between the different Commissioners’ offices. In particular,
different approaches are said to have been taken to the relative intrusiveness
of different methods of surveillance, and to the identification of appropriate DPs
in organisations such as local authorities in which there are no clear-cut ranks
as in the police. It was not always clear whether such discrepancies were
attributable to individual inspectors or to the policies of the two offices more
generally.
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