“Taser Related Deaths” – Keeping the I.P.C.C. Busy

We all understand the need for to the IPCC getting involved when someone meets their maker in custody. It’s an entirely necessary evil these days when everyone wants someone to blame, and a large percentage of them want to blame the Police. The facts have to be established, and the speculation replaced by some degree of factual information.

In recent years though, (formalised by the Police Reform Act 2002) the I.P.C.C. have come to our door on more and more occasions. New terms have been created to widen the scope for the Police to be examined as a potential blameworthy party. To this end we have a new and extended version of the “Death in Police Custody” called the “Death Following Police Contact” which applies when a person dies and there is a potential link between recent contact with Police (outside custody or detention) and that death.

After a third death in just over a week where the deceased had recently been on the receiving end of a taser deployment or incapacitatant spray, the IPCC are, yet again, doing the necessary and this news has prompted the predictable shouting from the cheap seats as Amnesty International proclaim our little yellow friend is a “potentially lethal weapon”.

On those terms though a spoon is equally capable of becoming a potentially lethal weapon.

Imagine the scene…the duty probationer makes the tea (they offered by the way – it’s NOT bullying), and in a moment of complete madness (and one that will later see their workbox gaffer-taped to the ceiling of the inspectors office) touches the hot spoon on the bare forearm of a passing P.C.S.O. In true “Final Destination” style, the P.C.S.O. stumbles and falls out of a recently opened window to their death three floors below.

Would we ban spoons?

What if two others died in similarly bizarre spoon-related accidents?

In this latest case, Philip Hulmes, 53, was hit by a Taser after refusing to leave his terraced house in Over Hulton, near Bolton on Tuesday night. It is reported by West Midland Police, that his daughter had called the police after he locked himself inside his house while in possession of a knife and began to harm himself.

The fact that he had been tasered is unlikely to have had anything to do with his death. That would have been caused by the significant stab wounds he appears to have inflicted on himself. The taser may well have prevented further injury to himself or others including the Police Officers he was threatening at the time.

In the other cases currently being investigated body-builder Dale Burns, 27, (pictured) died his flat in Cumbria last week after being subjected to shocks from a Taser gun and pepper spray. Eight officers attended a disturbance and attempted to arrest him for Criminal Damage. He refused to calm down and required a shot of pepper spray and three taser shocks to subdue him. Bearing in mind the size of this chap (it is alleged that he was also taking steroids) I would imagine that he was physically capable of taking on most officers in the confines of a bedsit and that any force used would be quite justified if used for the safety of those present.

Jacob Michael, 25, died on Monday after being pepper sprayed during his arrest by 11 officers in Widnes, Cheshire. The amateur rugby league player ran from his house after being sprayed with pepper spray and was captured a short distance away after a foot pursuit. He became ill in custody and was taken to hospital where he later died.

Helen Shaw, co-director of Inquest, the charity that advises the family of those killed in contentious circumstances, suggests that these incidents are further examples of unlawful and excessive use of force or gross neglect. It’s nice to see that the families of those that have died in circumstances where Police have been involved have such an independent and unbiased standpoint.

Perhaps one day, the media and institutions such as Amnesty International and Inquest will realise that just because the IPCC are investigating, it doesn’t mean the Police were at fault!

I am now waiting for renewed calls to ban taser, CS and pepper spray to start coming from the wings.
What these people will never fully appreciate is that we carry these things to defend ourselves, facilitate safer arrests of violent suspects and to protect others from harm. If they have been used, there would have been good reason for it. Not everyone hangs their head in shame and puts their arms out to be cuffed. I am damn sure that if Burns told me he wasn’t going to come quietly I would use my canister of spray on him before taking him by the arm and, no doubt, doing a rag doll impression. That’s why we have S.3 of the Criminal Law Act and S.117 of PACE.

There is currently no suggestion in ANY of these cases that the Police were directly responsible for the deaths being investigated.  All the above had the option to walk out quietly…none of them chose to take it. Who made that decision?

