In the Summer of 2022, my client Matilda was driving her car along the A3 northbound in Surrey; also in the car were her 20-year-old son and two of his friends. It was a routine journey on an ordinary day; and little did Matilda and her passengers know that a Police ambush was being prepared ahead – and they would become its target.
Matilda exited the A3 at junction 10 and approached the roundabout at the end of the slip road, intending to traverse the roundabout and join the M25 motorway. As the vehicle approached the traffic light-controlled junction with the roundabout, my client noted a bus had broken down in the fourth lane on the slip road, blocking it, and accordingly she stayed in the third lane.
As Matilda continued driving past the bus, a “stinger” device was suddenly and without warning thrown across the road in front of the vehicle by PC Downs of Surrey Police.
Stingers, also known as road spikes, are a form of device used by Police and military organisations worldwide to enable them to intercept/ incapacitate target vehicles. They are a belt of spikes capable of being quickly whipped out across the road and which then rip and puncture the tyres of the moving target, slamming it into an immediate and violent halt.
Matilda’s car ran over the “stinger”, which punctured all four tyres, stopping it dead and throwing all its occupants about. As this occurred, Police Sergeant Ayrton pulled his police car in front, blocking the road and causing a line of traffic to form behind my client’s now-disabled vehicle.
PC Downs approached Matilda’s car and reached in through the open driver’s side window to take the keys from the ignition, whilst shouting at her in an aggressive manner, his hand hovering near his taser gun. At this point, however, PS Ayrton shouted at his colleague that this was ‘the wrong car!’ PC Downs acknowledged his gross mistake with breathtaking brevity – shouting “my bad” to Matilda – before running away from her car and further down the line of vehicles that had formed behind, followed shortly afterwards by PS Ayrton.
The officer’s attitude, summed up by his flippant remark, is almost incredible: he had deployed a dangerous weapon, specifically designed to engineer a car accident, which could have resulted in even more serious injuries than it did – and he attempted to brush it off as if he had accidentally bumped shoulders with someone, or fumbled on a computer-game controller.
The officers then approached another car several vehicles behind my clients’, and apprehended the driver of that car, who had evidently been their actual target. PC Downs had hugely ‘jumped the gun’ in his deployment of the stinger. During this time, no officers remained with my clients or offered them any further apology or explanation. Matilda was extremely distressed and began to experience a panic attack.
After some time, PS Ayrton returned to the vehicle and spoke to my clients. He informed them that the officers had been intending to stop a car further behind them, which was suspected to be stolen (it had triggered ANPR – Automatic Number Plate Recognition – cameras as possibly bearing ‘cloned’ plates) but that unfortunately there had “been some confusion about which car it is we needed to stop.”
Sadly, it transpired that the Police had not just stopped one vehicle wrongly – the driver immediately behind Matilda, also entirely innocent, had likewise found his vehicle becoming ‘collateral damage’ as it also hit the stinger.
Initially, PS Ayrton informed Matilda that the officers would not assist in recovering or repairing the vehicle, despite their acknowledged “bad”, and she would be obliged to make her own arrangements for alternative transport and repairs. However, after Matilda called her husband, who is in fact a Police Sergeant in a neighbouring Force, it was agreed that the officers would make the necessary arrangements for the recovery of the vehicle.
After several hours at the roadside, Matilda’s vehicle was recovered and taken to a garage where its tyres were replaced.
My client subsequently submitted a complaint to the Surrey Police’s Professional Standards Department (PSD), who in response admitted that PC Downs had made a “visual misidentification” of her vehicle and that accordingly his “service was unacceptable”- one of those tortuous pieces of Police jargon in which empathy is buried in bureaucracy.
Matilda suffered nasty seat belt ‘burn’ injuries across her stomach, hips, shoulder, and chest; but the incident had also left marks in her mind. At first, she had feared that they were being ‘carjacked’ by criminals; even when she realised that the people outside her car were Police Officers, she feared being tasered by them – particularly given PC Downs’ initial aggression. For a long time afterwards she suffered from anxiety and sleep disturbance, as well as a fear of driving which was compounded whenever Police vehicles were around.
I have considerable experience in representing people who have suffered exactly this form of Police stinger ambush. I gathered expert medical evidence to establish the extent of the impact upon Matilda and her son and am pleased to confirm that shortly after I issued Court proceedings against Surrey Police, I was able to settle their claims for significant damages plus legal costs.
The message my client and I wish to send to Surrey Police at the end of this, is that stingers are potentially highly dangerous weapons, which must only be used with the utmost due care and caution – not treated like toys in one of those games of cops and robbers which, sadly and all too often, real life officers like to play.
My client’s name has been changed.
Iain Gould - Actions Against the Police Solicitor 
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