During the course of my career, I have successfully sued every single one of the 43 territorial Police Forces of England and Wales, plus the British Transport Police.
The publicly funded territorial forces, which between them comprise the vast majority of the UK’s approximately 171,000 Police Officers, are based on the geographical counties of England and Wales (e.g Merseyside, Kent, Greater Manchester, Norfolk), with some areas of wider amalgamation e.g South Wales Police. Each Police Officer who serves with a territorial force therefore has a natural and primary ‘base of operations’ but their policing powers are not geographically limited i.e an Officer of West Midlands Police can still exercise powers of arrest, search and entry in Northumbria if required.
Although each Force does try to confine its operations to its own county boundaries, and would generally request local Police to carry out the arrest of a suspect in another region, they are not obliged to do so and their powers and privileges do not ‘fall away’ when they cross the county line.
However, as well as the territorial forces, there also exist a wide variety of “Special Police Forces” whose officers are not full Crown Constables, answerable to the Home Office, but a different species of law enforcement officer, whose typical police uniforms belie the fact that their powers are geographically limited to a specific location or type of infrastructure and cannot generally be exercised outside the boundaries of the same. Such “Special Police Forces” include the following –
- British Transport Police (formerly, the Railway Police)
- Ministry of Defence Police
- Civil Nuclear Constabulary
- Ports Police (e.g the Port of Dover Police)
- Parks Police (e.g Kensington & Chelsea Parks Police)
- Cathedral Constables (e.g York Minster Police)
- Cambridge University Police (Clearly Cambridge students need closer control than any others!)
- Mersey Tunnels Police.
The Port of Dover Police, as with many other regional port forces, are funded by the owners of the Port and are maintained under powers originating from the Harbours, Docks and Piers Clauses Act 1847 which limits their jurisdiction to land actually owned by the Harbour Board, and extending in a one mile radius beyond.
An embarrassing situation therefore arose when, in 2011, the custody suite operated by Kent Police in Dover itself closed, meaning that any people arrested by the Port Police would need to be transported to the next nearest custody centre in Canterbury – as this would have meant going further than a mile from the Port, the arrest would have become unlawful once the boundary was passed. A temporary solution was put in place, whereby Kent Police had to come to the port to arrest and transport suspects, until the Marine Navigation Act 2013 was introduced, extending the jurisdiction of all regional Port Police to the Police area in which they were located (e.g Kent) but for the purposes of Port Policing matters only.
A recent example of this type of jurisdictional issue is provided by a case which I am currently fighting for one of my clients against Mersey Tunnels Police, who are responsible for the policing of the two road tunnels (Kingsway and Queensway) connecting Liverpool to the Wirral.
Mersey Tunnels Police derive their powers from Section 105 of the County of Merseyside Act 1980 and can only act in the capacity of an ordinary citizen when outside of their jurisdiction, which is defined as that land forming “the Tunnels, approaches or marshalling areas”. If an on- duty Mersey Tunnels officer comes across an arrestable offence when he is outside of that jurisdiction, he is required to notify the local territorial Force i.e Merseyside Police, who will allocate an officer to deal with the matter.
In the matter with which I am dealing, three officers from Mersey Tunnels Police handcuffed and purported to arrest my client for ‘causing a danger to public health’ by being out and about during one of the Covid lockdowns during 2020. The location of the arrest was not, however, in one of the Mersey Tunnels, or their approaches/ marshalling areas, but rather a public road bridge (consisting of vehicle carriageway and pedestrian pavement) which overlooked the tunnel entrance but did not directly lead to it i.e outside the geographical jurisdiction of the Tunnels Police.
The fact that Mersey Tunnels police chose to hassle, assault and arrest my client in such a location (when he was doing nothing more sinister than standing alone on the pavement of the bridge, looking at his mobile phone) is indicative of the tendency of all Police Forces, big or small, to overreach the boundaries of their powers, in what is sometime referred to as ‘mission creep.’ It is perhaps not surprising that in a time when many officers were indulging their authoritarian impulses by over-policing the Covid ‘curfew laws’, Mersey Tunnels officers were tempted to join in, even if that meant leaving behind their lawful jurisdiction.
I am here to help push back against all such Police over- reach of powers, and my purpose in this brief overview of the status of the Special Police Forces of our country is to flag up some of the lesser-known limitations on Police authority and to urge you to contact me for advice if you believe you have fallen prey to Officers playing “out of bounds” in this way.
Iain Gould - Actions Against the Police Solicitor 
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