The Independent Police Conduct Authority says it cannot tell how many police officers are the subject of complaints without making a a manual search through more than 2000 complaints would be needed.
The IPCA's annual report provides details on how many complaints it has received, how many weresubsequently accepted for investigation, the general category and what police district the complaint was made in.
IPCA spokesman Bernard Steeds said because records were based on the category of each complaint, there was no accurate way of measuring what complaints had been upheld, or how many police officers were involved.
Asked whether the IPCA held information on how many police officers were the subject of complaints, Mr Steeds said: 'We don't have it in a reliable form. We gather it but we're at the moment working through exactly how our database works. Every complaint that comes in, we record in the database, but it doesn't always spit out the information that either you want or I want."
Mr Steeds said the IPCA was in talks with a software developer. He hoped the problem would be solved with a new computer programme intended to be in use by next year.
He said the reason for the unreliable records was because data was recorded based on why people complained, which became complex when a person could complain about several staff and their actions, but only one complaint may be upheld.
"When you're basing it on (areas) of complaint, it's not that accurate an encapsulation of our workload," he said.
"Once we have that data for complaint files, we'll put it back in the annual report. It's not that we're trying to hide it, it's just that it doesn't seem to me to mean that much at the moment.
"We need to find a better way to report and while we're working through that I left it out this year."