Blair on Britain – Like glitter on a turd

Unfortunately you can’t polish Britain (it’s been well Polished – that’s another story though), but you can roll it in something sparkly and this is exactly what Blair appears to be trying to do with his sudden return to public speaking this week. He has (quite rightly) stayed out of the political spotlight for some time now, but has carefully chosen his moment to break from the silence and do what politicians do best. Disagree with each other.

Blair, writing for one of the National papers, claimed that opinions that the UK was in a state of “moral decline” were inaccurate. Instead, he stated that the underlying root of the recent outbursts of criminal activity were the result of an “alienated, disaffected youth… outside the social mainstream”. He stated that the current focus for those trying to create a solution was too broad and targeted society in general, where as the problem was due to an “absolutely specific problem that requires a deeply specific solution”.

He implies that the majority of the population (those that restrict their behaviour to the confines of what is considered acceptable) are not part of the problem, and therefore do not need to be part of the solution. I think this is a dangerous standpoint – they should be considered, as should the systems in place to investigate, prosecute and punish.
We cannot blame the events of the last few weeks on a tiny minority. There are other forces here, not least the lack of effective Policing strategies, or judicial deterrent for those unlucky enough to be in the wrong place at the wrong time and trip over a bobby.

The ex-Prime Minister went on to say that, in relation to the rioting and looting, it was essential that the police felt they had the backing of the government.

“The police need to know they have strong support. They need to feel it from politicians and public alike.”

This is a sentiment that I agree with whole-heartedly. We have, for the time-being, the support of the public, but the politicians are proving a little more difficult – especially the important ones like Theresa May. The public will no doubt have their new-found respect pro-actively gradually eroded by the media who are already sniffing around for the next corruption, hacking, or excessive force story.

Mr Blair – This country is broken.

You can throw as much glitter at it as you want and try to put the blame on a tiny minority to try to make the rest of us feel better. Unfortunately though, as any one of my readers will tell you, every day of the week, more and more people who don’t fit into your idealistic view come into contact with the Police. More and more of them are willing to carry a weapon, or have a go at the uniform stood on their door-step. If we are lucky, some get put through the court process, but get only a pointless community slap-on-the-wrist-order or a suspended sentence at best. This cycle of lack of punishment and the rewards of crime is self-perpetuating and continually increases the perception of those that enter it that crime is more socially acceptable than ever.

We need to stop worrying so much about stigmatising the young and old of this land who elect to take and give nothing back. They are not going to become victims of the system, or be ruined by our actions if we lock them up. They are criminal scum and deserve nothing more than the bare minimum required to keep them alive, breathing prison air for as long as it takes to make a difference.

Lets see if Scameron holds true to his promises to “get a grip on the misrepresentation of human rights” and facilitate a “stronger police presence on the streets, deterring crime and catching criminals instead of filling in forms or wasting time on phoney targets” and hope that this is backed up by a continuation of the recent “proper” sentences being handed down in our courts.

More importantly though, if this new world does come to fruition, lets see if A.C.P.O. and Senior Management can drag their eyes out of the league tables and pie charts for long enough to take it on board and realise that getting out on the streets is what most of us have been asking to do for as long as I can remember. This is where we belong!

N.B. If you are one of those with a uniform that hide behind an office door or at the local council officers or intend to spend your entire service in any role that means you don’t have to use it – THAT MEANS YOU TOO!
If you want to be an “Alcohol Harm Prevention Officer” put down your pen and go stand outside a pub!

How to beat your children and get away with it – Fear and the CPS

I have recently investigated a heartbreaking case where a father had, finally, been reported by his eldest daughter for ritually beating his children (her younger brothers) over a period of four or five years. This investigation was something that would normally have been taken on by the Young Persons Unit in the city. Unfortunately, due to the fact that they have been depleted due to “Natural Wastage”, and that any potential investigators have already been snaffled by the District CID, who are also without a paddle, there are only a tiny percentage of what would be an effective level officers and staff in the office and they all have an immense workload.

