Imagine being on your own at night in a side street, cornered by a gang who force you to the ground, break your arm, take and rifle through your wallet, mock and threaten you – and then order you to leave their ‘turf’ on pain of further violence. A harrowing scenario; but this is exactly what happened to my client Isaac at the hands of Officers from West Midlands Police.
In the early hours of 21 September 2019, Isaac, a black British man, was in Birmingham City Centre. Isaac had been out socialising and he intended to travel to his mother’s address in order to sleep there.
At or around 02:00, Isaac was on Cumberland Street, close to Brindley Place, when he was approached by a police officer, now known to Isaac as PC Hurrell.
PC Hurrell asked Isaac to stop. Isaac complied with PC Hurrell’s instruction and stopped. Isaac asked PC Hurrell what the problem was.
Without any warning, PC Hurrell took hold of Isaac’s forearms and gripped them tightly.
Isaac was shocked and surprised at PC Hurrell’s unnecessary use of force and he defensively pulled away and out of PC Hurrell’s grip.
At this stage, Isaac noticed that PC Hurrell was wearing a camera on his body. Isaac was therefore under the impression that PC Hurrell was filming their interaction from the outset. This gave him some reassurance, although he was taken aback at the officer’s aggressive attitude.
Other officers now joined PC Hurrell – PCs Mervyn, Ingram and Davies. They were also all wearing cameras.
One of the officers, believed to be PC Mervyn, took hold of Isaac’s left arm, while another officer, believed to be PC Ingram, took hold of his right arm. Isaac was compliant both verbally and physically, and did not resist being held by the officers.
Only at this point did PC Hurrell state that the officers wanted to search Isaac. However, PC Hurrell provided no further information to Isaac about what the search was about and nor did any of the other officers.
Isaac asked the officers why he was being detained and what was going on. Still no justification for any search or detention, nor indeed any further information at all, was provided to Isaac by any of the officers.
Instead, the officer who was holding Isaac’s left arm, believed to be PC Mervyn, kicked Isaac’s legs, causing him to trip to the ground, in a face-down/prone position.
When Isaac was on the ground, the officers held him there, and forced his arms together behind his back.
Whilst this was happening, Isaac felt the officer on his left arm, believed to be PC Mervyn, bend it in an unnatural way, by pressing down on the upper part of the arm and simultaneously pulling up on the lower part of the same arm. Isaac was caused to experience real fear for his life at this point, in view of the level of force being used against him by multiple officers.
Isaac heard a crunching sound from his left elbow, accompanied by immediate, severe pain, which caused him to cry out. The officers nevertheless continued handcuffing Isaac, disregarding his distress.
Contrary to Isaac’s initial impression, and as he later discovered, it was only at this point that any of the four Officers activated their body-worn video cameras.
Once the officers had applied handcuffs to Isaac’s wrists, they lifted him back up and onto his feet.
Isaac continued to exclaim and complain about the pain to his arm. One of the officers, believed to be PC Ingram, said, “We’ll sort your arm out in a second.”
Rather than offer any first aid – or even just verbal sympathy – however, PC Hurrell now concentrated on belatedly complying with the GOWISELY rules for street stop and searches, informing Isaac that it was the officer’s intention to search him under Section 23 of the Misuse of Drugs Act.
The officers then commenced a search of Isaac’s person, which included placing their hands in Isaac’s pockets removing his property from them, patting Isaac down and holding him tightly by his injured left arm.
During the search, and in response to Isaac’s cries of pain, one of the officers, believed to be PC Mervyn, said, mockingly, “You’ll win a BAFTA for this.”
PC Mervyn also told Isaac to “Shut up” in relation to his complaints about his arm.
Isaac asked the officers to allow him to straighten his arm in order to alleviate the pain he was in, but this perfectly reasonable request was refused and they kept him in cuffs until the search was done.
Throughout the course of the search, Isaac continued to complain about the pain to his arm and what had been done to him, which he said had not been needed. Isaac stated that he had been engaging with the officers, that what had been done to him was “Harsh”. He knew he was innocent and would have had no reason to resist the officers.
Their search was, of course, entirely negative.
Following the search, however, even as they released Isaac from his temporary imprisonment in the handcuffs, PC Ingram informed him that he was going to be dispersed from the area. The officer stated that she had authority from their inspector to ‘disperse’ anyone from the area that she believed “could cause anti-social behaviour”. The officer informed Isaac that he had 15 minutes to leave the city centre.
Another officer, believed to again be PC Mervyn, threatened Isaac that he was now in danger of being “locked up” for “breach of a dispersal order”. Isaac said that he did not know what the officer’s problem was and informed the officers that he perceived the treatment he had received from them was motivated by his race i.e. because he was black.
In Isaac’s own words –
“It hurts, mate it hurts like a fucker and I don’t know why you would do that. It’s inhumane, man. If I was being a cunt, I could understand, but I am trying not to be ‘cos I know these things happen, but you – imagine if I was a cunt, he could have killed me. If he worked in America, jeez, I’d be shot to death.”
PC Ingram then handed Isaac the “dispersal notice” and the officers left the scene, leaving Isaac with a short time to get out of the city center or face arrest simply for the ‘crime’ of being there.
Section 35 of the Anti-Social Behaviour, Crime & Policing Act 2014 provides as follows-
Directions excluding a person from an area
(1)If the conditions in subsections (2) and (3) are met and an authorisation is in force under section 34, a constable in uniform may direct a person who is in a public place in the locality specified in the authorisation—
(a)to leave the locality (or part of the locality), and
(b)not to return to the locality (or part of the locality) for the period specified in the direction (“the exclusion period”).
