On the Manchester Airport incident
I have read and watched a lot of commentary about the Manchester Airport incident on the 23rd July. The focus has been on a brief video clip which appears to show a police officer using apparently excessive force – two kicks to the head – against a male suspect who is lying belly down on the ground.
Several commentators, including former police officers, have stated that they find it hard to envisage any circumstances when that level of force would be reasonable. And while I will not pass judgement one way or the other on the officer’s actions at this stage, I can say the armchair narration is naïve and simplistic.
I do not intend this article to be a blow-by-blow analysis of what took place in Terminal 2. My aim is to talk about the problems with how police disciplinary matters are conducted, the lack of a clear legal framework concerning the use of force, and how this investigation has already been compromised by those in charge.
My experience with inquiries of this nature leads me to suspect – hopefully wrongly – that the officer’s fate is a foregone conclusion. He will probably be found guilty of gross misconduct and charged with criminal assault. With this already being a public spectacle, Greater Manchester Police will sack him to save face.
This is the same GMP who are – I discovered via a recent FOI inquiry – associated with Stonewall, Stop Hate UK, The Proud Trust and African Rainbow Family. Identity politics is firmly embedded in the force, so the appeasement of so-called Muslim community leaders comes as no surprise and could indicate bias.
Catherine Bates of the Independent Office for Police Conduct stated on the 26th July: ‘We are meeting with a number of community leaders in Rochdale [of grooming gangs notoriety] this afternoon to listen to their concerns and explain our role.’ This is not the duty of the IOPC and raises questions about its impartiality.
It is worth taking a moment to discuss IOPC investigations. There are a number of reasons why they take on an inquiry. They investigate civilian police staff as well as police officers. Investigations are classed as misconduct or gross misconduct. A criminal investigation might be bolted onto the latter.
A staff member or officer found guilty of misconduct may receive sanctions in the workplace such as a training requirement. A person found guilty of gross misconduct can expect to lose his job. Many complaints are malicious, but even when this is clearly the case, the IOPC takes months to investigate.
When the IOPC serves a misconduct notice – usually via the subject’s inspector – they offer a summary of the complaint and state the staff member has the option to respond. However, should the subject wish to wait for the case to proceed on its merits alone, the IOPC falsely views that as a refusal to participate.
This is then followed by a demand to attend an interview, and this can take place at the IOPC’s offices in Canary Wharf. The half-dozen or so IOPC investigators I have spoken to were often young graduates with no policing experience at all. Some are unable, or even unwilling, to understand the realities of policing.
So who does understand those realities? Well, the female officer whose nose was broken by a violent offender at Manchester Airport probably has a good idea, and it is shameful that politicians and GMP have failed to utter robust and swift condemnations of that savage attack. The CCTV footage is appalling.
Instead, we hear mealy-mouthed comments about ‘context’. Well, here’s some context for you: there were multiple offenders, all apparently fit and strong young men, who assaulted police officers and subsequently refused to comply when arrested. They were arrested for affray, which is a serious public disorder offence.
Affray is defined in section 3 of the Public Order Act 1986 as follows:
“A person is guilty of affray if he uses or threatens unlawful violence towards another and his conduct is such as would cause a person of reasonable firmness present at the scene to fear for his personal safety.”
The following subsection is relevant when there is more than one offender:
“Where 2 or more persons use or threaten the unlawful violence, it is the conduct of them taken together that must be considered for the purposes of subsection (1).”
Let’s be absolutely clear: this is a serious offence which is surpassed in the Act only by violent disorder (section 2) and riot (section 1). The video evidence suggests violent disorder might actually be a better charge in the Manchester case because it applies to ‘3 or more persons who are present together’.
Riot does not apply here because the minimum number of people is twelve. (There is an unspoken rule that riot is never charged, even when the numbers are sufficient, because such a charge is an admission that the police have lost control of law and order and are therefore responsible for financial damages.)
To emphasise the point: threats of violence alone can be sufficient to justify an arrest for affray. The airport incident went far beyond threats. It involved multiple assailants who knocked officers down and allegedly attempted to steal a firearm. They were eventually cornered but still refused to follow clear instructions.
The video that was originally circulated – which included the kicks – appears to reveal much more than has been discussed. The suspect on the ground is not safely incapacitated and seems to be trying to get up. There are several other assailants still uncontrolled. Even the person with the camera goes to intervene.
The role of the police officers in a scenario such as this is complicated. To comment that the person in question was already on the ground does not allow for the fact that, until he is completely restrained, he continues to pose a danger in a precarious situation. That threat must be negated by subduing him.
I’m addressing these points in broad terms; the details of the airport incident will need to be examined closely. But I can say from my own policing experience that it usually takes a minimum of four – uninjured – officers to gain careful control of one violent offender. The odds in Manchester did not favour the police.
Use of force needs to be discussed. A key piece of legislation is section 3 of the Criminal Law Act 1967:
“A person may use such force as is reasonable in the circumstances in the prevention of crime, or in effecting or assisting in the lawful arrest of offenders or suspected offenders or of persons unlawfully at large.”
The important wording is ‘reasonable in the circumstances’, and the fate of the officer in Manchester will depend upon how this is interpreted. It’s important to add that section 76 of the Criminal Justice and Immigration Act 2008 considers the perception of the individual at the time, even if he is mistaken.
So, not only should the officer’s actions be judged objectively by the standard of reasonableness from the CLA, but also his subjective perception of the dangers that he and his colleagues faced from violent offenders who had already injured some of their number and were still not under absolute control.
The commentary about the officer’s actions so far seems to disregard the section 76 aspect of the use of force. That in itself is cause for concern, but the failure to acknowledge the severity of the incident is also alarming. If it is true that a firearm was nearly stolen, then we are talking about an even greater peril.
