March 2024: Bring on the armchair brigade
Abuse towards his officers is something Rowley says he ‘won’t accept’. But why should the public accept his officers abusing them?
Dear StopWatchers,
Another busy month for the team saw us attend a weekend convening in Manchester hosted by the fabulous Northern Police Monitoring Project in partnership with the Justice, Equity and Technology (JET) Project, which brought together representatives from organisations engaged in resistance work directly related to police monitoring in England and Wales.
And our very own Girls Research Project entered its final phase, with members of the London team attending a weekend retreat to analyse the findings from the nationwide survey of girls’ and women’s stop and search experiences. Watch out for the results later this year.
In policing news, the chief commissioner of the Met fired his latest kvetch against the great unwashed of London for commenting on video of fraught police-civilian encounters. How dare those armchair generals criticise his officers! But if he were paying attention to the ever-mounting footage of harassment and violent conduct from members of his own force across the capital, he’d understand why.
Bring on the armchair brigade
Posting on his favoured social media platform LinkedIn, Sir Mark Rowley addressed the subject of officers who ‘are starting to become direct targets for abuse and harassment, both online and in person’, as he put it (LinkedIn, 10 March).
Having had a pop at the ‘army of armchair commentators’ who film officers (Evening Standard, 11 March), Rowzers was then reported to have promised in an internal memo that those under investigation for misconduct can still be promoted, setting up a ‘gateway’ team to carry out ‘fact-checking’ of [abuse and harassment] allegations against his officers before they are reported to the Independent Office for Police Conduct (i News, 15 March).
All of which begs the question: does the Met commissioner truly accept any level of external scrutiny? Because we’ve seen several video clips of officer conduct this month alone which don’t exactly come across as instances of model policing to any fair-minded person. One notable example is a video of electricians on the way back from work subjected to a vehicle stop in Clapham which turned nasty, in an episode of ‘Commuting While Black’ (Twitter / ITV News, 25 March), and in another incident that happened elsewhere in the UK, a Lancashire police officer kicked a man in the head during an arrest whilst already on the ground (ITV News Granada, 12 March).
We’ve also witnessed an example of what happens when the police are trusted with video evidence: it takes a decade to get an apology for unlawful conduct and the footage is somehow lost in the process (Press Gazette, 27 March).
But it’s certainly okay for the police to film us using facial recognition cameras, even if they are a wildly ineffective crime-fighting tool which reduces whole units of officers to loitering passengers. Two separate south London deployments showcased the difference between how the police would like you to know facial recognition cameras are working…
Live Facial Recognition continues delivering justice in south London (Metropolitan Police, 22 March)
Officers from the Met arrested 17 people in Croydon and Tooting during three Live Facial Recognition deployments this week, including a 23-year-old man in Tooting who was found with two rounds of blank ammunition.** Note that there is no information on how many faces were scanned during this operation, nor for the number of false matches
… and how things are actually going (coverage courtesy of the good people at Southwark Copwatch on 26 March).
Contrary to what Sir Rowley believes, filming encounters is not about catching officers out, even on the occasions they do their jobs badly. It spotlights intimidation, deceit, violence, and other abuses of police power. And in racialised communities, where every next officer carries the threat of exercising malicious conduct in the name of ‘hotspot policing’, filming provides a degree of transparency the police often fail to display themselves.
So it is disingenuous and disrespectful to conflate those individuals who film for those reasons with people who inflict ‘abuse and harassment’, assuming that was what Rowzers was getting at in his post. In fact, the example he gave to make his point treated the terms ‘stream(s) of abuse’ and ‘considerable criticism’ as synonymous with each other, before going on to say:
There aren’t many professions where from the minute you arrive at an incident to the minute you leave, you are filmed and then critiqued by an army of armchair commentators.
From ‘abuse and harassment’ to getting ‘critiqued’ in the space of a few paragraphs, in have a measure of the very broad brush with which Sir Rowley is prepared to paint anyone who distrusts his force enough to want to record and / or express their dissatisfaction. This very thin-skinned take came as London Assembly Member Caroline Russell raised concerns about a survey for a new Met stop and search charter (StopWatch, 22 March).
