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Former PC Nicholas Peacock has been jailed for misconduct in public office after having been found to have had a sexual relationship with a criminal suspect in a case he was investigating. 

Peacock, who was with West Mercia Police at the time of the offence, has been sentenced to 18 months imprisonment. He pleaded guilty to the charge.  His actions had also caused harm to the criminal case which he was supposed to be investigating.

Acting West Mercia Deputy Chief Constable Rachel Jones commented as follows:

“The dishonesty and lack of integrity shown by Nicholas Peacock is deplorable…. He abused his power as a Police Officer, and in the process totally undermined the trust which the victim had placed in him to investigate the case fairly and impartially”.

Sadly, Peacock was not the first, and nor will he be the last, Officer to be convicted of this particularly sinister type of misconduct in public office.  It is absolutely an abuse of power – but as I have written before, the warning to the Police is that it is that very power which attracts this type of man to the profession in the first place and, historically, the strong strain of “toxic masculinity” in policing culture which has excused and even enabled this type of behaviour.

Policing the night- time economy, as it is phrased in modern jargon, is a common task for today’s ‘beat cop’.  The job of such Police patrols is, understandably, to help maintain law and order at times and places which can become fraught and a dangerous given the alcohol on which much of that economy is based.

The Police therefore do play a crucial role in keeping our city centres safe and allowing the vast majority of revellers to stay safe and have fun. But that does not mean that the Police can be excused when it is their Officers who turn out to be the dangers to the drinkers rather than the other way around.

In June 2022 my client Owen Andrews travelled to Liverpool for a night out with four friends, only to have their night ended by Police brutality. The recent settlement of his claim was prominently featured by the BBC’s Jonny Humphries in this recent news report, and I can provide further details about the case here.

Owen and his friends arrived in Liverpool early evening, checked in at a local hotel and then went out about 10pm/11pm, visiting a succession of bars before going to a ‘Subway’ restaurant to purchase food.

At approximately 3.45am Owen and his friends were making their way back through the city centre to their hotel, when Owen became aware that a Police van had stopped and was talking to one of his friends (who had been walking behind Owen).

Several uniformed Officers then alighted from the van and seeing them engaging with his friend, Owen approached and began to record events on his mobile phone.  This was a perfectly legitimate activity for Owen to be performing, as I have previously made clear. Without mobile phone footage, many modern episodes of Police misconduct would have gone unevidenced and unproven.

Owen was told to keep back by a female Officer. He protested that his friend done nothing wrong and walked around the female Officer, whilst remaining several feet away from where his friend was being dealt with by the other Officers.

Another Officer, now known to be Special Constable Gillon, instructed Owen to move back, but then, before Owen had had an opportunity to do so, the Officer then physically pushed Owen backwards saying, “Move away”. 

Although Owen stepped backwards, SC Gillon now grabbed hold of my client by the neck of his shirt and forcibly took him to the ground, whereupon Owen felt Officers delivering multiple strikes and blows to his body.

Whilst my client had been drinking, he had in no way been behaving in a disorderly manner.  Not for the first time I am caused to reflect on how often the two elements of that offence – “drunk and disorderly behaviour” – have been artificially brought together by two separate parties – a civilian who has been drinking, set upon by disorderly Officers. 

Whilst Owen was lying on his back on the ground, in a helpless, prone position, offering no resistance, SC Gillon, standing over Owen, deliberately sprayed him directly in the face with PAVA incapacitant gas. Owen immediately experienced pain and discomfort, he struggled to breathe, and his eyes became swollen. My client’s discomfort was made all the worse by the fact that he suffers from asthma.

Owen was then handcuffed, brought to his feet and – lo and behold – informed that he was under arrest for being “drunk and disorderly”.

Owen was then locked in the caged section at the back of the Police van. He tried to spit the foul taste of the PAVA spray out of his mouth, but was warned by the Officers that if he did so that he could be arrested for criminal damage. This, I am afraid is a common move from the ‘policing the night time economy’ playbook: Officers doubling down on an initial wrongful arrest by further arresting a person for causing ‘criminal damage’ to Police property which they are drooling, vomiting or bleeding upon precisely because of the violence which the Police have just meted out to them.

Owen was then driven to the Wirral Custody Suite.

The circumstances of Owen’s arrest were recorded in the Custody Record as follows –

“DP [Detained Person] and another group of males approached police vehicle and became abusive to officers, shouting and swearing in front of other MOPs [Members of the Public]. DP was warned about his behaviour but persisted, officers were trying to deal with another male but the DP placed himself in between them, AO [Arresting Officer] attempted to move the DP, he became obstructive and resistant, pushing, pulling, resisting and lashing out in officers direction… He was arrested D&D. Taken to the floor, actively resisting, put hands in waistband, refused to remove it. He was warned PAVA was to be deployed if he did not move his hands, AO feared he was reaching for a weapon, unable to gain proper control. PAVA deployed. Effective, cuffed to rear non-compliant. Further arrested obstruct. No reply. After-care provided at scene and on arrival in custody.”

Such was the extent of his injuries, Owen had to be assessed by a Healthcare Professional whilst in Custody, after which he was subjected to the degrading process of being fingerprinted and having a sample of his DNA taken, before being interviewed under caution, where he took the opportunity to deny all wrongdoing. 

Eventually, almost 11 hours after his arrest, Owen was informed that he was not going to face any charges and was released from custody on the basis of “No further action”. 

Special Treatment?

It soon became apparent that the Merseyside Police Officers reviewing the evidence in this case had not been happy with what they saw in regards to Special Constable Gillon’s behaviour, as evidenced by the body camera footage, and not only had this led them to release Owen without charge – the matter was now referred to the Professional Standards Department (PSD) and the Officer was prosecuted for common assault upon my client.

I believe that Special Constable Gillon should have been convicted; but as is often the case his Police status seems to have disposed the criminal court to look favourably upon him and, in effect, hold him to a different standard of account than members of the public. In August 2023 at Manchester Magistrates Court, Gillon was found not guilty of assaulting Owen, with the Judge criticising Owen’s “attitude towards authority”, drawing “no adverse inferences” from the fact that SC Gillon had chosen to exercise his ‘right to silence’ in interview and going as far as to praise the Officer’s “reasonable and proportionate” use of force as being in accordance with his training. Owen was blamed for “encroaching” on the Officers, when all he had actually been doing was to exercise his right to film them.

In this way, what begins as a criminal trial of the Officer often seems to ‘flip’ into a trial of the victim, and end with the kind of judicial address which might accompany a “decoration for valour.”

