August 2024: Is this what you call progress? A nightmare on Met street
Between an embarrassing inspection by HMICFRS and front-and-centre coverage in the children’s commissioner’s report on child strip searches, the Met is not having a good month
Dear StopWatchers,
This month has seen our new government use weeks of racist riots across the nation as an excuse to pledge more resources to police forces and encourage them to use existing powers more, from ramping up facial recognition technologies to granting suspicionless stop and searches to any and every force who wants them. This freedom to run riot – for want of a better word – fell flat on its face when the United Nations condemned UK police forces for excessive, deadly and racially disproportionate use of force. Specific cases making the headlines include: officers getting caught allowing a suspect to walk free; downloading indecent images of and sending inappropriate messages to children; treating Black colleagues like animals; sidelining the cases of r*pe victims; assaulting a woman attempting to end her own life; failing to protect domestic murder victims; and sexually harassing witnesses.
Meanwhile, the Met has decided to show us just how badly it wants to stay in special measures by failing to study hard for its inspection test and featuring at the forefront of a new report on child strip searches published by the Children’s Commissioner for England.
In StopWatch news, some of our trustees have published research on the evolution of stop and search powers in England and Wales and their misuse in the coercive over-policing of marginalised communities. We trekked out to the ITV News headquarters to share our thoughts and reflections on the recent report by the children’s commissioner, followed by The Runnymede Trust’s in-depth analysis at their studios. We have been busy planning for our upcoming strategy day on 7 September, producing more materials for those who want to defend themselves against egregious police actions (you can download our newly published full-fat complaints guide from our website). We are extremely grateful to the Waltham Forest Youth Independent Advisory Group and our volunteers for helping us to bring our bust cards and guides to life! And we have been touching base with friends and fellow activists taking action against police mistreatment towards Child X and his family.
Is this what you call progress? A nightmare on Met street
The famous Hanlon's razor adage advises that we should never attribute to malice that which might be explainable by incompetence or ignorance. Between the recent inspection into the Metropolitan police and the release of the third report by the Children’s Commissioner for England into the strip searching of children, the force has successfully shown that it does not need to choose between malice and incompetence when it can do both at the same time. Maybe ‘kill two birds with one stone’ is a more fitting idiom, in the Met’s case.
In the report by His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire & Rescue Services (HMICFRS), the force was found to have ‘no crime prevention strategy and no plan to develop one’. This is perhaps the natural consequence of the qualifications of the force, which the report describes as ‘an inexperienced workforce, including both investigators and their supervisors’ who carry out ‘[u]nacceptably long, inadequate or even wrongly-conducted investigations’. This damning performance review is felt most acutely by the victims, with officers breaking protocol to forewarn sex offenders ahead of spot checks, and ‘no further action’ undertaken in 60% of Met investigations into ‘indecent imagery of children’. The worst part is that the Met thinks that this is the best it has to offer, with one spokesperson saying that:
The Met is using every available resource to deliver more trust, less crime and high standards for London (City A.M., 15 August)
Despite Home Office findings that the Met had the highest proportion of searches in which force was used (36%) and a meagre stop and search arrest rate of only 15.6%, the inspector somehow came to the conclusion that the Met’s use of stop and search is ‘fair and effective’. Despite carrying out 19.8 times more stop and searches than the police force average in England and Wales, the Met is below average for catching criminals for regular crimes and only half as likely to solve victim-based crimes (only 4.1% of offences were brought to justice compared with the 9.8% average). It’s almost as though the Met has been wasting its resources on ineffective stop and searches rather than actual crime prevention strategies.
The final verdict found the Met to be, on the one hand, inadequate at investigating crime and managing offenders and suspects, and on the other, requiring improvement in (1) preventing and deterring crime and anti-social behaviour; (2) reducing vulnerability; (3) responding to the public; (4) protecting vulnerable people; (5) building, supporting and protecting the workforce; and (6) leadership and force management. So, most areas of policing, then. All-in-all, having been in special measures since June 2022 (The Guardian), the prospect of the Met getting out of them before the end of the year is looking pretty dim.