Russell’s letter to Sir Rowley challenged ‘the inherent assumption that stop and search is an inevitable fact of policing’, when ‘many Londoners don’t believe that stop and search is either a useful or effective tool’. She also noted that the survey contains no space for respondents to express this view and no option to record discontent over racial disproportionality in stop-searches, while asking participants about the potential use of new technologies such as Artificial Intelligence and ‘algorithms of body worn video footage’ to assess the quality of a stop and search encounter.
With glaring omissions like that, what use is this survey for improving police use of the tactic? And what would be the point in even filling it in if the chief commissioner himself thinks that anyone who raises concerns about the way police conduct searches is nothing more than an armchair commentator? Speaking of which… the armchair army is always recruiting. Join us. Keep filming the police.
Deaths from police contact, cases old and new
Chris Kaba
The Metropolitan police officer charged with the murder of Chris Kaba has been named as Martyn Blake, after an anonymity order was lifted at a hearing at The Old Bailey. Kaba was fatally shot by a firearms officer from the Met on 05 September 2022 in Streatham, London. He was an unarmed Black man.
This is the twelfth murder and/or manslaughter charge to have been brought against an on-duty police officer involved in a death since 1990, and the fourth relating to a police shooting. No on-duty police officer has ever been found guilty of murder or manslaughter in relation to a police shooting.
INQUEST’s director Deborah Coles said: ‘Police cannot and should not be above the law. Accountability for police officers and forces involved in death, even where evidence of criminality and wrongdoing is identified, is extremely rare.
In any other murder trial, the accused would be publicly named. This case is no different. We welcome today’s decision.’ (INQUEST, 08 March)
Ronaldo Johnson
Black teenager Ronaldo Johnson died on 06 April 2021 when a car crashed following a police chase in Manchester in the early hours of 31 March 2021. An inquest concluded that Ron was unlawfully killed by the driver of the car that was pursued by Greater Manchester police. The family are campaigning alongside others to call for an end to police pursuits:
‘Losing Ron has devastated his family, friends, loved ones and the community. We are fighting for justice for Ronaldo and will continue to fight for him. We ask you to support the Ronaldo Thierry Johnson Foundation.
We are also working collectively with other families who have lost their loved ones in high-risk, unnecessary police pursuits. We do not want to see another life lost and invite you to support the #EndPolicePursuits campaign.’ (INQUEST, 26 March)
Other news
Making things up as they go along: An unproven medical condition rooted in pseudoscience and disputed by doctors is routinely being used by police and other emergency forces to explain deaths after police restraint (Observer, 17 March).
‘Acute behavioural disturbance’ (ABD) and ‘excited delirium’ are used to describe people who are agitated or acting bizarrely, usually due to mental illness, drug use or both. Symptoms are said to include insensitivity to pain, aggression, ‘superhuman’ strength and elevated heart rate.
Police and other emergency services say the labels, often used interchangeably, are a helpful shorthand used to identify when a person who might need medical help and restraint may be dangerous. But the terms are not recognised by the World Health Organization and have been condemned as ‘spurious’ by campaigners who say they are used to ‘explain away’ the police role in deaths.
Despite the continuing controversy, the Observer has found that the terms are being used by frontline police when deciding whether to use restraint – and by forces and their lawyers to explain deaths after the fact. Use of the term in mental health settings is also thought to be rising, with a study by King’s College London finding references to ABD had become more prevalent since 2019 – and that it was twice as likely to be included in assessments of Black people than those who were white, which the researchers said ‘may contribute to existing racial inequalities in the use of coercive measures during crisis presentations’.
Foster defeats Street to retain control of police and crime functions in West Mids… for now: West Midlands police and crime commissioner (PCC) Simon Foster won his high court challenge against government plans to merge the role with the region’s mayor, a position currently held by Andy Street (BBC News, 18 March).
Ruling in favour of Mr Foster, the judge said the Home Office had not provided sufficient information when consulting over its plans. The government department said it was disappointed by the outcome and intended to seek permission to appeal.
Please think of the children when you strip-search them, urges police watchdog to forces: The National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC) has accepted all 10 findings made by the Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC) regarding children’s ‘safety and wellbeing’ in England and Wales (BBC News, 19 March). This comes after the controversial case of Child Q, in which police strip-searched a Black schoolgirl without an appropriate adult present.