Owen was understandably demoralised by this outcome and assumed that it was now ‘game over’ for his chances of seeing justice done. However, I was able to reassure him that this was not the case: with the criminal process out of the way, I was able to take charge of the situation and to take steps to hold Merseyside Police to account for the Officer’s actions by means of a civil claim for compensation.

Police Accountability

The resolution of the criminal proceedings against Special Constable Gillon, had also cleared the way for Merseyside PSD to conclude their own investigation into matters of professional misconduct arising from this incident. Regrettably, but perhaps unsurprisingly, a 16 page investigation report by PSD concluded that SC Gillon had ‘no case to answer’ in respect of use of excessive force against Owen and furthermore that his decision to arrest Owen was entirely lawful.

SC Gillon had sought to justify the level of force he used against Owen on the basis that as the struggle began – initiated in the first place by the Officer of course – he feared that Owen might have a knife secreted in the waistband of his trousers. It was notable, however, that he based this assertion simply on unspecified ‘previous experience’ rather than anything that Owen or his companions had done or been seen to do. In my view, this was a retrospective excuse: the Officer was fixated on my client’s phone, not on a phantom blade.

Notwithstanding the fact that Merseyside Police Legal Services, in responding to the letter of claim which I had now sent on behalf of Owen, purported to endorse their Officer’s version of events and his justification of his use of force, they now admitted liability for false imprisonment and assault and battery. 

In addition to an admission of liability, I also secured for Owen the following letter of apology from the Force –

“On behalf of Merseyside Police, I apologise to you for your treatment at the hands of Officers of the Force on the evening of 11 June 2022.

You will appreciate that a full admission of liability in relation to your claims for false imprisonment and assault has been made and that in this instance the Force did investigate your complaint against Police which resulted in a prosecution of a serving Police Special Constable.

Once again, I apologise on behalf of the Chief Constable for the actions of the Officers of Merseyside Police”.

This of course was only part of Owen’s victory, albeit a very important part. I also sought on behalf of Owen damages for loss of liberty, physical and psychological injuries and other losses including damage caused to his clothing,  and I commissioned expert medical reports in support of Owen’s injury claims. After rejecting Merseyside Police’s initial offer of settlement of only £8,000, I went on to secure a final settlement for Owen of £22,375 damages plus legal costs.

Once again, I am caused to reflect on the fact that there is a three- pronged ‘trident’ of legal remedies with which the victim of Police brutality or misconduct can seek restitution/justice. Unfortunately, two of the points of that trident often prove to be blunt and/or useless i.e. criminal proceedings for assault against the Officer concerned and internal Police misconduct investigations. Thankfully, the third point of the trident remains sharp – the right to sue in the civil courts for damages and the very real opportunity to secure not only a sense of empowerment and accountability through legal action, but also an apology for the wronged individual, which such a claim brings with it. 

And I fully intend, through my actions on behalf of my clients and the publicity which I bring to such issues in this blog, to keep it that way.

PC Ian Brotherton of the Metropolitan Police has this month admitted causing death by careless driving after he ran a red light whilst responding to a 999 call, and struck and killed a moped rider, 26- year old Christopher De Carvalho Guedes, who had entered the junction through a green light.

The Officer’s barrister said “He is deeply remorseful for the accident but it was an accident that occurred while he was responding to a genuine emergency”.

Sadly, that is no excuse.  As I have written before, Police status and training does not give Emergency Response Officers ‘carte blanche’ to drive through a junction against a red traffic light at whatever speed they see fit – a Police driver is supposed to treat the junction as a give way and be aware of the extreme risks they are posing to other, innocent drivers and pedestrians who may not have appreciated his direction of travel or speed of approach.

The first duty of Police Emergency Response Drivers must be to ensure that their driving does not cause an emergency in itself. Testosterone and petroleum are a dangerous mix: when Police drivers are thinking only of the ‘chase’ or the ‘race’ then terrible tragedies like this one can occur, which have cost a young man his life. 

This week’s blog post contains two salutary warnings: the first a reminder of the risk possessed by self-styled “red-blooded” male officers to the women they encounter in the course of their duties, whose need for Police help they despicably seek to leverage to get those women into bed with them; and the second a reminder to be careful when selecting a solicitor to assist you in claims against the Police, for firms which have spent a great deal of money on establishing an internet presence to ‘capture’ such claims might not necessarily have invested as heavily in their staff training, resulting in overly cautious approaches or frankly wrong advice being given to their clients.

At the beginning of 2015 my client, whom I will call Harriet for the purposes of this blog, had been in an abusive relationship with her male partner for a number of years.  Finally summoning the courage to break away from her partner, she was assisted by Women’s Aid in moving to a new address with her child.  Unfortunately, Harriet’s former partner discovered her new address and turned up there and began to harass her. She called the police for help, but at the time did not have any Non- Molestation Order in place preventing her former partner from making contact with her.

Around the same time, Harriet’s former partner himself called the police and falsely alleged that she had caused criminal damage to his vehicle.  In consequence of this allegation, it was not Harriet’s partner, but Harriet herself who was then arrested by officers of West Midlands Police; a sadly familiar tale.

Harriet was understandably traumatised by her arrest, further adding to her existing vulnerability.  During the course of her detention, Harriet was interviewed by PC Colin Noble, a Domestic Abuse Investigation Officer who worked in the Public Protection Unit of West Midlands Police.

Harriet subsequently had to return to the police station in order to answer bail, and she was there met by PC Noble who as the officer in charge of the case (OIC) now formally charged her with criminal damage.

Having charged Harriet, PC Noble then took this highly vulnerable, single mother, victim of domestic abuse and now criminal suspect, into a side room and started to ‘chat her up’ in a grossly abusive manner. 

PC Noble first belittled Harriet by telling her that the situation she was in occurred “when you go for bad boys” and then made his own sexual interest in her clear with comments such as “How can you be single with boots like that? (she was wearing knee high boots) and “Why are you looking down there?” – insinuating that Harriet was looking at his crotch (she in fact had her eyes downcast owing to her lack of confidence in the situation).

Following her release from the station, Harriet initiated the process of and was successful in obtaining a non-molestation order against her former partner.

Then, a few weeks after Harriet had been charged by PC Noble, the officer called her from a private number and asked if she could talk. During the course of their conversation, PC Noble claimed that it was not his fault that she had been charged with criminal damage and asked her to go out with him for food and drinks.  Harriet was led to believe that PC Noble had run intelligence checks on her former partner and that he was going out of his way to try to help her with her problems.