(2)The first condition is that the constable has reasonable grounds to suspect that the behaviour of the person in the locality has contributed or is likely to contribute to—
(a)members of the public in the locality being harassed, alarmed or distressed, or
(b)the occurrence in the locality of crime or disorder.
(3)The second condition is that the constable considers that giving a direction to the person is necessary for the purpose of removing or reducing the likelihood of the events mentioned in subsection (2)(a) or (b).
It is worth pausing here to note that although Isaac was considerably less bothered about this ‘insult’ added to his injury, as he had been on his way out of the city centre when the Police had stopped him anyway – I think that this ‘dispersal notice’ was as an unlawful a use of Police powers as was the rest of the incident. The Officer who was issuing it could not define or describe any anti-social behaviour from Isaac, and instead relied upon her imagination, telling him – “You’ve got no reasonable excuse to be up here, so I believe you are either going to commit an offence or give us a bit of grief later on, so therefore…” In other words, the officer had turned the power to disperse someone suspected of harmful behaviour into the dispersal of someone for failing to have a ‘reason’ for being in the city centre – a public space, of course. Thankfully, we do not live in a country in which Police Officers are the arbiters of who gets to come into public spaces and who does not, provided they are law-abiding – but this night PC Ingham and her colleagues behaved as if they did, and already having had his arm broken by them, Isaac was in no position to argue with them.
Furthermore, despite what had been said about the officers “sorting [Isaac’s] arm out in a second”, at no time during the interaction with the officers did any of them provide Isaac with any first aid, nor did they offer to obtain or offer to assist him to obtain medical attention.
Isaac travelled to his mother’s home and attempted to go to sleep there. However, due to the pain Isaac was still experiencing to his left arm, early the following morning he attended Birmingham City Hospital A&E. Following an X-ray, Isaac was found to have a fracture to his left elbow and was discharged with a sling/collar and cuff and analgesia.
On 25 September 2019, Isaac made a police complaint by telephone, which was subsequently recorded.
Thereafter, Isaac attended hospital follow-up and physiotherapy for his fractured elbow which rendered him unfit for work as a joiner/carpenter for several months. The psychological impact which he received from this incident, was even more long- lasting.
Playing the Blue Card?
On 7 April 2020, West Midland Police’s Professional Standards Department (“PSD”) completed an investigation report in relation to Isaac’s complaint, although he was not notified of the outcome until 8 June.
As a result of the complaint report, Isaac discovered that none of the officers had made contemporaneous notes of the force used on him on 21 September 2019, nor had any of the officers completed a Use of Force form, and this despite the fact that they had pinned him chest down on the ground, putting him at risk of potentially fatal positional asphyxia, handcuffed him and he had undoubtedly brought his broken arm to their attention.
These are hardly matters to be taken lightly amongst an Officer’s record- keeping responsibilities, but the only written, contemporaneous documentation completed by the officers were PC Hurrell’s brief notes relating to having stopped and searched Isaac and the stop and search record, neither of which referred to him having been injured by the officers. The complaint had instead placed great reliance on ‘long after the event’ accounts provided by the four Officers between March and April 2020 (i.e some 6 months later).
Isaac also discovered that the part of the incident during which he had sustained the injury to his left elbow had not been recorded on any officers body-worn video camera.
The investigation report determined that Isaac’s complaint was “not upheld” and that there had been no criminal offences identified and no breaches that would warrant misconduct proceedings. Merely a number of “learning points” were identified for the officers relating to activating body-worn video cameras and contemporaneous record-keeping.
On 11 June 2020, Isaac appealed to the Independent Office for Police Conduct (“IOPC”).
Sadly, the IOPC decided not to uphold Isaac’s appeal, again in reliance on the accounts of the officers provided in March and April 2020.
This is a perfect example of all that is imperfect with the Police Complaint system –
- An investigation which took over 8 months to conclude (and only after Isaac had to complain about the length of the complaint process itself).
- Police Officers given the ‘benefit of the doubt’ in the absence of objective video recording or contemporaneous written records, despite the fact that they were responsible for the non-existence of these recordings.
- The IOPC taking the ‘path of least resistance’ and rubber-stamping the complaint outcome report, despite its flaws.
During the incident, when Isaac was protesting about what the officers had done to his arm, there was some debate about whether he was ‘playing the black card’, with the officers insisting that he would have been treated in exactly the same way had he been white. I think the truth of the matter is that those officers, subsequently and undoubtedly, benefited from being able to ‘play the Blue card’ – that unofficial but very real ‘get out of jail free’ card for officers which renders the majority of the Police-investigating-Police complaints process a pointless charade.
Calling their Bluff
Thankfully, I am not dismayed by the ‘blue card’ and I am more than happy to call the bluff of Police forces on behalf of my clients who deserve so much better than the white-washing of their legitimate complaints and the denial of their meritorious claims.
I brought Court proceedings on behalf of Isaac, and after a hard- fought battle of almost 2 years duration – during which the Chief Constable continued to dispute liability and assert that his officers had done no wrong – I secured for Isaac, shortly before trial, a settlement from West Midlands Police of £27,500 damages plus his legal costs.
So, in the end, it turned out that PC Mervyn was very wrong: Isaac did not win a BAFTA.
He won justice.
My client’s name has been changed.
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