A mere four days after the HMICFRS deep dive into the Met’s ineptitudes, the force found itself in the firing range of the children’s commissioner. Dame Rachel de Souza started investigating child strip searches following the gross misconduct of three Met officers who strip searched the 15-year-old Child Q at her school. After an inquiry by the police watchdog, the Met admitted to overusing their powers to strip search children (The Guardian, Sep 2023). Seeking evidence that the case of Child Q was an exception to the rule, the Children’s Commissioner’s report makes for a heart-breaking read on the scale and severity of child strip searches nationally.
Specifically, a horrifying 3,368 child strip searches were conducted between January 2018 and June 2023, 457 of which taking place since July 2022. That’s the equivalent of one child every 19 hours. For the same year, the greatest proportion of child strip searches were carried out by the Met and City of London police forces alone (14%). If the trauma of being strip searched by adults in uniform wasn’t harrowing enough in a police station, 11% of children were subjected to strip searches within view of the public. One in every 20 of these strip searches were not compliant with statutory codes of practice and an appropriate adult could not be confirmed to be present in almost half (45%) of searches.
Not only is the strip searching of children wildly ineffective at preventing youth crime (only 26% resulting in arrest and 47% resulting in ‘no further action’), but the practice also inflicts life-long psychological harm on the child. We highlighted this in an interview with ITV News, condemning this act of bodily violation on children. Knowing that children subjected to strip searches frequently go on to suffer from symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety, depression, disturbed sleep, intrusive memories of the event, and in some cases attempt to take their own lives, police forces cannot honestly contend that this invasive practice safeguards children. In light of the finding that Black children are 4 times more likely to be subjected to strip searches, the commissioner’s report only confirms what many reviews before it have already concluded: that the police persistently disproportionately wield their powers against racialised communities.
While the children’s commissioner has praised police forces for areas of improvement – including their data collection on strip searches and disproportionately strip searching Black children at a lower rate than before – this is hardly cause for rejoice. If anything, what has been dubbed ‘progress’ brings to the forefront the abhorrent ends to which the police have used these powers to date. If there was any doubt before, it must surely be dispelled now: the notion of child-centred policing is a myth. Far from protecting children, strip searches violate the right of all children to not be subjected to degrading treatment and discrimination. Although the report found that 11% of child strip searches constituted a safeguarding concern, it is high time that the government recognises that all child strip searches are a safeguarding concern.
Deaths from police contact, cases old and new
Joel Stenning
Joel Stenning died in a London hospital after being shot in the abdomen by a Surrey police officer on 15 August. The force claims that Joel pointed an air rifle at police who attended his home following reports of a man with a gun. The coroner has adjourned the inquest until 27 November for the police watchdog to carry out its investigation (Irvine Times, 27 Aug).
Jermaine Baker
Jermaine Baker was fatally shot on 11 December 2015 by a Met officer known as W80 (INQUEST, Jul 2022). The officer claimed that he believed Jermaine was reaching for a firearm, but Jermaine was found to be unarmed. Despite the judge identifying multiple police failings, the Crown Prosecution Service did not bring criminal charges against W80 (BBC, Jul 2022). However, an investigation by the Independent Police Complaints Commission (predecessor to the Independent Office for Police Conduct) made the recommendation to the Metropolitan Police Service that officer W80 had a case to answer for gross misconduct. The supreme court ruled that W80 could face a gross misconduct panel. In response, West Midlands Police Federation secretary Tim Rogers has urged the home secretary to overturn the supreme court’s judgement in the W80 ruling (West Midlands Police Federation, 12 Aug).
Other news
Sacked Met officers to appeal controversial athlete search: Two Met officers sacked for the way they carried out a stop-and-search of Bianca Williams and Ricardo Dos Santos will have an appeal heard in October.
Ex-PCs Jonathan Clapham and Sam Franks were dismissed after a disciplinary panel found they lied about smelling cannabis when they pulled over Olympic sprinter Ricardo Dos Santos and his partner Williams in July 2020.
The police followed the pair as they drove from training to their west London home with their baby in the back seat of their Mercedes. They were handcuffed and searched on suspicion of having drugs and weapons but nothing was found. The officers' actions were found to have amounted to gross misconduct (The Guardian, 29 Jul).
