Mr. Drew Harris:

There was, undoubtedly, a problem in the feedback loop, a lack of awareness of the system that had been put in place and an absence of knowledge of exactly what had happened with the cases. When they were deemed not to be suitable, they were referred back to the detecting member and that is when the breakdown occurred. They then had responsibility to lift them, but, undoubtedly, some of them were lost, perhaps because of workload. Some were lost because of a lack of knowledge. At the same time, 96% were dealt with properly. Of the 55,000-odd that were returned for investigation, a great proportion of them were dealt with properly. There are two elements, the first of which relates to systems, training, briefing or whatever it might be. Second, the officers were asked to do something that was a basic or elementary skill for any member - to prepare a file and submit it for consideration of a prosecution - but that did not happen. It is a big step to consider that there are disciplinary issues for 3,400 members, but, in the end, it ultimately kept coming back to that. We got this right in so many cases that one could not say it was about the system.