Following this initial telephone call, PC Noble called Harriet regularly, several times a week and mentioned which ‘local’ pub he drank in. He also informed Harriet that it was he who had served the non-molestation order on her former partner and bragged about how he had told her former partner that he, PC Noble, would personally arrest him if the order was breached.

As the telephone conversations between Harriet and PC Noble became increasingly flirtatious, the officer disclosed to Harriet that he could get into ‘trouble’ himself for contacting her, which served to make her feel flattered and increase the connection that she thought that she had with him. It was then arranged that PC Noble would visit her at home one evening.  Harriet had come to believe that the two of them were in the early stages of a romantic relationship. 

Upon arriving at her home, PC Noble and Harriet initially sat on opposite sides of the sofa but the officer asked Harriet to move to sit by him, so that they could “relax”. Thankfully, the officer did not stay long that evening, and no physical, sexual encounter returned. Noble had come across as jumpy and on edge, leaving Harriet feeling confused about his motives.

The officer continued in his grooming of Harriet by using several common tactics from the police abusers ‘handbook’ – seeking to elicit her sympathy, he disclosed to Harriet that he was in an unhappy relationship and no longer slept with his partner; seeking to impress her, he talked about his work as a police officer, including how he had helped victims of domestic abuse and how he had previously worked in the “gang unit”. 

In July 2015, Harriet was acquitted of the charge of criminal damage.

Harriet was now beginning to realise that something was not right with PC Noble’s conduct towards her.  She began to suspect that he was seeking to exploit her, and when she questioned him about his existing relationship, he was not forthcoming with answers.  Shortly thereafter, her contact with PC Noble ceased.

As it turned out, however, Harriet was not the first woman whom PC Noble had targeted in this way, and nor was she the last.

In June 2017 PC Noble was tasked to obtain evidence from a young woman who had reported a breach of a restraining order (During subsequent misconduct proceedings this woman was identified as “Ms X”). Noble visited the woman at her home on two occasions; such was his inappropriate, sexualised demeanour towards her on the first occasion, Ms X covertly recorded the officer during his second visit to her house. Those recordings included the following comments by PC Noble towards Ms X –

• “I think you’re fit, and I could see why he would want ya”
• “I’m a proper red-blooded male…I love women in all their glory”
• “I need to get focused. I need to stop watching you.”
• “You’re telling me another fit girl like you is gonna be jumping all over his dick.”
• “I’ve got to be sensible and careful, I’m not supposed to be chatting you up…”
• “I’ve never done it before, but I’ve never met anyone like you before. And asking you personal questions like have you got any naked pictures…”
• “If I did anything with you it would have to be on the down low, because we’re not supposed to…You know that teacher, pupil relationship that you’re not supposed to have, goes for us as well. We’re not supposed to have relationships with people we’re deemed to help. It’s like doctors shagging their patients…”

We have, it seems, come a long way from “Dixon of Dock Green.”

On the back of those recordings, PC Noble was charged with the criminal offence of Misconduct in Public Office and appeared before Birmingham Crown Court in August 2018. Disappointingly, he was ultimately found ‘not guilty’ at trial in April 2019 but, crucially, the publicity surrounding the trial led not only Harriet, but other women to come forwards with similar stories of Noble’s predatory behaviour towards them.

The Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC) was now conducting a wider investigation into PC Noble’s conduct towards other women, under the name “Operation Goulburn” Harriet was put in contact with the investigative team.

In November 2019, PC Noble falsely asserted that his interactions with Harriet had been “professional at all times”, and furthermore he denied ever attending her home address.  These lies only added to the trauma that he had already caused towards Harriet by his exploitative behaviour.

She was now determined to see justice done, and gave evidence at the misconduct hearing which took place with PC Noble in April 2021, as did two other women whom PC Noble had targeted in a similar fashion – Ms A (a domestic violence victim whom the officer had sought to exploit in 2014) and Ms B (whose daughter had been assaulted in 2017, with Noble assigned as the investigating officer).  The misconduct panel found my client and the other women to be honest and truthful witnesses, found PC Noble guilty of gross misconduct and dismissed him without notice. 

We already know about Ms X, of course. Sadly, there may well have been other victims of Noble’s misconduct who simply failed to come forwards.

Finding the Right Solicitor

Securing complete justice in a case like this, however, does not hinge only on the courageous decision to take action – but also on finding the right solicitor to represent you.

The firm whom Harriet initially instructed sent a letter of claim on behalf of Harriet to West Midlands Police, seeking damages for misfeasance in public office, arising out of the predatory conduct of PC Noble towards her.

In response, in early February 2022, the Police admitted liability, agreeing in principle to compensate Harriet. So far, so good. However, not only did the Police make a derisory – indeed, insulting – offer of only £500, but Harriet’s then- solicitors misadvised her as to the likely range of damages, incorrectly telling her that damages in such cases which didn’t involve “physical or sexual assault” were “generally not huge” and that she was likely to only recover something in the range of £1,200 – £1,500. Boldly, they advised her to “slightly inflate” the value of her counteroffer to a truly whopping £1,600 in order to “allow room for negotiation.”

Sometimes those with the biggest advertising budget, lack the necessary depth of experience and stomach for the fight to achieve the best results for the clients they have gathered.

Thankfully, Harriet recognised the solicitors’ timidity for what it was, totally inadequate to reflect the emotional harm which had been caused to her by having let PC Noble “into my life and into my home.” Dismayed and disappointed, she searched for an expert solicitor in actions against the Police – and she quickly found me. After reviewing the available evidence, I had no hesitation in advising Harriet to reject the offer and she decided to transfer her instructions to me.

Strikingly, when I wrote to West Midlands Police legal services to notify them that I was now acting on Harriet’s behalf, they initially tried to withdraw their admission of liability – perhaps recognising that I was not going to allow Harriet to be bought off as easily as her former solicitors almost had.

On my advice, Harriet now commenced Court proceedings against West Midlands Police, forcing them to pin their colours to the mast and to have to seek Court permission to withdraw their previous admission of liability: I strenuously contested their application, and their admission of liability was restored, this time permanently enshrined in Court documents.

The battle now would be for us to secure an appropriate level of compensation to reflect the officer’s abuse of trust and the harm that had been inflicted upon Harriet, and I commissioned expert psychiatric evidence accordingly, as well as advancing a case for aggravated and exemplary damages in addition to the basic compensatory award.

