October 2022: Not just a couple of bad apples
The publication of the Casey review of the Met's misconduct system exposes a disgraceful – but not surprising – state of affairs at the UK's biggest police force
Dear StopWatchers,
Police in the UK made so many U-turns this month that we’re starting to feel dizzy.
First, the inquest into the killing of Chris Kaba opened on the 4th of October, where it was revealed that – contrary to an earlier statement by the Met and countless media reports – no car chase took place. Chris was not a suspect, and the officers who followed the car he was driving did not activate any lights or sirens on the night of the 6th of September when he was killed. The Met had initially claimed that Chris had been shot ‘after a vehicle pursuit’ – but on the first day of the inquest, the IOPC lead investigator made it clear that that is not what happened at all. Unsurprisingly though, the force was happy to let it be inferred that Chris had refused to stop for the police, sparking a car chase that culminated in a forced stop as police vehicles closed in, therefore allowing the gaps in the story be filled by means of long-established racist narratives about Black men, gang violence, and crime.
The second U-turn came as the Met published a statement after it was reported that they planned to stop recording the ethnicity of people subject to vehicle stops (which do not require officers to have ‘reasonable suspicion’). Following the subsequent public outcry, they changed tack, saying: ‘The Met is now actively working with the National Race Action plan team on the commitment to record ethnicity of traffic stops’.
And need we say anything about Suella Braverman’s dramatic exit and re-entrance as home secretary in the space of less than a week?
This month also saw the publication of Baroness Louise Casey’s interim report on the Met’s misconduct system, the first part of her review of culture and standards of behaviour in the force. The review described a misconduct system in urgent need of ‘radical and wholesale reform’. It laid bare a shocking number of cases of racism, misogyny, and other kinds of discrimination that had gone (and continued to go) unchecked in police ranks.
The question is, as report after report after report exposes the racism and misogyny in policing, when (if ever) are they actually going to do something about it?
And do they actually want to?
This month at StopWatch…
Three team members from our girls’ and young women’s research project visited the Houses of Parliament for a meeting with shadow minister for policing, Sarah Jones MP, to discuss misogyny in policing, violence against women, and youth justice – and to share some early findings from our own ongoing research
Preparations for our Rights and Wellbeing (RAW) festival in London on the 3rd and 4th December entered their final stages – see here for more information about RAW, and stay tuned for the announcement of our full programme!
We analysed the latest annual drop of stop and search stats from the Office of National Statistics – Twitter thread here; article here
Topics in this newsletter include:
Baroness Casey’s interim report on the Met’s spectacularly terrible misconduct system
Analysis of the latest annual stop and search stats published by the Home Office last week
A racist officer in Bristol using the timeless ‘go back to your own country!’ line on his own colleague, then refusing to return to speak to attending officers at the scene
One force’s bold new tech innovation: body-worn video cameras – for dogs! Given that human police wearers of body-worn cameras routinely ‘forget’ to make use of theirs, do we think the dogs are likely to have better results?
Please enjoy our roundup of stories below.
Casey review exposes total disciplinary breakdown at the Met
On the 17th of October, the first part of Baroness Louise Casey’s review of standards and culture at the Met was published. Originally commissioned in response to public outrage following the murder of Sarah Everard and a number of other high-profile scandals at the Met last year, the review began in February 2022, with the final report and recommendations due to be published in early 2023.
This interim report focuses specifically on the Met’s misconduct system, setting out ‘detailed evidence [...] based on our analysis of internal, unpublished data and many hours of interviews with officers and staff of all ranks’ to expose the force’s catastrophically failing disciplinary system. In the letter to Mark Rowley that accompanies the report, Baroness Casey summarised the conclusion of her investigation as thus: ‘the misconduct system is not delivering in a way that you, I, your officers or the public would expect it to’.
The report identifies eight key issues:
Misconduct cases take too long to resolve
When concerns about police conduct are raised, officers and staff have little faith that action will be taken in response
Allegations relating to sexual misconduct and other discriminatory behaviour (most notably, racism and misogyny) are less likely than other kinds of allegations to result in a ‘case to answer’ decision, and since 2013, only 0.71% of the 1,809 officers who faced allegations of sexual misconduct or discrimination were dismissed
The misconduct system is failing to deal with officers with patterns of unacceptable behaviour who have multiple allegations raised against them
Local Professional Standards Units (PSUs) are not being fully supported by the Met to deal with misconduct effectively
The definition of (and subsequent punishment for) ‘gross misconduct’ is unclear, and the threshold for what is counted as ‘gross misconduct’ is too high
There is racial disparity throughout the entire misconduct system at the Met
Regulation 13 (which allows for the removal of probationer officers) is being used neither fairly nor effectively
The review ‘highlighted cases to show how broken and substandard the Met police’s efforts were to shield the public from bigoted and potentially dangerous officers’ (The Guardian, 17th Oct). Women described difficulties in reporting misogynistic abuse, given that their line managers and supervisors often joined in with such behaviour. 47% of female employees surveyed in one Basic Command Unit reported that they had experienced misogyny at work at least once in the past six months alone. One particularly shocking case study was that of an officer who had a total of 11 misconduct claims raised against him, including for sexual harassment and assault, fraud, and abuse. He was still a serving officer at the time of the report’s publication though. If the Met can’t even deal with the misogynistic abuse its officers direct at their own colleagues, how can they expect us to trust them when it comes to violence against women more broadly? ‘As long as the police remain a threat to women’, said Mandu Reid, leader of the Women’s Equality Party, ‘they cannot begin to tackle the epidemic of violence against us’ (The Independent, 17th Oct).