Putting aside the obvious risks to their own investigations through stress and overwork, further risks have been generated by the requirement for people such as myself to investigate offences that should clearly fall within their remit. I may have 10 plus years in the job, and be quite a proficient investigator (allegedly) but that doesn’t mean I am comfortable taking on the responsibility of this sort of job.

After reading the report the arrest team was dispatched (when I say arrest team, I mean three of my rota that happened to be free at the time) and we dutifully located the suspect, seizing his weapons of choice from the home address and brought him into custody.
Thankfully, one of my team used to work on the YPU and was on duty that day. He understands the issues we have as he usually gets thrown all the work designated suitable for district investigation.
Despite the fact that he left the unit just before I joined the job, he still has (on paper) anyway, the relevant skills and experience to do the victim interviews. The two children involved were taken with their mum to the local Video Interview Suite (which is actually 35 miles away, but that’s becoming more and more “local” as facilities fall to the corporate axe). While the children, aged eight and twelve, were delicately questioned by our expert and another officer, their older sister gave a statement to me.

The statement pretty much confirmed what had been disclosed in the initial report. Dad would come home from work, and demand to see the kids homework. Every mistake would result in a beating. He would use a variety of household objects to administer this, (books, rulers, sticks and the like) and the children were terrified of him as a result. This was the sort of scenario that we were expecting….but then came the bombshell…

…and when they are really naughty he gets the belt out

She went on to describe their fathers idea of discipline for what he considered to be bad behaviour. He would demand the boys stood in front of him, make them strip so they were completely naked and then beat them around the legs and body with his favourite leather belt. The children would stand there screaming. He would insist they remained silent, but they were in pain – they could no longer contain their screams.
On a number of occasions their mother and sister had attempted to intervene, but just ended up being a target for the belt themselves. Mum would be sent, weeping, to another room while the punishment was completed. It was one of these episodes that prompted requests to the Police for help.

The boys told a similar story, although the youngest tried to conceal the truth by drifting off into fantasy and talking about another boy whose dad was mean to him. The oldest would start to disclose elements of what we were being told by his sister, but quickly withdrew his account through either fear, or misguided loyalty. Evidential disclosure was there, but, as you can imagine, it was not a clinical and factual account.

Dad was interviewed on the strength of the statement and video interviews later that day. He denied the worst of the offending, but fully admitted using physical discipline on the children on a number of occasions. His reason for this…lawful chastisement in line with his cultural background. He was of Indian decent, and this was how he had been raised by his own father. It was therefore acceptable, in his opinion, to carry on these rituals once he was head of the household and had children of his own.

Mum refused to make a statement as she was clearly terrified about the repercussions of doing so. The female members of the household had previously been banned from the first floor of the home by our suspect who controlled everything they did. I have no doubt that he disciplined his wife in the same way that he did his children. She was not going to risk standing up against her husband.

Finally, after all the evidence was obtained, we went for what we considered a straight forward decision to charge from the lawyers on the fourth floor. After a couple of hours, I was summoned upstairs for the decision. I have never walked into that office more confident of a thumbs-up in my career. This was a guaranteed win and I was feeling good. We would protect the children, and bring this brute of a man to justice.

Release him without charge

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I phoned my Sergeant and asked him to join me. Together we demanded to speak to the senior prosecutor for a review. We argued our case on every level – the welfare of the children, the disclosure (albeit patchy) from their interviews, the statement of their older sister, and the potential for revenge if the suspects actions were vindicated by his release. They revealed that they had contacted the older sister of the children to discuss her views on giving evidence. She was now “a little hesitant” as the reality of what she was doing had sown seeds of fear in her mind.

With no clear disclosure from the boys, no statement from their mother, and the potential for the only other witness to refuse to attend court, we feel there is little guarantee of a successful prosecution.

I was furious…and still am. Even bringing in the local Inspector to further appeal the decision had no effect on the decision.

This was a clear example of ritual child abuse, and it we all knew it would continue if we didn’t take a chance and put this man before a court. The CPS refused to budge. They accepted that our suspect admitted assaulting the children, but said that his defence of lawful chastisement, excused on the basis of cultural difference, could not be disproved without clear evidence to the contrary.
The evidence we had compiled was compelling, in my opinion, but the fear of violent consequence and of subsequent beatings being more violent meant that nobody within the family felt strong enough to stand up against him.