PC Noble’s behaviour towards Harriet had left her with deep feelings of shame, guilt, embarrassment and anxiety. She had had to go for counselling. She developed a lack of trust in police officers, which would put her at increased risk of harm given her history as a victim of domestic violence.  She was a person who even more than others needed to know that if she turned to the Police, help could be found; and yet when she had done so that very need had been shamefully exploited by a corrupt officer, a would- be serial philanderer.

Harriet told me that she was left with lingering feelings of dread – not only that, should she need to turn to the Police in the future, another male officer might turn out to be “a wolf in sheepdog’s clothing”,  but that officers generally might have animosity towards her because of the part she had played in the downfall of one of their colleagues.

I am pleased to record that I have recently settled Harriet’s claim for damages against West Midlands Police for damages in the sum of £25,000 plus legal costs : a damages sum over 16 times greater than the ‘maximum value’ of her claim according to her original solicitors.

But I must also sadly record that PC Noble’s type of behaviour remains shockingly common amongst male police officers. The Police are instituted in order to fight crime, but the power bestowed upon them for this purpose and the access which it brings into the lives of vulnerable women, is also an attractant to men who themselves harbour criminal, predatory urges.

 My client’s name has been changed.

News broke last week that a Metropolitan Police Officer is under criminal investigation for assault after ‘Sex Education’ actor Reece Richards claimed he had been unlawfully arrested in an incident in September. 

Richards’ account is that he was walking back home through the streets of London, after having appeared in the West End Musical Hairspray when he encountered a very different type of treatment –  Police ‘pepper’ spray.

Richards, who has also appeared on the Netflix show ‘You’, posted an account of the incident on Instagram.

“I had just finished performing in Hairspray the Musical when a car crashed near me.  Two men, one white and one Asian jumped out; one started running in one direction, and the other ran towards me where I stood with my suitcase.

Realising the Police were chasing them, I shouted “He ran down there Officer” and pointed out the direction they fled.

Despite hearing me, the Officer shouted that I was under arrest and demanded I get on the ground. I was confused, unable to understand why I was suddenly being treated like a criminal. 

Calmly I explained that I was a performer returning from a show, but one Officer yelled “Get to the floor or I will pepper spray you””.

Richards claims that the Officers then rushed him, pepper sprayed him (he is probably referring to the use of PAVA incapacitant gas), kicked his legs out from under him, threw him to the ground and handcuffed him.

Thankfully there was a witness to what was occurring – Richards’ mother – who was able to call for help from the director of Hairspray, the “Loose Women” star Brenda Edwards, who attended at the scene, and helped diffuse the situation with Richards being released shortly afterwards.

Richards summed up this very traumatic incident as follows –

“The whole experience was embarrassing, deeply upsetting, and exhausting. It has left me questioning everything I thought I knew about justice. Suddenly my understanding of right and wrong feels completely upended”.

I can deeply sympathise with how he feels. I have represented many clients who have had experiences like this at the hands of hot-headed Officers who ‘rush in where angels fear to tread’ – assaulting or arresting people who are not only innocent, but who were actually trying to help them. Read my recent blog about the case of my client Scott Barratt, kicked in the head by a Police Officer in very similar circumstances, here. 

Police Officers who commit brazen, brutal mistakes of the kind perpetrated against my client – and also against Richards if his account is correct – must be held to account in order to maintain the public’s and to restore their victim’s faith in our justice system.

I wrote last week about the case of my client Gemma Barnes, an animal rights activist who encountered police violence and prejudice whilst exercising her right of protest at a cattle market in Norfolk.

She was initially arrested for alleged breach of a bail condition, which had in fact been lifted weeks earlier by the court, and she was then further arrested on what I considered to be a false allegation of assaulting a  police officer – the assault supposedly occurring whilst the officers, having trussed up my client not only in handcuffs but also leg restraints, were in the process of throwing her into the back of a police van.

The hostility which permeates the policing profession when it comes to activists like Gemma, also seems apparent in the harshness of some of the treatment they receive from the Courts as well.  Gemma’s case actually concluded in April 2024, but I was not able to immediately write about it because Gemma was at that time under a different set of bail conditions which included a prohibition forbidding her (on pain of arrest) from “posting anything online regarding any police officers or encouraging or instructing anyone else to do so.”

This type of Orwellian gagging order, clamping down not only on Gemma’s freedom of speech but also (indirectly) that of others, for which she would otherwise pay the penalty, seems more a product of 1984 than 2024…

Be that as it may, the bail condition now having been lifted, I can continue with this story without jeopardising Gemma’s liberty.

Two Defendants, Two Denials

As I explained in last week’s blog, because there was a dispute over who was responsible for the mistake which apparently led to Gemma’s bail status not having been updated on police databases, it was necessary to bring legal proceedings against both the Ministry of Justice (the MOJ) – who were responsible for the Magistrates’ Court Service who had imposed and then varied the bail condition – and the Chief Constable of Norfolk Constabulary, whose officers carried out the arrest.

The MOJ  filed a Defence in which they acknowledged that Norwich Magistrates’ Court had withdrawn the bail condition preventing Gemma from attending Neat Market Road in Norwich (the place of her arrest on 19 February 2022) on 8 February 2022 and that a notification as to the correct bail conditions  (i.e. that there were none) was sent to the police on 17 February 2022 (two days prior to Gemma’s arrest) and that therefore the police should have been aware that Gemma was now on unconditional bail.

Hence all liability for Gemma’s arrest, whether under the Data Protection Act, in Negligence or under the Human Rights Act was denied.

For their part, Norfolk Constabulary filed a Defence to Gemma’s claim which was equally vociferous in its denial of liability. They claimed to have no knowledge of the alleged notification of the correct bail conditions which the MOJ claimed was sent on 17 February, and instead relied upon the notification which they said the court had sent to the Police National Computer (PNC) on the day of the hearing itself (8 February) which had (incorrectly) maintained that Gemma was still under an exclusion not to enter Neat Market.

Hence, it was maintained by Norfolk Constabulary that their officer’s arrest of Gemma was lawful as it was honestly based on apparently correct information appearing on police computer systems. They staunchly asserted that they did not receive notification of the withdrawal of the bail conditions at any time prior to Gemma’s arrest and that when my client was first arrested and protested that the bail conditions had been removed, Police Sergeant Rimmer had carried out checks on both the PNC and the Athena Case Management System used by the police, and the results were that the bail conditions remained in place/live. 