Sussex officer charged with police corruption: PC Joseph Aylett has been charged with corruption for allegedly misusing his police powers. The charge stems from a July 2022 incident in Crawley High Street, where Aylett is accused of allowing a suspect involved in an alleged assault to walk free without taking any action (Independent Office for Police Conduct, 12 Aug).
Expansion of facial recognition technology: The prime minister has announced a wider deployment of facial recognition technology following riots, despite the intended usage falling outside of European parliament restrictions, as well as high-profile cases of misidentification and racial biases in the technology. Twenty-seven charities and human rights organisations called on the Prime Minister to reverse this planned expansion (Independent, DigitNews, 13/14 Aug).
Essex Police introducing live facial rec tech: With its first use at Clacton Airshow, the force promises that the public will be informed ahead of time when the technology is deployed, the force have not addressed findings of racial biases in facial recognition technology and issues with misidentification (Essex Live, 18 Aug).
Two officers guilty of gross misconduct: Avon and Somerset police officers were found guilty of gross misconduct for treating a vulnerable woman like a ‘caged animal’ after she attempted to jump off the Clifton Suspension Bridge. A misconduct panel determined that the officers used excessive force as one officer stood on the woman's arm as she was being handcuffed on the ground before grabbing her hair and then her throat. The other officer deployed PAVA spray twice at too close a range in the back of the police car after momentarily removing and replacing a spit hood, before her colleague dragged the woman out of the vehicle, causing her to land heavily on the ground (Bristol24/7, 19 Aug).
Black officers treated ‘like an animal’ by Met: Ten Black Met officers shared their experiences of racism within the force. Describing white colleagues in the Met, one officer said ‘they’ll treat you like an animal’ and criticised the force for issuing ‘pathetic punishments’ for racist behaviour such as ‘learning through reflection’ (BBC, 21 Aug).
Research questions efficacy of stop and search: A study by the Youth Endowment Fund found that stop and search is one of the least effective police practices in addressing violent crime, whereas tactics such as focussed diversion were much more effective at tackling violence (achieved a 33% reduction in incidents, 6 times greater than stop and search). Positive results were more likely where mentoring potential suspects was done by counsellors rather than officers (The Guardian, 21 Aug). Even though £10–16 million was spent on stop and search last year, only 3% of stop and searches find weapons and 14% result in arrest. 10-17-year-olds were subjected to 21% of stop and searches and 11% were conducted on Black people, who make up 4% of the population (The Police Foundation, 22 Aug).
R*pe victims not prioritised by police forces: Inspector of Constabulary Michelle Skeer called for urgent improvements in police handling of r*pe investigations after finding that many officers in these teams were unqualified trainees. Some investigators cancelled appointments with victims due to being reassigned to events like festivals and football matches. The charge rate for r*pe cases remains extremely low, with only 2.6% of suspects being taken to court (The Herald, 22 Aug).
UN findings on UK law enforcement: The United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination reported that it is concerned by the disproportionate impact that stop and search practices, including strip searches, have on racialised groups and children in the UK. The committee was alarmed by the use of deadly and excessive force by the police and the lack of accountability of forces. In highlighting institutional racism in policing, the committee called for the government to set up an independent complaint mechanism to investigate police misuse of powers, including racial profiling (United Nations, 23 Aug).
Victims not confident reporting crime will bring justice: A report by the Victims’ Commissioner has found that 73% of victims are not confident that reporting a crime will lead to justice. The report found that 40% of victims whose crime was reported were dissatisfied with the police response, a figure which increased to 45% among disabled victims. Young people, some racialised groups, and disabled victims were less likely to report a second crime to the police. Almost half of respondents said that they were not kept regularly informed by police about their investigation (ITV News, 27 Aug).
Section 60 watch*
North East
Darlington, Durham (06 Aug)
North West
Warrington, Cheshire (07 Aug)
Bolton, Greater Manchester (04-05 Aug)
Liverpool, Merseyside (17-18 Aug)
Southport, Merseyside (01-02 Aug)
East Midlands
Boston, Lincolnshire (14-15 Aug)
West Midlands
Walsall (04-05 Aug)
London
Notting Hill (25-26 Aug)
South West
Bournemouth, Dorset (18 Aug)
Bristol, Avon and Somerset (03-04 Aug)
Yeovil, Somerset (10-11 Aug)
* This is not a comprehensive list
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