The IOPC’s recommendations aim to improve how strip-searching of children is conducted. This includes asking the government to require police forces to make mandatory safeguarding referrals for any child subject to an ‘exposure of intimate parts’ search. The NPCC said it was ‘refreshing’ its officer training and addressing any regional disparities in providing appropriate adults to supervise searches.
However, some have argued that the very idea of law enforcement agencies safeguarding children is a contradiction in terms.
Hateful messages shared on police WhatsApp chats, again: Two serving police officers and a former officer at Gwent police face gross misconduct proceedings over the sharing of ‘racist, misogynistic and homophobic’ WhatsApp messages, found on the phone of a deceased former officer (Sky News, 21 March).
The IOPC began the investigation in November 2022 after a referral from Gwent Police. Derogatory and inappropriate messages were found on the phone of deceased former officer Ricky Jones, who spent 26 years with Gwent Police. His widow and daughter told Sky News they suffered years of coercive control by him, but felt unable to report it to police due to his links to the force. In a statement, Jones's family said they welcome the IOPC's findings of gross misconduct in relation to the three individuals.
They said the evidence they discovered ‘laid bare a deep-rooted, toxic culture within [Gwent Police]’. They also said that they hope to see a new body established to help those facing domestic abuse at the hands of serving officers and that the IOPC’s investigation would act as ‘a catalyst for change’.
GMP sorry for wrongful detainment of a nurse at hospital: Greater Manchester police handcuffed a nurse outside Royal Manchester Children’s Hospital after detaining her on suspicion of obstructing an officer following a ‘welfare disagreement’ (BBC News, 26 March). A second officer de-arrested the nurse minutes later.
GMP has apologised to the nurse and senior hospital leaders for the ‘alarming and disappointing way’ the incident had escalated. The officer has since been removed from frontline duties pending the outcome of an investigation.
Ex-officer avoids jail for punch and pepper spray assault: A former police officer who punched a man in the face four times and deployed PAVA pepper spray has avoided an immediate prison sentence (Watford Observer, 27 March). William Owen was on duty in Watford when he swung a drunk reveller into a wall and asked him: ‘Who’s the f*****g big man now, eh?’ A jury at Peterborough Crown Court found Owen guilty of common assault on 05 February and the judge handed Owen a 12-month prison sentence, suspended for two years, plus a fine of £750 and 160 hours’ community service.
At a misconduct hearing held days before, Hertfordshire police chief Charlie Hall also added Owen’s name to the College of Policing’s ‘barred’ list, which means he cannot serve in any force again. Hall said: ‘He shows no acceptance that he has done wrong, that he is the one convicted of two criminal offences, no remorse for his actions, just a flawed belief that his use of force was proportionate, legal and absolutely necessary.’
Several reports of police misogyny *warning: contains distressing content*: A Met police constable attached to the Territorial Support Group has been arrested and charged with ‘non-fatal strangulation and assault’ of a woman whilst off duty (BBC News, 25 Mar). He has been suspended from duties while he awaits a court hearing.
Another serving Met officer is also to appear in court after allegedly sexually assaulting a girl under 14 in Croydon in the 1980s (MyLondon, 27 March).
More recently, a police officer has been accused of raping a woman on multiple occasions while on duty in Plymouth (BBC News, 20 March). A court heard how the officer initially visited her home to respond to an attempted break-in, but then exploited the woman's vulnerability after spotting cocaine and alcohol on the premises. The officer denies all the charges.
Elsewhere, Greater Manchester police have been accused of making a woman who reported rape feel ‘worthless’ (Channel 4 News, 18 March). There are also accusations of a ‘boys’ club culture’ in the force and that a wider investigation is needed into the way women are treated when they make complaints.
Amidst this backdrop, the government has decided to accept all recommendations made by Part 1 of the independent Angiolini Inquiry, including commissioning research to establish if there is an evidence-based link between active masturbatory indecent exposure and subsequent contact offending (BBC News, 25 March). The National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC) and College of Policing have also committed to addressing the remaining recommendations in Lady Angiolini’s report concerning police culture and increasing the robustness of police vetting.
Section 60 watch*
Met (London)
East Ham (8 Mar)
Thames Valley
Slough (16 Mar)
Essex
Chelmsford (16 Mar)
West Midlands
Staffordshire
Hednesford (18 Mar)
Greater Manchester
Gorton (5 Mar), Middleton (22 Mar)
* This is not a comprehensive list
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