To Convict A Copper?

A lot of attention was grabbed recently by Channel 4’s ‘fly on the wall’ documentary series, “To Catch A Copper”, which followed the trials and tribulations of one of our country’s Professional Standards Departments – in this case that of Avon & Somerset Police.

‘Catching a copper’ can be hard enough, given the sclerotic state of many PSD units, but what is even harder is getting the criminal conviction of a serving Police officer at trial in the Magistrates or Crown Court. A report in the Mirror newspaper this month highlighted that 158 Police Officers/ Police Staff were convicted of criminal offences in the 12 months to April 2023, but in my opinion this is really only the tip of the iceberg – as it remains far more difficult than it should be to get the Courts to convict a criminal in uniform, as opposed to one in civilian dress.

A case in point is that of PC Alan Kirkwood of Lincolnshire Police, who just this month walked free from Nottingham Crown Court, despite admitting kicking a defenceless man in the face. To make the situation even worse, the man he kicked was not the man he was attempting to apprehend – but in fact a ‘Good Samaritan’ who had come to PC Kirkwood’s aid, as the officer struggled with two suspected robbers, and who for his effort got a boot in the face and a broken nose.  

PC Kirkwood’s own body worn camera recorded the Officer – apparently mistaking his heroic helper for one of the suspects – training his taser on the man, ordering him to lie down on the ground and then, quite deliberately and apparently vindictively, kicking the shocked but completely compliant man in the face. In his defence, the Officer claimed that the kick was a “distraction strike” designed to protect himself and gain “compliance.”

PC Kirkwood it seems to me, had taken it upon himself to be judge, jury and executioner – issuing with his boot some ‘summary justice’ to the man he thought was a robber; this was a gross distortion and abuse of his duty as a Police Officer, but the real Judge presiding over Kirkwood’s trial for Actual Bodily Harm seemed to want to give the Officer a medal rather than sanction him for this. After the Jury delivered its ‘not guilty’ verdict, Judge James Sampson declared-

“This [prosecution] was never going to not fail and is a decision which proves a failure to understand the instruction of an English jury by asking them to convict a man of exemplary character with 43 years serving in the police or the military acting in good faith and doing his public duty but who made a mistake. It is simply not fair play.”

Thus, do experienced Judges seem to turn into gushing cheerleaders when it comes to Police Defendants, and the attitude of the Judge naturally has a very strong influence upon the Juries hearing these cases of Police violence. This is not at all an unusual outcome: see my blog post about a case in which the Police Officer who drove his car over a man’s head was ruled to have ‘no case to answer’ at Leicester Crown Court in 2019.

Judicial sympathy for Police Officers in these cases is only half of the story, however. Also upsetting the scales of justice, in my opinion, is the attitude of the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) which often seems ‘torn’ when it makes a decision to prosecute one of its criminal justice system colleagues in this way, resulting in half-hearted or lukewarm prosecutions of the Officer. This can lead to some strange decisions being made: notably, in the case of PC Kirkwood, the man who he assaulted was not called to give evidence, thus depriving the Jury of seeing and hearing the other half of the human story in this case – that of the man of good character who bravely helped a Police officer, only to become the victim of the Officer’s unprovoked attack. In this way, the victim was effectively rendered faceless, and the Jury’s focus and sympathy was naturally concentrated upon the long- serving ‘Copper’ in front of them.

Such attitudes are long- ingrained in our judiciary and amongst Crown prosecutors, and change will take a long time, but the good news is that we have other mechanisms for justice in such cases, principally the ability to sue the Police for assault and battery in the Civil courts of our country. This is what I did on behalf of the victim in the Nottingham case I referred to earlier, at the conclusion of which the Chief Constable and his officer were found to very much have a ‘case to answer’, in terms of significant damages.

Because in the civil compensation claims in which I specialize, you and I are the prosecutors.