It was further asserted that all of their uses of force upon Gemma were lawful and that it was legitimately perceived by the Officers present that Gemma had assaulted one of their member whilst they were in the process of lifting her into the back of the van – whilst she was handcuffed and leg strapped.

Be that as it may, these two contradictory Defences obviously raised a number of questions and, indeed, eyebrows.

The principle question that occurred to me was this – if Norfolk Constabulary’s version of events, as advanced in its Defence, was correct and none of the Police computer systems contained the correct information about the lifting of Gemma’s bail condition – then how was it that the Officers, within seconds of Gemma’s second arrest (for the alleged assault upon one of the Police Officers), suddenly became so confidently aware that the bail condition had been lifted.  I strongly suspected that all relevant documentary evidence had not been disclosed to us yet by the Police and therefore, in the aftermath of the filing of the Defences, I probed their position with a series of requests for further information (under Part 18 of the Civil Procedure Rules) and specific disclosure (under Part 31 of the Civil Procedure Rules), the best tools which a lawyer has to test the other party’s case prior to trial.

In particular, I required Norfolk Constabulary to explain exactly how and precisely when Acting Inspector Binns became aware of the true state of affairs in regards to Gemma’s bail status, in light of the assertions made in the Defence to the effect that neither the PNC nor the Athena System had been amended to show the correct bail status, and furthermore the Police’s claim not to have received any ‘manual update’ from the Court as to my client’s correct bail status. 

It turned out that I had asked exactly the right questions, as in response, Norfolk Constabulary now handed over previously unseen documents which completely changed the picture as to liability and led to the Police having to file an amended Defence in which the following admissions were made–

• On 9 February 2022, Police Constable Ward emailed the Court to enquire about the outcome of Gemma’s Magistrates Court case. Rachel Lewis, Team Leader at the Court, emailed the Officer to confirm that Gemma had attended and entered a not guilty plea. The trial date was provided.

• PC Ward forwarded the email to Police Sergeant Larkin that day, PS Larkin emailed Rachel Lewis to ask if the bail conditions had remained. She responded: “No, she is now on unconditional bail”.

• PS Larkin then emailed Rachel Lewis on 15 February 2022 and wrote: “We have just looked at Barnes in relation to this as we are building the file – the System states she is still on bail?  Is there somewhere we can double check?  Rachel Lewis responded: “She is on unconditional bail”.

• PS Larkin and Rachel Lewis exchanged further emails during which it was acknowledged that the PNC had not been updated at that time (15 February 2022) because of a Court error. Rachel Lewis said that she would raise it with the Courts ‘resulting’ team; in the meantime, she provided PS Larkin with the actual result copied from the Court system (i.e the confirmation of ‘no bail conditions’).

• PS Larkin then emailed Police Sergeant Taylor who was anticipated to be the attending Sergeant at the Neat Market protest that weekend. The subject header was ‘DO NOT ARREST GEMMA BARNES FOR BREACH OF BAIL’.  He wrote that there had been an issue at the Court and the correct result was that Gemma was now on unconditional bail. However, the Sergeant attending the Livestock Market was then changed i.e. it was no longer PS Taylor but, crucially,  PS Larkin’s email was not passed on, and neither of these senior officers (Taylor or Larkin) had updated the wider Police computer systems.

• PS Larkin had then received a phone call from A/Inspector Binns on 19 February (whilst PS Larkin was on a rest day) to ask about the bail conditions, following Gemma’s arrest, and had verbally disclosed to the Inspector what he knew.  Apparently, no notes were made of this conversation.

Well: if you don’t ask, you don’t get. 

None of that crucial chain of email correspondence between Norfolk Constabulary and the Magistrates Court, and between PS Larkin and PS Taylor, had been referenced at all in either the Complaint Investigation Report or Norfolk Constabulary’s pre-action response to the letter of claim which we had sent on behalf of Gemma. Had they been, then it is quite clear that this claim could have been settled at a much earlier stage and without the need to issue Court proceedings also involving the Ministry of Justice. 

It was now quite clear that Norfolk Constabulary was aware of the lifting of Gemma’s bail conditions but had, for whatever reason, failed to properly record and enshrine that information within its ‘datasphere’, an omission that various Officers ‘on the ground’ at the time of Gemma’s arrest had then been able to rely on as their ‘excuse’.

Whether these failings were as a result of deliberate malice towards Gemma, or incompetence – or some institutional hybrid of the two, in a Force where some Officers seem to have regarded Gemma as a ‘problem’ and relished the opportunity to teach her a lesson, cannot be known for certain – but in the end it was my client who ended up teaching the Police lessons about respect for civil rights, their use of arrest powers, the double duties of thorough and candid disclosure and the cost of failing to do so.

Shortly after the filing of the amended Defence I was able to bring Gemma’s claim to a successful conclusion with Norfolk Constabulary agreeing to pay her £8,750 damages for her wrongful arrest, plus the legal costs which we she had incurred in having to bring proceedings not only against them but also the Ministry of Justice.

I am proud to have been on the front line of this fight alongside Gemma. When the Police fail to respect individuals, and fail to respect their own professional duties and the boundaries of the law that govern them, this is what results. 

The conveyor belt of Police Officers who have to be ejected from the Force after going ‘on the pull’ whilst on duty (trying to use the ‘gravitational pull’ of their uniforms for a sexual purpose, we might say) shows no sign of slowing down.  This month has seen gross misconduct findings against ex-PC Benjamin Pearson of Derbyshire Police, whose attempted seduction of a woman who he met during the course of his duties as a public Officer very much mapped onto the ‘modus operandi’ of this (shockingly common) type of Police Officer whose motivation is apparently to combine the ‘Knight in shining armour’ with the ‘Stag night’.

The misconduct panel made the following findings about PC Pearson, who was formally based at Buxton Police Station, prior to placing him on the Police Barred List-

• PC Pearson encountered a woman whilst responding to an incident involving an abandoned motor vehicle, and at the conclusion of the incident gave this woman his personal mobile phone number.

• He then followed up an hour later with a text message to the woman telling her “Would love to take u out maybe, my marriage ended a month ago, she cheated x”. 

• When the woman responded by sending PC Pearson messages disclosing issues in her own relationship, the fact that she was taking anti-depressant medication and that she was under investigation for an offence herself, PC Pearson did not back away but only emboldened his own interest in her and, between September and December 2022, sent her hundreds of personal messages, some of which were explicitly sexual, as well as using Police computer systems to access information about the woman, including looking up her home address.

