A police chief told officers to ‘arrest first’ and investigate later when dealing with rape cases, it emerged yesterday.

Lynne Owens, the head of the National Crime Agency appointed despite concerns about her performance, overhauled sex crime investigations when she was chief constable of Surrey Police.

She announced the change during a period of heavy criticism of her force’s handling of rape, domestic abuse and child protection cases.

Lynne Owens, now head of the National Crime Agency, is under scrutiny of a policy change for sex crime probes when she worked in Surrey

She was accused of ‘moral cowardice’ and of blaming others for a ‘litany of failures’ by Kevin Hurley, who was Surrey’s police and crime commissioner.

Details of Mrs Owens’s ‘arrest first’ policy were revealed at a meeting of senior police staff called by Mr Hurley to address shortcomings in the force.

Minutes of the meeting say: ‘The chief constable was keen to ensure officers were robustly pursuing offenders.

‘Officers tended to receive an allegation, then wait to make an arrest after gathering evidence. They needed to change this and make an arrest first and then gather the evidence.’

GIRL'S 50 SHADES SEX LIFE A girl who falsely accused her father of rape based her allegations on the plot of EL James’s erotic novel Fifty Shades Of Grey. The teenager had claimed he raped her eight times over six years. But on the third day of the trial, when defence barrister Cathy McCulloch asked her about the similarities between her allegations and passages from the book, the girl said she had got ‘all the ideas from Fifty Shades Of Grey’. Questioned by the prosecutor, she admitted the allegations were untrue and the judge directed the jury to acquit the father. Mrs McCulloch wrote on her blog after the trial: ‘She had made the whole thing up because she was angry with her father and wanted to teach him a lesson.’ Advertisement

The deputy chief constable at the time, Nick Ephgrave, who now leads the force, told the meeting in September last year that the tactics had raised the rape detection rate from 6 per cent to 15.8 per cent in a year.

But critics said the ‘arrest first’ policy can make it harder to sift through evidence properly.

A senior police source said: ‘Once an officer arrests someone the clock starts ticking because police can hold a suspect for only 24 hours before they have release them.

‘They can apply for an extension but even that might not be long enough to examine phone or computer records.

‘Policing should be robust if it needs to be, but the decision to arrest should be taken with a degree of circumspection.’

A 49-year-old arrested by Surrey Police over claims he had raped his former partner said the policy had a ‘catastrophic effect’ on him when he spent four weeks on bail before being told he would not be charged.

‘There was not a shred of evidence in my case. This approach is out of control,’ he told The Sunday Times.

Mrs Owens said: ‘Every case was taken on its merits, though, and both those things weighed’

‘It means anyone can turn up in a police station, make an allegation and you will be arrested.’

Mrs Owens, director-general of the NCA since January, said her comments were made in the context of reviews, ‘when we were not always getting the balance right between making an early arrest to support the safeguarding of victims and where we were waiting for all the evidence to have been gathered before making an arrest’.

She added: ‘Every case was taken on its merits, though, and both those things weighed.’

Surrey Police said: ‘Early arrests may be necessary in order to secure and preserve evidence… relating to the offence which could be interfered with or disposed of.

‘The investigator would also take into account the risk posed by the alleged offender to the victim or other persons.’