I have written before about how the Courts of England and Wales expect Police Officers on the ‘frontline of the thin blue line’ to display reasonably thick skins when it comes to unpleasant, but every day, swear words used in their presence – and not to ‘weaponise’ the Public Order Act order to punish people who are being disrespectful, or even merely ‘cheeky’ in their presence.
In this respect, the law has not changed since I wrote this blog post in 2011 regarding the case of Harvey v Director of Public Prosecutions (2011) EWHC B1(Admin) l in which the High Court reminded the Police that “Parliament has not made it an offence to swear in public” and cited with approval the comments of Glidewell LJ in DPP v Orum [1989] –
“Very frequently words and behaviour with which Police Officers will be wearily familiar will have little emotional impact on them save that of boredom. It may well be that, in appropriate circumstances, justices will decide as a question of fact that the words and behaviour were not likely in all the circumstances to cause harassment, alarm or distress to either of the Police Officers. That is a question of fact for the justices to be decided in all the circumstances, the time, the place, the nature of the words used, who the Police Officers are, and so on.”
Down the years, I have also recounted the stories of some of the many football fans whom I have helped to win substantial damages when it is the behaviour of the Police Officers policing the crowd which turns out to be the real hooliganism.
This week’s blog post brings both of these recurrent themes into focus, as I explain what befell my client Jack W and how I helped him to secure a court judgment against and compensation from Greater Manchester Police following an incident after the Manchester Derby in January 2023.
Jack had attended the match at Old Trafford with his brother and friends, and after the game finished was part of the large exodus of fans heading towards the local Metrolink station. Jack was carrying a can of lager and a tray of chips and gravy.
Jack accepts that as he was walking along he mischievously called out “pigs” at two Police Officers, now known to be PS Ritchie and PC Shahhet.
The Officers then rapidly approached Jack and PS Ritchie questioned him “What did you say?”, to which Jack replied “You heard”.
PS Ritchie then grabbed Jack’s wrist and pulled him from the (peaceful) crowd, whilst PC Shahhet removed the can of beer and tray of chips from Jack’s hands.
Jack was escorted towards an off- road area and pushed against a metal fence. A third Officer, now known to be PC Sharples, also closed in and together the three Officers began bending and pulling Jack’s arms, hurting his wrists and then began standing on his left foot and kicking his legs in an apparent attempt to trip him to the ground.
Bizarrely, two of the Officers then took hold of Jack’s legs (one Officer holding each leg) and lifted Jack up into the air, where my client found himself swaying precariously – above the Officers heads – as if they were cheerleaders trying to build some kind of human pyramid. The Officers then dropped Jack to the ground, whereupon one of them kneed him in the head.
You won’t be surprised to read that this manoeuvre by the Police – lifting Jack up into the air by his legs – was not a ‘Home Office approved’ use of force technique. When I saw mobile phone footage of this incident, I was frankly shocked. The Officers had placed Jack into a position of great danger, and it was only good fortune that he did not sustain potentially life changing injuries in a break-neck fall.
Even as it was, Jack did not avoid injury – the three Officers applied further force to him as he lay face down upon the ground, grinding his face into the ground as his hands were handcuffed behind his back, and causing Jack to suffer a cut above his eye which bled profusely.
At this time, still no Officer had told Jack that he was under arrest. The Police do not have powers of detention without arrest, except in limited circumstances which did not apply here – so there is no doubt that Jack was not only being unlawfully assaulted, he was also being falsely imprisoned.
Jack was brought to his feet and caged in the back of a Police van, before being driven to hospital, given the substantial gash above his eyebrow.
On arrival at the hospital, common sense at last seemed to prevail and the Officers removed Jack’s handcuffs and released him, allowing him to seek help from A&E staff for his injury without suffering the insult of being marched in as a Police prisoner.
In response to the letter of claim which I sent to Greater Manchester Police on behalf of my client, the Police flat-out denied liability, and disclosed statements from their Officers asserting that all of their uses of force upon Jack were lawful for the purposes of effecting his arrest for a Section 5 Public Order Act offence.
Section 5 of the Public Order Act 1986 provides as follows –
Harassment, alarm or distress.
(1) A person is guilty of an offence if he—
(a) uses threatening or abusive words or behaviour, or disorderly behaviour, or
(b) displays any writing, sign or other visible representation which is threatening or abusive,
within the hearing or sight of a person likely to be caused harassment, alarm or distress thereby.
As I am sure you will gather from my earlier comments, based on my thorough knowledge of the case law, I rejected GMP’s assertion that Jack’s act of calling the Police Officers ‘pigs’ could have constituted such an offence. Surely none of the many robust Police Officers in the vicinity, on football crowd control duty, could have possibly been caused “harassment, alarm or distress” by the use of that puerile, but also pretty inoffensive, word.
Furthermore, any suggestion that actual members of the public in the vicinity would have been alarmed by Jack’s use of this porcine pejorative was equally unlikely. The only members of the public in the area were Jack’s fellow football fans, none of whom, I am confident, would have been shocked to hear that word – and many of whom were, frankly, probably thinking it. Jack’s behaviour has to be seen in the context of his being part of a football crowd – not a convention of nuns or choir boys.
To my mind, the Officers could and should have simply ignored Jack’s run-of-the-mill insult. It was totally unnecessary for them to lay hands upon him – pushing, shoving and twisting him up. The Police Officers were wasting their own time; they were running the risk of completely unnecessarily antagonising the football crowd; and, as I have pointed out, they were also putting Jack at risk of far more serious injuries even than those that he actually sustained.
It was obvious to me that the Police were going to have real problems in justifying what they did to Jack, although that did not stop PS Ritchie having a stab at it in the statement that he wrote after the incident. This was how he described the key part of the incident, when Jack was raised up into the air by Officers holding his legs –
“At one point he lifted himself above myself and the other two Officers, saying something along the lines of “even three of you can’t get me”….we managed to coordinate our movements and take [Jack] to the floor”.
This was clearly nonsense. How does a person ‘lift himself above’ another person in a situation like this? Jack was obviously being lifted up by the Officers; unless PS Ritchie was attempting to suggest that my client was levitating?
The Officers had got themselves into a ‘Keystone Cops’ mess, and had caused real injury and harm to my client in the process. Faced with the Police denial of liability, I advised Jack about the strengths of his case and recommended that he bring Court proceedings to hold the Chief Constable to account for the behaviour of his Officers. Jack courageously accepted my advice – because even when you have a strong case and a lawyer who is an expert in this field – going to Court can still be a daunting, lengthy and stressful process.
However, I am pleased to confirm that these proceedings have been speedily concluded in Jack’s favour. I secured Judgment for him against the Chief Constable and a settlement of £10,000 plus legal costs.
I trust that those of you who are ‘season ticket’ holders to this Blog will tell any football fans you know to reach out to me, should they need advice and assistance when the Police Officers who are supposed to be the agents of public order, become its disruptors; hooligans in uniform.
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