This was extremely serious, and indeed sinister behaviour – bordering, in my opinion, on that not merely of the ‘seducer’ but of the stalker. 

As the Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC) Operations Director Steve Noonan said about this case –

“PC Pearson abused his authority and position of trust by pursuing an improper emotional relationship with a member of the public he met on duty…It was not a one-off incident and he carried on sending sexualised messages over several months after the woman indicated she was emotionally vulnerable”.

Unfortunately, this type of Officer is specifically looking for that type of vulnerable person to exploit.

Thankfully, Benjamin Pearson has now been held to account, and placed upon the Police Barred List – although some might say he should be behind actual bars.  Hopefully the woman whom he targeted will also receive the help and compensation she deserves from Derbyshire Police.

Read here how I helped a victim of exactly this type of Police exploitation of power achieve justice. 

It was with quiet satisfaction that I read this week that Metropolitan Police Officer PC Liam Newman, who tasered a man who then fell from a garage roof and sustained life-changing injuries, has been charged with GBH.  

The criminal courts will determine culpability in this case, arising from an incident which occurred in April 2022, and I have long been calling for much more of this type of scrutiny of Police violence i.e through the lens of the very criminal law which it is the Police’s crucial duty to enforce. The enforcers cannot be allowed to be exempt from enforcement themselves, although all too often in practice this is what occurs.

Taser weapons are an arsenal which as a society we should watch over with great concern and caution so that their use does not become routine, and they are deployed only in the most appropriate of circumstances. Let them not become the instruments of a ‘mission creep’ which sees the UK’s inherently ‘unarmed’ Police Forces evolve into ‘every cop has a gun’ miniature armies, in the style of American law enforcement. In my opinion, there is a great danger inherent in the fact that these weapons have the potential to be lethal or cause catastrophic injuries, and yet at the same time are viewed by many Officers as ‘low level’ stun guns – increasing the likelihood of ‘accidental’ discharges, or trigger fingers twitching in anger or even in laziness, rather than only in circumstances where the use of a 50,000 volt electrocution device is essential and justified.

Read here some of the previous blogs written by myself and my colleagues about compensation awards which we have won for the victims of Police taser misuse-

• £22,000 for man tasered in the back
• £70,000 damages for innocent man tasered and beaten by the Police 
• Taser Misuse against Children.

Each time I read another Police Complaint Outcome Report displaying naked bias in favour of the Police, and adopting a tone of either passive aggression – or indeed in some cases aggressive aggression- towards the complainant, I am left feeling angry and I reflect on what change could be implemented to Professional Standards Departments (PSD)  in order to make the Police complaint system fair, effective and fit for purpose. 

Increasingly, I think the problem could be identified in the third word of the title of those Police units that investigate public complaints i.e. ‘Department’.

The problem is inherent in the fact that the complaint is handled by a department or unit of the very Police Force whose Officers are the subject of the complaint.  The tone which is so often adopted by PSD investigators in their communications with Officers under investigation – in the manner in which they question/interview them (even when conducting interviews under a formal caution) – and that is also displayed in the outcome report itself, so often reveals the collegiate/comradely impulses which PSD Officers have towards their fellow ‘Bobbies’.  Members of the public under suspicion of an offence are ‘others’ – but Police Officers, are part of ‘us’.  We are all human beings at the end of the day and none of us who are part of a tight- knit organisation ever find it easy to set aside our ‘team’ loyalties in favour of total objectivity, in the face of criticism.  My experience suggests that most PSD investigators struggle to do this most of the time.

One solution would be to have Police complaints randomly allocated to another Force in England and Wales, thereby introducing a physical and emotional distance between the investigating Officers and the Officers under investigation in each complaint e.g. have West Yorkshire Police PSD investigate a complaint made against the Metropolitan Police Service, rather than by those who drink their coffee in the same canteen…

An even more radical solution, but one which certainly would shake things up in terms of Policing culture and mentality, would be to abolish the in-house Professional Standards Departments of each Force and replace them with one, national Super- Police Force whose sole role would be to handle all complaints made against Officers of  the regional Forces.  A kind of ‘Professional Standards Bureau of Investigation’ whose motto would be We Watch the Watchmen.

Until that day comes, I feel it remains especially incumbent upon those lawyers such as myself who specialise in representing the victims of Police misconduct, to continue to shine a spotlight on the current, inadequate system of ‘policing the police.’

A case in point is that of my client Patrick, a student who was on a night out with friends in a busy city- centre environment when he was approached by several Police Officers, including one whom I shall identify as PC Trumpton.

Patrick was advised that he was to be searched for drugs; he fully complied with the search and nothing was found.  He had not been taking and nor was he in the possession of any illegal drugs.  All Patrick was guilty of was being a little ‘merry’ after consuming several pints of alcohol.

Despite the negative search result, the Officers continued to detain my client, with PC Trumpton seeking to establish Patrick’s name and address – information to which he actually wasn’t entitled.

Patrick questioned why he was still being detained and explained that he hoped to secure a job in national security and that PC Trumpton’s actions could “fuck up” his career.

PC Trumpton now announced that Patrick was under arrest for “drunk and disorderly behaviour” whereupon Patrick, in a state of shock, was handcuffed, marched away to a Police van and then transported to the Wirral Custody Centre where he was detained overnight.

The following morning, Patrick was obliged to provide his fingerprints and a DNA sample, and be photographed, and was then issued with a Community Resolution Order. This is essentially an offer of a low-level quasi-caution, and no further legal action, in return for an ‘admission’ of the alleged offence.

I was subsequently instructed by Patrick and on hearing his story I agreed that this sounded like a gross abuse of Police power and an unlawful arrest – almost certainly not born out of a legitimate suspicion by the Officer that Patrick had committed any offence, but rather out of the Officer’s offence at being given a minor bit of ‘lip’ by Patrick.

Definition of Drunk & Disorderly Behaviour

The offence of drunk and disorderly behaviour, as defined by s.91 of the Criminal Justice Act 1967, requires that three essential elements be satisfied –

1. the person is drunk AND
2. is behaving in a disorderly way AND
3. their conduct occurs in a public place.

To be very clear, ‘disorderly conduct’ is defined as relatively high level anti-social behaviour such as –

• engaging in fighting or ‘tumultuous’ conduct.
• making unreasonable noise and continuing to do so after being asked to stop.
• disrupting a lawful assembly of people.

What it absolutely does not encompass is low-level use of swear words, arguing with or questioning a Police Officer’s decisions or behaviour or merely being intoxicated.

