The following was received in an email from Disability Rights UK. If you feel you could help, please follow the contact guidance.

The Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) will be producing new guidelines for police in 2015 on how to handle discrimination complaints. The IPCC has asked Disability Rights UK to feed into this work by gathering some examples of disabled people’s experiences of discrimination involving the police.

We think that it is vitally important for the IPCC to hear real stories, directly from disabled people, about how they have been affected by discrimination or bad service from the police. So if you have an experience of poor treatment from the police, we want to hear from you.

You might feel like you were treated in an unfair or insensitive way by the police; or that necessary reasonable adjustments weren’t made; or that wrongful assumptions were made about you due to your impairment or health condition; or that the police didn’t deal appropriately with a crime you reported.

It doesn’t matter whether you have made a formal complaint about your experience or not. The IPCC want to know about barriers to accessing the complaints process as well as any problems with the outcomes of complaints.

We are particularly keen to hear directly from individuals who feel that they have been treated in a discriminatory way, but we are also interested if you want to act as a representative for a friend of family member whose experience you know well.

The IPCC oversees the police complaints system in England and Wales so we are only looking for examples from this area.

If you would like to contribute please let us know your contact information (name, email and phone number if possible) and a brief account of your experience of discrimination involving the police. We will collect all your experiences but, if you give us your permission, we will also be contacting some of you in January for a longer follow up interview.

Name:

Contact email:

Contact phone number:

Brief account of your experience:

May we contact you by email and / or by phone?:

If possible, please email your information to Cheryl Gowar: cheryl.gowar@disabilityrightsuk.org

If you would prefer to provide your information in a different way, please contact Cheryl on 020 7250 8178 or write to Disability Rights UK, CAN Mezzanine, 49-51 East Road, London, N1 6AH.

Please be assured: although we need to know how to contact you, no personal details will be passed on to the IPCC or the police.