The report also found that whenever issues relating to racism or discrimination were raised, the person who had raised the concern (rather than the person with the allegation raised against them) would be ‘labelled a trouble maker, which then led to unfair disciplinary action’. And while the misconduct system was ‘not sufficiently robust with white officers who breach professional standards’, the threshold for Black, Asian, and Minority Ethnicity officers was far lower. Complaints against this group by their colleagues are disproportionately higher than complaints against white officers: in the most recent financial year, Black officers and staff were 81% more likely than white colleagues to have an allegation of misconduct made against them. Notably, however, ‘there is no disproportionality in public complaints against police officers’ (our emphasis).
As Baroness Casey notes in her letter to Mark Rowley, none of these issues are new: ‘there are numerous reports and recommendations on many of the issues raised in this letter that go back decades including the key matter of racial disproportionality’. As many others have pointed out, how many damning reviews and reports will it take for something to actually be done? The same day the Casey review was published, the Home Office announced that they were launching an internal review of police dismissals across England and Wales ‘to ensure that the system is more effective in removing officers who are not fit to serve the public’ (Home Office, 17th Oct). But is this likely to lead to any meaningful change? And how might this play out in the context of the huge recruitment drive currently underway in policing in England and Wales, which Mark Rowley himself has admitted being concerned about (The National, 12th Oct)?
As one commentator put it, ‘As long as the Met is unable to police itself, it shouldn’t be fit to police Londoners either’. So, what should happen?
Centre for London chief exec Nick Bowes thinks that ‘only by giving the Met the resources, powers and leadership needed to ruthlessly root out those unsuitable to policing will public trust be restored’ (City AM, 18th Oct).
But to believe this is to ignore the structural problems that have plagued the force well beyond the Austerity Years™. The Met’s acquired more resources than other emergency services (Londoners need only check their council tax slips for the past few years to realise this). They’ve never had so many powers, yet are promised ever more by successive governments. And they have new leadership, again promising to fix what the last leaders could not and did not.
So, despite yet more fine words from Sir Mark Rowley to newly qualified officers at Hendon Police College during a ceremony for young officers recently, to ‘confront and challenge’ racist and misogynistic behaviour within the force (Evening Standard, 28th Oct), are we convinced that tightening the misconduct system and removing a bunch of ‘bad apples’ from the force will be enough? Will the systemic issues of street policing then simply go away? We’ll see.
Stop and search stats 2021-22
Last week, the Home Office released the annual stop and search dataset for the year ending March 2022. Published as part of the ‘police powers and procedures’ data, these stats show police-recorded information about stop and search and resultant arrests, age, gender, ethnicity, recorded reason for the stop, the specific legal power used, and more.
The 2021-2022 data shows a decline in the number of stop and searches conducted by police compared to the previous year: forces made just over half a million searches (530,365) were made, a decline of roughly a quarter (26% or 184,549) compared to 2020-21 (714,914).
We point out that the decrease in searches was driven by a 30% reduction in the number of searches for drugs under the Police and Criminal Evidence Act (falling from 484,917 in the previous year to 339,662 in 2021-22). Searches for drugs were the most common type of search, with offensive weapons coming in a distant second – as is the case almost every year.
But why was the overall number of searches lower in 2021-22 than in 2020-21, given that most of 2020-21 was spent in various levels of lockdown, with far fewer people around to search? Breaking down the stats by individual police force, we see that this reduction was actually driven by the UK’s largest police force – the Met – highlighting the dramatic effects of former commissioner Cressida Dick’s operational decision-making during the previous year as officers engaged in the ‘proactive’ policing of lockdown rules (and sometimes in the proactive policing of behaviour within the rules, too).
Taking the Met out of the equation, then, reveals an overall increase in the number of stop and searches in 2021-22. And, as usual, these searches rarely led to anything of note being found, as the below table shows:
For a more in-depth analysis of the stats, see our Twitter thread and corresponding article on our website.