The fact that I still wanted to take every opportunity mattered not. We might not have a guaranteed win….but surely we owed it to the young boys involved to try! We had no chance if we didn’t!

This is the latest in a series of cases I know of that have been dropped before charge based on the CPS’s assessment of thier potential for a win at court. Targets for successful prosecutions and budgets have meant that unless it’s a stone clad case there is every chance that it won’t make the cut. I accept that we are never going to win some cases and these should be discontinued, but where there IS evidence and there IS a chance to protect the vulnerable I think we owe it to the victims to take that chance.

I hope we don’t come to regret this decision and that these children don’t become a news story at some point in the future.

Taxi for Chris Sims…Chief Constable requests compassion for offenders

The most violent single act of last week resulted in the deaths of three members of a family who were trying to protect their streets from rioters and looters. The incident in the Winson Green area of Birmingham claimed the lives of:

21-year-old Haroon Jahan
30-year-old Shazad Ali
31-year-old Abdul Musavir

This week, Chris Sims, the Chief Constable of West Midlands Police – the force investigating the deaths, spoke about recent events to councillors in the city. During the meeting it is reported that he referred to those recently in a local custody centre as:

Young people who have been in care for most of their lives. We need to show some compassion and be pragmatic about how we deal with these people

These views are echoed in a post on the West Midlands Police website and I therefore have no doubt that they are accurate. I do however challenge their content, and the message they send out to the population of a nation still coming to terms with recent events.

Perhaps Mr Sims would like to explain to the families of those killed (in what would no doubt be a slightly less comfortable face-to-face meeting than the one he had with his councillor friends) what exactly it was that happened that night that warranted any compassion being shown.
The fact that people involved in these riots may have come from less privileged backgrounds, single parent families or care homes should be a factor in how they are dealt with says Sims. They should, according to his comments in the report published in the national press, be seen as tragic offenders. These tragic offenders apparently exist alongside the more commonly acknowledged tragic victims of their crimes.

Somehow I doubt there are many that were victims of the recent outbursts of mass criminality and thuggery* that will agree with his sentiments. Thankfully, and I never thought I would say this, it’s not him that will decide who to punish and how to punish them. That decision rests with the courts. I hope the recent proper sentences continue to flow from courtrooms throughout the country.

We should instead listen to the relatives of those killed. Their perception of how little these deaths mean to the rest of the nation should disgust us.

Tariq Jahan, father of Haroon, said:

A day from now, maybe two days from now, the whole world will forget and nobody will care

If we do as Chris Simms says and excuse their actions on the basis of circumstance, this is exactly what will happen.

• We will infinitely dilute the fact that three people were killed.
• We will insult their memory by handing out a suspended sentence for manslaughter and allow the killer to walk the same streets as the grieving family with, potentially, no real punishment ever being handed out.
• We will, at the same time, betray those that they were trying to protect, and completely undermine the moral values that we allegedly hold so high in this country.

We should be seeking to impose the maximum sentences possible to demonstrate that those committing these offences will be removed from society and punished for their crimes. If Sims gets his way, we may as well give them a weeks detention and ask them to write out “I will not riot or loot, or kill people with my car that stop me trying to riot or loot” one hundred times.

Either you, as a Chief Constable, need to sort out your priorities, or stand down and let someone else do the job who will. Just watch you don’t get hit by the door (or a fatherless child who likes the look of your phone – bless him) on the way out!

Rant ends…

*Thuggery: A phrase used recently by Theresa May to deliver her “message” whilst simultaneously managing to avoid answering direct questions about Police cuts. 

And while we are on the subject of the Home Secretary, thanks for showing your support for the troops by branding the initial Police response to the riots and looting  as “unsatisfactory” – lets see what happens after you’ve finished buggering about with it!

