Mr. Peter Whelan:

We said earlier that the Grant Thornton review gave us a model to estimate numbers. It looked at the Independent Office for Police Conduct, IOPC,which is our sister agency in the UK. It also looked at Northern Ireland and Scotland and found that each investigator might have between two and five cases. Grant Thornton came up with a figure of ten cases per investigator. At the moment, we have 40 investigating officers, IOs, and assisting investigating officers, AIOs, so at any one time we can cope with maybe 400 investigations. That does not take into account many other factors, for example, where we have a major investigation coming in. GSOC has between 900 and 1,200 cases on hand at any one time, so would need significantly more than the 40 staff.

On cases of suspensions, GSOC does two types of investigation. One is a disciplinary investigation, while the other is a criminal investigation. It is probably fair to say, although this is not definite information, that our criminal investigations attract more suspensions than disciplinary investigations. Again, we do not have full access to that information.