Patrick had already made the decision not to accept the Community Resolution Order, and I now assisted him with the filing of a complaint against the Police. 

How To Overturn a Complaint ‘Whitewash’

The ‘Finalisation Report’ produced by the Professional Standards Department was a typical piece of pro-police propaganda which displayed an almost cheerleader- like enthusiasm for the Officer who was the central subject of the complaint.  All of PC Trumpton’s actions that night were deemed to be ‘acceptable’.

“No learning has been identified” concluded the report – well, I certainly agreed with that!  I had no hesitation in advising Patrick to appeal the outcome to the appropriate review body (the Office of the regional Police and Crime Commissioner  – the OPCC – not to be confused with the Independent Office for Police conduct – the IOPC – which has review oversight over higher level complaints).

Amidst the points of appeal which I raised on Patrick’s behalf were the following –

• Although Police body camera footage was not released to my client – the Police always keep their cards close to their chest when dealing with complaints – we did have access to a mobile phone recording of Patrick’s interactions with PC Trumpton (I have written before about the benefits of Big Brother being watched by all his Little Brothers and Sisters) and this footage demonstrated how unreasonable it was for the PSD investigator to purport to conclude that Patrick was “acting in a disorderly manner” or “repeatedly swearing at PC [Trumpton]”.  In fact, the only time that Patrick could be heard swearing was when, immediately prior to PC Trumpton arresting him, my client asserted that the Officer’s behaviour towards him was “fucking up” his hopes for a career in national security.  The use of a swear word in this context could, on no reasonable analysis, be deemed to constitute ‘disorderly’ behaviour, especially given that my client’s protest about his continued detention (following the negative search) and his questioning of the Officer’s continued, intrusive demands for his personal details were entirely legitimate – as PC Trumpton had no power to continue my client’s detention once the search was complete and no power to require my client to provide his personal details.
• Indeed, on the mobile phone footage available to us, the only aggressive/targeting swearing which could be heard was from one of the other Police Officers who could be heard shouting at a bystander “Stop being a fucking dickhead, now fuck off!”.
• In asserting that PC Trumpton “Patiently gave [Patrick] several opportunities to provide his details and reassured [Patrick] giving him clarification as to why he was in this situation” the PSD investigator was demonstrating either that he failed to understand the true legal framework of Police powers applicable in this situation, or else was deliberately misrepresenting the same – as he had completely failed to comment on the fact that Patrick was simply not obliged to ‘provide his details’ and hence that it was unlawful for PC Trumpton to continue to detain my client following the completion of his search.
• The PSD report also failed to engage with the fact that PC Trumpton apparently had no intention of arresting Patrick until he swore, mildly, in the manner described above, whilst expressing frustration about the effect this Police interaction could have on his future career prospects in this modern world where ‘data prints’ matter more than finger prints. 
• My submission was that a reasonable, proportionate and unbiased outcome for the complaint investigation would have been for PSD to conclude that PC Trumpton had exercised his powers unlawfully by choosing to punish Patrick for what the Officer apparently perceived as a lack of respect for Police power/status and/or to rub salt into the wound about which my client was at that moment complaining (i.e. the creation of Police records which might effect his future employment) – rather than out of any reasonable belief that Patrick’s behaviour was ‘disorderly.’  

I am pleased to confirm that the Police Complaints Adjudicator at the OPCC upheld significant parts of our appeal and directed the PSD to reconsider its original conclusions.

This time – and apparently solely because of my push back on behalf of my client, because the underlying evidence had not changed – another PSD investigator now concluded as follows –

“Whilst [Patrick] accepts that he is intoxicated and he is in a public place, I do not believe, from what is shown on body worn footage that his conduct amounted or met the definition of behaving in a disorderly manner and discretion could have been afforded to avoid an arrest.  It is further noted that the behaviour of an individual that can be seen in the background of the footage is far more problematic and displaying further signs of disorderly behaviour than [Patrick], and yet [the other individual] is not stopped or questioned further regarding his behaviour…  in summary, the grounds to conduct a search were sufficient, however any subsequent actions including the detention and arrest were unreasonable”.

In a complete reversal of the position expressed in the original PSD report, it was now conceded that PC Trumpton’s actions were ‘not acceptable’ and the Police offered an apology to my client “for the disruption and upset” caused by this incident and announced that it was now necessary for PC Trumpton to “receive learning” in relation to his powers of arrest, and specifically in regards to the grounds for an arrest for the offence of drunk and disorderly behaviour, in order to “improve any potential knowledge gaps”.

The PSD report went on to conclude with several paragraphs of ‘mantra’ regarding how ‘all complaints are taken seriously’ and how one of the ‘most important functions’ of the Police Complaint system is to support individuals and to learn from complaints and incidents where Policing standards have fallen below the expected level, which was described as “a vital source of information to help drive improvements in Policing”. 

Yet further, the new complaint outcome report went on to acknowledge that “a strong learning culture… reflecting on experience and actively seeking feedback from stakeholders, including the communities we serve” was ‘extremely important’ to maintaining public confidence in the Police service.

I strongly agree with those words – but I also think that my strength of belief and investment in them is far greater than that of most PSD staff who ‘copy and paste’ such pious paragraphs into their reports (like the rote- prayers of which might ‘top and tail’ a sermon) whilst actually conducting the investigation in the opposite spirit – as demonstrated by the outcome of this particular Complaint investigation the first time around, before a lawyer got involved on behalf of this particular ‘stakeholder’.

An organisation’s ‘learning culture’ is not that strong if it depends so often on third party advocates to point out the necessary learning, is it?

A Police Complaint culture bristling with pro-police bias and an often visible antagonism towards complainants, will render the opposite results from all those polite and pious ‘mission statement’ phrases which I have quoted above and will continue to down-grade public confidence in the Police service.

Indeed, this ‘toxic’ and ultimately self-defeating element of pro-police prejudice in complaints handling was still evident in PSD’s second ‘Finalisation Report’, notwithstanding the positive conclusions which I have highlighted above. 

The investigator went on to plead a bizarre form of ‘mitigation’ on behalf of PC Trumpton arguing that – despite the finding that there were no grounds to justify an arrest of my client –

“[Patrick’s] presence and/or behaviour may have resulted in an occurrence of anti-social behaviour or a public safety concern…[Patrick’s] behaviour may well have escalated again…without seeing [Patrick’s] prior behaviours, I am unable to say whether an incident may have occurred later in the evening requiring Police contact”.