Deaths from police contact, cases old and new
Chris Kaba
The inquest into the fatal shooting of Chris Kaba opened on the 4th of October. The IOPC lead investigator, Dean Brown, told the inquest that Chris had not been a suspect, and that the officers following the car Chris was driving ‘did not activate their lights or sirens’ – in contrast to a statement released by the Met in the aftermath of the shooting that said Chris had been shot ‘after a vehicle pursuit’, implying a car chase (The Guardian, 4th Oct; The Mirror, 4th Oct).
Oladeji Omishore
The family of Oladeji Omishore, who fell into the Thames after being Tasered by police officers in June this year, have taken legal action against the police watchdog, the IOPC, for failing to criminally investigate the officers involved – instead treating them as witnesses for the purposes of the investigation (BBC News, 7th Oct).
Waltham Cross man – identity unconfirmed
A man who reportedly appeared to be experiencing a mental health crisis died after being restrained by police in Waltham Cross, Hertfordshire in the early hours of the morning on the 8th of October. Officers had used PAVA spray on the man during the restraint; paramedics pronounced him dead at the scene just after midnight. An IOPC investigation has been launched (BBC News, 9th Oct).
Marius Ciolac
Fatally shot by Derbyshire Police on the 7th of October outside Derby police station. Officers also used a Taser, baton round, and stun grenade before fatally shooting Marius in the abdomen. Marius’s sister, who lives in Italy, only learned about the circumstances of her brother’s death from news coverage (ITV News, 14th Oct).
Other news
Met police using ankle tags to target young Black men, mayor’s report finds: Electronic ankle tags are being used to racially target and sentence young Black men for knife crime offences in a way that ‘may reflect unconscious bias’ among Met police officers, according to internal documents (The Guardian, 5th Oct).
South Wales police inspector convicted of assaulting vulnerable teenager: Dean Gittoes used ‘significant’ force to restrain the vulnerable 16-year-old who was filming in a public place near a police station, grabbing the boy’s hoodie and preventing him from breathing properly. He was then arrested and detained for seven hours under the Terrorism Act before being released without charge (The Guardian, 5th Oct).
Canadian police using DNA phenotyping in an attempt to ‘predict’ what a suspect looks like from their DNA: ‘At best, it’s guesswork. At worst, it’s just more stereotyping and profiling’, commented Griff Ferris of Fair Trials. Edmonton police, who announced the use of the measure on social media, later deleted the post (6th Oct).
Police forced to pay £6,000 after unlawful search and handcuffing of mixed-race 13-year-old: The boy’s mother, a serving police officer, launched a complaint at the time of the incident in 2018; four years later, the family have finally received compensation and an apology from the Met (The Independent, 12th Oct).
PEEL inspection reports published for Essex, Norfolk, Warwickshire, and Lancashire police forces: Inspectors called for increased external scrutiny in relation to the use of force in Essex, Norfolk, and Warwickshire, highlighted inconsistencies in the use of body-worn cameras, and in the case of Norfolk Constabulary, commented that ‘[t]he force must improve how officers record the grounds for stop and search or risk the public losing confidence in its use of these powers’ (HMICFRS, 14th Oct).
Police trialling body-worn video for police dogs: The helmet-mounted camera has been developed by drone designer Heliguy and deployed with Cumbria Police’s dog unit (BBC News, 19th Oct).
Bristol police officer suspended after allegedly assaulting a member of the public and telling a colleague to ‘go back to your own country’: He faces a police misconduct hearing at Avon and Somerset Police headquarters in Portishead next month (BBC News, 24th Oct).
March for justice: Thousands of people joined the bereaved relatives of Chris Kaba, Oladeji Omishore, Matthew Leahy, Jack Susianta and Leon Patterson as they gathered at Trafalgar Square in central London to march to Number 10 Downing Street and deliver a letter addressed to prime minister Rishi Sunak on Saturday the 30th of October (The Independent).
Alongside Marcia Rigg, an organiser at the United Families and Friends Campaign (UFFC) whose brother Sean Rigg died in police custody in 2008, they are calling for changes to the judicial process following state-related deaths involving the police.
New report exposes racial disparity in the use of police tech: The Racial Justice Network and Yorkshire Resists’s research, Mobilising Against Police Use of Biometric Fingerprint and Facial Recognition Technology, shows that Black people are four times more likely than white people to be stopped and scanned by police using this tech (31st Oct).
Section 60 watch*
London
Enfield (02 Oct), Haringey (02 Oct)
Thames Valley
Slough (03 Oct)
West Yorkshire
Huddersfield (07 Oct), Leeds (27 Oct)
Greater Manchester
Fallowfield (27 Oct)
* This is not a comprehensive list
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StopWatch.