Police casework recordkeeping in England and Wales: an archival denial of evidence

Although policing is a public service, police records are not public records nor can one of the most prominent work product of police forces activities—case files—be easily found in public record offices or institutional archive services. Little research has been undertaken on what documents police casework (evidence to the evidence). The whole record of police investigation encompasses textual and artefactual material, making them complex documents worth exploring under the archival lens. This article establishes a landscape of police forces' archival practice in England and Wales, through analysis of grey literature formalizing national recommendations on police IRM, especially archiving in the public interest. The study also includes a survey of current practice of what police forces loosely call 'archiving,' through a questionnaire (sent under FOI requests) to all 43 forces in England and Wales. Findings showed that there was little to no awareness of inter/national archival practice standards, in official discourse and in current practice, which correlates with little to no practical archiving of police case files in the public interest. These findings suggest that the absence of actualized police casework archives may result in an archival silence.