I have also read some nonsense about the use of Taser. The function of a Taser is to cause a temporary disruption to the body’s nervous system. Via electric shock it causes brief pain and a spasm of the muscles. Its effectiveness is not assured though, depending as it does on the placement of two barbed electrodes.
Taser can fail because the barbs do not make good contact with the skin, perhaps due to the thickness of clothing, or because a barb becomes dislodged. Being tasered does not always prevent the target getting up and returning to the fight. It can be necessary to employ a different means of subduing an offender.
Every police officer hopes that a situation can be calmed through dialogue, but it is usually obvious when there is no chance of that happening. It is unnerving to face a single violent person; a crowd is many times worse, particularly when the bystanders are volatile. It is chaos. Armchair commentators have no clue.
One would like to think that objective investigators would give very careful consideration to the entire incident as well as the legal position. At face value, the standard of ‘reasonable force’ seems a sensible one. But is that truly the case? Does it adequately take account of the threats police officers endure?
If one interprets ‘reasonable’ as the legislators intended, we’re in safe territory. ‘Reasonable’ can include killing someone if an officer’s – or someone else’s – life is at risk. But the problem is this: the word is now generally considered to mean ‘minimum’ by the College of Policing, the IOPC and ignorant critics alike.
The force required to stop a violent act and detain the perpetrator often needs to go far beyond what naïve commentators would describe as ‘minimum force’. It cannot be equal to the threat from the aggressor. The goal, as stated above, is to subdue the offender. This does not justify punishment but it should overwhelm.
Take this as an example. I once attended an A&E department where a suspect was flicking blood at staff and patients while screaming at the top of his lungs and spitting. What would be reasonable force in those circumstances? He needed to be overpowered, and that included pressing his head into the ground.
Until there is an understanding and appreciation for the fact that the police’s response must be far firmer than the threat they are faced with, we will remain in this ridiculous quagmire where the uninformed public and even minor-celebrity lawyers can make unfounded allegations of racist police brutality.
I’ve written in earlier posts about numerous issues within British policing so I won’t repeat them here. But, as a minimum, the role of the police needs to be precisely defined. It isn’t good enough to perpetuate the silly nostalgic notion of friendly bobbies with Victorian values, or claim UK policing is the best in the world.
There also needs to be an understanding, supported unwaveringly by politicians and chief officers, that the public have a duty to comply with the lawful directions of the police, especially when being detained. It should be known that failure to comply will result in an additional charge of resisting arrest.
But perhaps more important than all of this is the need to look at the offenders’ roles in criminal matters. What we have seen with the Manchester Airport incident is the presentation of those involved as victims. This is deliberate and, one might argue, an unethical attempt by a lawyer to influence or thwart a trial.
So what needs to be done to make it clear that nothing can hinder the criminal investigation and that the perpetrator has accountability for his own actions during the crime? I have argued for a presumption of criminal misadventure. This should become law. Let me explain what this means in practice.
Many people are familiar with the presumption of legality, which states that a person is presumed to have acted lawfully unless the contrary is proved. We normally hear that in the phrase ‘innocent until proven guilty’. There are a variety of other legal presumptions on a range of topics, e.g. sexual consent.
A presumption of criminal misadventure would state that a perpetrator who is found guilty of an offence is responsible for any harm that befalls himself during the criminal act, whether by accident or as a result of his detention, unless he can prove otherwise. This would not negate the presumption of legality.
So, if you don’t want to fall through a conservatory roof, don’t climb up there to burgle a house. If you don’t want to get knocked off a stolen moped during a police pursuit, don’t steal the vehicle. And if you don’t want to get hurt after punching a police officer in the face, obey commands when the police arrest you.
This, to me, seems obvious. The burden of proving the police used excessive force should fall to the defendant, not the IOPC, police professional standards departments, chief constables or idiots on social media. The current method looks for scapegoats and immediately seeks to punish police officers.
There are a number of other details which are worth discussing. Although the focus has been on a single officer, and no comment has been made about the others (including those who were injured), it is probable that all the officers who attended will be placed under investigation by the IOPC simply for being present.
They will be expected to provide statements and attend interviews. There is nothing untoward about that, but it means that every officer involved will be distracted for months while the investigation drags on. The apparent scapegoating of the principal officer will deeply affect morale and trust on his firearms unit.
Police use-of-force training is called ‘defensive skills’. It involves very basic baton, incapacitant spray and handcuffing techniques, taught on one day per year. There is nothing in the syllabus that resembles martial arts training – not even rudimentary grappling skills. It’s entirely unsuitable for most violent situations.
Therefore most frontline officers are completely unprepared to tackle the violence that they are subjected to, and it often comes from young thugs who are trained in boxing or a martial art, or others who are high on drugs. The term ‘defensive skills’ is deliberately intended to sound soft and non-confrontational.
There are many other questions to answer about the quality of police leadership and the priorities of chief officers. There should only ever be one response to an incident like the affray at Manchester Airport, and it should look like this: ‘This is a live criminal investigation and we will not comment until it is concluded.’
Instead, we have heard about community engagement, the suspension of the police officer and the referral to the Crown Prosecution Service by the IOPC to see if a criminal charge is appropriate against him. And this is from the quango that normally takes months to investigate the most trivial of occurrences.
So, without drawing a conclusion about the officer’s conduct (as so many have already done), I have to say that I am nervous about the way this investigation has begun. I am not afraid to criticise the police when they make very obvious mistakes – particularly around free speech – but this case is not that simple.
I have concerns that investigations by the IOPC are conducted not by policing experts but by unqualified civilians. I worry that the College of Policing obfuscates on difficult matters to avoid liability. And I fear that police chiefs are more willing to sacrifice their officers than defend them. I hope to be proved wrong.