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Senior UK correspondent
Shared knowledge unit
BBCThousands of felony instances – together with one of the maximum severe violent and sexual offences – are collapsing once a year as a result of misplaced, broken or lacking proof, the BBC has discovered.
More than 30,000 prosecutions in England and Wales collapsed between October 2020 and September 2024, knowledge from the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) finds.
They come with 70 homicides and greater than 550 sexual offences.
Police chiefs say no longer all of the instances relate to misplaced proof and the figures come with scenarios the place officials won’t have the ability to to find knowledgeable witness or get a scientific remark.
However, it follows a chain of damning stories about how police forces are storing proof.
A Home Office spokesperson stated: “We always expect forces to adhere to the National Police Chiefs’ Council’s (NPCC) guidance on storage and retention of evidence.”
A number one criminologist says the rise was once in large part “a resourcing issue” caused via cuts to police forces all over the 2010s.
And ex-police officials advised the BBC it was once unsurprising and the volume of proof they maintain is “overwhelming”.
When police forces construct instances round defendants they hand a report to the CPS.
But when the CPS can’t continue to trial as a result of police should not have the vital proof had to protected a conviction – they document it of their knowledge as an “E72”.
The BBC, along the University of Leicester, controlled to acquire Freedom of Information (FOI) requests appearing the choice of E72s recorded between 2020 and 2024 at police forces in England and Wales.
They can come with:
- Physical proof – together with forensic proof – being misplaced, broken or infected all over garage
- Digital proof, corresponding to sufferer interview pictures or frame digital camera pictures, being misplaced
- Witness statements or pathology stories no longer being made to be had via police
- Key proof no longer accumulated from the crime scene
The figures received via the BBC don’t damage down why instances have collapsed.
However, the knowledge does recommend the choice of instances recorded as an E72 are expanding, with a better percentage of prosecutions failing to lead to a conviction as a result of misplaced or lacking proof every 12 months.
In 2020, a complete of 7,484 prosecutions collapsed as a result of misplaced, lacking or broken proof. In 2024, that had risen via 9%, to 8,180.
‘It can actually have an effect on any person’s psychological state’
When Kiera was once simply 9 years previous she gave an interview on digital camera to Lancashire Police describing the harrowing main points of the sexual abuse she have been subjected to over a number of years.
But a couple of months later, she says, cops advised her mom they’d misplaced the recording.
“It was really hard, because I sat there for hours and hours telling people what had happened to me and for that to be lost, I just thought like what’s the point in doing it again?” stated Kiera, now 19.
“They did want me to do it again, but I just couldn’t go through with it at the time.”
It wasn’t till 9 years later, when Kiera was once an grownup, that she felt robust sufficient to offer her proof once more.
In October 2024, her perpetrators had been jailed for nearly 30 years for raping and sexually assaulting seven youngsters, together with her.
“It can really affect someone’s mental state. It’s also not protecting other people because these people then don’t get convicted of crimes.”
A Lancashire Police spokesperson apologised for the misplaced interview disc in her case, and stated, since 2015, it had presented new processes to forestall equivalent problems going down once more.
Responding to the BBC’s findings, Katie Kempen, leader govt at unbiased charity Victim Support, stated: “Police forces must ensure crimes are thoroughly investigated and evidence is handled appropriately and sensitively.
“All victim-survivors deserve the chance to hunt justice.”
‘The amount of it is overwhelming’
Former police officers have told the BBC they are not surprised by the findings.
“It’s [evidence] chucked everywhere,” said one former officer.
“The quantity of it’s overwhelming… it is unsurprising it will get misplaced or broken,” another told the BBC.
Professor Carole McCartney, a criminologist and expert in evidence retention believes the loss of the dedicated Forensic Science Service (FSS) in 2012 is one of the reasons behind the growing proportion of cases affected by unavailable evidence.
Before 2012, all police forces could send exhibits that needed storing or analysing to the service, but the government-owned company was closed that year after making large losses.
Since then, police forces have had to make their own evidence storage arrangements and contract private providers for forensic services.
Prof McCartney said she had witnessed an officer pull out what he called a “field of horrors” from underneath a desk which contained various pieces of un-catalogued evidence including a plastic bag with a broken wine bottle in it and a car numberplate.
All Items held by the FSS from before 2012 were moved to a different facility – the National Forensics Archive just outside of Birmingham – that year, but that archive is for unsolved cases only and does not accept new items.
Exhibits within the archive had been a very powerful in overturning the convictions of each Andrew Malkinson and Peter Sullivan.
Its director Alison Fendley says that without a dedicated forensic service, police forces were currently suffering from a lack of resources and expertise at a local level.
“Police forces have were given a number of different issues to do – archiving isn’t their day activity and there is such a lot subject matter coming and going it will have to be tough to stay on best of,” she says.
Meanwhile, backlogs at courts, the growth in online crime and the increase in digital evidence such as body worn video are all adding to a growth in the amount of exhibits police have to keep.
The NPCC said police and the CPS worked together to ensure evidence was “accumulated and offered in a well timed approach, bringing offenders to justice and making sure sufferers are safeguarded”.
It said the data obtained by the BBC refers to all evidence that is either missing or unavailable when a defendant is going to trial after being charged.
And this could include situations where police cannot find an expert witness or may not be able to obtain a required medical statement.
PA MediaA number of recent reports have raised serious concerns about police storage of evidence.
In 2022, His Majesty’s inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire and Rescue Services (HMICFRS) discovered police forces had been “suffering to satisfy the calls for put on it via the virtual age” as a result of the fast growth in digital evidence.
The University of Leicester’s study into police retention of investigative materials, found three quarters of lawyers it surveyed had worked on a criminal conviction where evidence had been lost, destroyed or contaminated. Almost half claimed this had happened on multiple occasions.
And Baroness Casey’s 2023 evaluate into the tradition of the Metropolitan Police discovered officials having to cope with “over-stuffed, dilapidated or damaged refrigerators and freezers containing proof together with the rape kits of sufferers”.
It discovered an “overworked and green staff” lacked the “infrastructure and specialism” for dealing with sexual offences, which existed before a specialist unit was disbanded in 2019.
The BBC study found around one in 20 prosecutions by the Met had been dropped as a result of missing evidence between 2020 and 2024.
By comparison around one in 50 were dropped across England and Wales.
The Met said the number included situations where police could not find an expert witness or were not able to obtain a required medical statement and to suggest it was simply down to lost evidence was misleading.
It acknowledged that on “a unprecedented choice of events” evidence is misplaced, adding: “We proceed to make enhancements to our recording methods to minimise this chance.”
The NPCC stated: “When evidential problems happen in a case, the CPS will lift this with police for any motion deemed vital and we will be able to paintings in combination to verify those are resolved anywhere conceivable.”
The results of a consultation by the Law Commission, which proposed re-establishing a national forensic service and making the mishandling of evidence a criminal offence in some circumstances, are set to go before Parliament next week.
Additional reporting via Catherine Heuston and Claire Jones.
