Police review to call for red tape cuts

|PIC1|A review of police work being published on Thursday is expected to call for cuts in paperwork which could free up as many as 3,000 frontline officers.

The final report by former Royal Ulster Constabulary chief Ronnie Flanagan will also recommend police no longer complete a lengthy "stop and account" form for each time they stop someone in the street.

Police will still have to document every "stop and search" - a more invasive procedure - but should be given hand-held data devices allowing them to complete the forms electronically.

In an interim report last September, Flanagan said police had to deal with a "staggering" amount of paperwork.

He called for the bureaucracy around "stop and search" to be significantly reduced

Officers told him that government targets and policy initiatives requiring more criminal data were partly to blame for a rise in red tape.

Home Secretary Jacqui Smith said in November she was committed to implementing Flanagan's recommendations.

Conservative Leader David Cameron last week called for the "foot-long" stop and search form to be scrapped, saying it is a waste of police time.

The forms were introduced to monitor how police dealt with ethnic minorities after complaints they were unfairly targetted by police.