Putting a [full] stop to bad sentences

Prior to the recent riots and mass looting in the capital and many other locations in the UK we saw how keen the anti-police campaigners were to criticise the excessive use of force employed by officers trying to hold the line in incredibly difficult circumstances.  They managed through various media and social network genre to influence public opinion, and cast those in Nato helmets and overalls as thugs and vigilantes. Incidents such as the death of Ian Tomlinson (who was three times over the drink drive limit and had underlying medical conditions that could not have been known by the officers he repeatedly ignored) were reported by the national press in such a distorted and biased way that they appeared to vindicate their argument.

Many of those campaigners had a change of heart once city centres started burning night after night. The scenes on international news channels of people raiding sports and mobile phone stores unchallenged provoked many to adopt a completely inverse position. Suddenly, once the lack of action and softly softly approach allowed the criminal masses to do whatever they wanted, the Police came back under attack. Now we were being too soft, and allowing too much latitude.
The actions of the hooded and masked were so wide-spread due, in no small part, to the knowledge that the UK judicial system, and sentencing guidelines were so weak that a suspended sentence or pointless community / supervision order were an acceptable payment for a 50 inch LCD, an iPhone and a pair of Reebok Classics.
To be fair, if I walked into Currys and saw that I could have the TV of my dreams if I agreed to “engage” with a member of the probation service’s fluffy talking-fixes-everything or promise-not-to-do-it-again teams once a week for a few months, I would have that shiny black Sony on my wall without a second thought. The deal gets even more attractive when you factor in that there is probably only a 10% chance (at best) of being caught in the first place.

These campaigners now have a new target – the courts.

Thankfully, things have changed on one hand. Due to a new-found respect for the Police officers that had previously been reserved to a tiny percentage of the population, those that spoke out against us have been forced to abandon their crusade against the too-nice-too-harsh Police or risk coming under fire from the very public they sought to enrage.

On the other hand, the fact that our courts have been given the freedom to impose sentences that might actually be a deterrent has upset them. Those that feel the need to fight the corner of those who would break into your house and steal your children under the flag of some misguided interpretation of the Human Rights Act have been bleating to the media and anyone else who will listen.

Two particular cases have come to light.

The first relates to Jordan Blackshaw, 20, (left) of Vale Road, Marston, Northwich, Cheshire and Perry Sutcliffe-Keenan (right), 22, of Richmond Avenue, Warrington, who were both sentenced to four years behind bars.

These two delightful individuals sought to orchestrate large scale public disorder by creating pages on the Facebook website. These pages were designed to encourage riots in the men’s home towns and resulted in four year prison terms for their authors. These are far from the maximum ten years that could have been imposed, yet The Howard League for Penal Reform have labelled them as not proportionate to the offence.
Perhaps the HLPR could explain to the Reeves family, who lost thier 140-year-old family-owned business in Croydon to fire how these people, who sought to incite others to commit similar acts, should be let off with a lighter sentence. That is what they sought to achieve, and that is what they should be punished for. Let’s face it…they will probably be out in 18 months or so anyway unless the parole system gets “fixed” too!

Next was David Beswick, 31, from Eccles, who was given 18 months for handling stolen goods (a 37″ TV) after attempting to convince a court that he was simply looking after it for a friend and had placed it in his car during the riots on 9th August. The judge presiding over the case, Andrew Gilbart QC, stated that more significant sentences were justified as the offences did not take place in isolation. Instead they were committed by individuals and groups taking advantage of “large scale mayhem and disorder”.

The Judge’s statement at the conclusion of the case was as follows:

I have no doubt at all that the principal purpose is that the courts should show that outbursts of criminal behaviour like this will be and must be met with sentences longer than they would be if the offences had been committed in isolation. For those reasons I consider that the sentencing guidelines for specific offences are of much less weight in the context of the current case, and can properly be departed from… To anyone who lives in Manchester or Salford, the effect of what had happened was heartbreaking… This is a hardworking city with a wonderfully diverse society, which is one of its great strengths… The common feature of these crimes that night is that all of those involved took advantage of the mayhem and disorder to commit crime.

I have two words to say in response to this sentiment.

Hear hear….