I find these comments deeply disappointing, and indicative of an almost breathtaking degree of arrogance and pride on behalf of PSD – despite being led to the water trough and made to drink they are still ‘bridling’ against the admissions they have now had to make. 

In doing so, the PSD investigator here appears to be day-dreaming himself into the kind of dystopian Police state in which people can be arrested for ‘pre-crimes’, not because they have committed any offence but because the whim of an Officer determines that they ‘may’.  On this sort of an analysis, any partygoer who had consumed more than a few pints of alcohol and was encountered by a Police Officer in the centre of any of our vibrant student- and stag- night- centric cityscapes would be fair game for being rounded up to cool their heels in the cells overnight because of what ‘might’ happen later… 

It is that form of sermonising by PSD which is indicative of “learning” that goes in one ear and out the other.

Which is why things have to change.

Names have been changed.

The ‘clang factor’ is the phrase which is often used when legal professionals are trying to describe the disturbing impact of the beginning of a period of false imprisonment upon a person – an onomatopoeic invocation of the sound of a cell door slamming shut upon your liberty.  In the leading case of Thompson & Hsu v the Commissioner of Police of the Metropolis [1997] the Court of Appeal enshrined the principle that compensation for a period of false imprisonment should be assessed with each passing hour on a reducing scale; in other words the compensation awarded for the first hour of your loss of liberty will be greater than the amount awarded for your second hour of detention, and that in turn will be greater than the amount awarded for the third hour (and so forth).  Applying this reducing scale, the Judges in Thompson found that for a straightforward case of false imprisonment the appropriate sum of compensation for 1 hour of detention would be approximately £1,300 (updated for inflation and subsequent Court rulings), but that rather than this being a flat rate leading to compensation for 24 hours false imprisonment of over £30,000 the reducing scale matrix would mean that the average compensation for an entire day of false imprisonment will only be around £8,000 (updated). 

The reasoning behind this approach is that it is the initial shock of the wrongful deprivation of your liberty which most upsets and disturbs you (the quotation from the guidance in Thompson is as follows “The Plaintiff is entitled to have a higher rate of compensation for the initial shock of being arrested”)  and that as each hour goes by thereafter the shock (or clang) factor is diminishing and you are coming more to terms with what has happened to you i.e. this infringement of your civil liberty has become less ‘painful’, blunted by the mundanity and monotony of incarceration.

There is a certain logic to this form of approach in the assessment of damages for false imprisonment, but I know from long experience talking to people from all walks of life who have suffered unlawful arrests that the ‘clang’ of the cell door is often only the beginning and not the high point of their anguish; often the reverberations of that noise echo for a long time after a person’s release, in the corridors of their mind, leading to long term mental health issues.

Or, to put it another way, handcuffs can be quickly removed, but mental chains last longer. 

The question this poses, given the way that the Court of Appeal guidance on the assessment of damages is structured, is whether it is possible to get a fair compensation award for the long term effects of false imprisonment – and the answer, as I will explain below, is that it is – with the help of expert psychological/psychiatric evidence.

Wrongful arrest and imprisonment has been described as “An extraordinarily stressful psychological trauma” that can cause “serious psychological impairment” (Robert I Simon MD Bulletin of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law, Volume 21, number 4, 1993)

“Being unexpectedly wrenched from ones normal, expectable existence and plunged into the sheer terror of imprisonment without apparent reason is a highly traumatic experience.  This extreme, abrupt discontinuity in a person’s life experience is capable of producing psychiatric disorders…”  

(Simon)

Although I am not a psychiatrist, the thousands of cases of wrongful arrest which I have handled over the course of my career have left me very familiar with the mental scars which can be caused by such events and which frequently include the following –

• Flashbacks and nightmares; the rewind and replay button that you can’t control.

• The previously innocuous sound of a knock on the door becoming something which now causes a person a chilling stab of fear, if not a full blown panic attack, for the ‘go to’ assumption in the mind of a person injured in this way, is no longer that the visitor is probably a courier come to drop off an Amazon parcel, but rather the Police come to take them away. 

• A lingering sense of guilt and shame, of having become socially ‘dirty’ and diminished in people’s eyes by this experience of being made a suspected criminal, irrespective of the fact that you know yourself to be entirely innocent.

• A loss of the sense of security that most of us take for granted in our lives caused by the loss of control resulting from arrest, incarceration and accusation.  This can lead to long term anxiety conditions.  And all of this is exacerbated if the wrongful arrest has occurred in a person’s home – turning what should be safest of safe spaces for them into the arena of their trauma, the ordinary surroundings of their home a daily reminder of what occurred. 

• Unwanted personality change – in the form of feelings of paranoia, becoming ‘hypervigilant’ and anger management issues, including shortness of temper/irritability. 

• Being made to feel ‘guilty until proven innocent’, in a reverse on normal expectations of societal fair play.

• Feelings of isolation/social withdrawal.

• Strain on relationships.

• Loss of faith in the law and in particular loss of trust in the Police, who have turned from being a protective to a persecuting force in the person’s life.

• Anger towards authority and a feeling of being betrayed by ‘the system’. 

• Long term depression often also sets in, flowing from the helplessness and sense of injustice which people experience during those tormenting, powerless hours of fear and frustration in a cell. 

• In addition, physical symptoms can flow from this psychological harm – including raised blood pressure, sweating, headaches, dizziness and nausea.

Going beyond a hampering of day to day activities and an impairment of enjoyment in life, very serious consequences flowing directly from these symptoms can include self harm, suicidal thoughts and long term absence from work, potentially causing significant financial loss and career disruption.

As Dr Robert Simon cogently observes (in the article which I have already quoted), comparing the impact of imprisonment upon hostages on the one hand and wrongfully arrested persons on the other –

“Hostages are not stigmatised because they are viewed as being unjustly imprisoned by antisocial individuals operating outside of the criminal justice system. The false arrest of a person by duly empowered authorities entrusted with protecting the public reduces and uncomfortable psychological dissonance. Thus, the person who is falsely arrested may continue to be viewed with suspicion despite his or her proven innocence”.

Any wrongful arrest is also, in effect, a wrongful accusation of criminal behaviour – even if the arrest process does not actually culminate in a criminal charge, let alone a conviction.  This in itself is a deeply destabilising experience for people whether or not they have previously experienced arrest for any reason. 

As another academic paper puts it –

“It is not unreasonable to assume there is an extra layer of resentment, frustration, confusion, anger and dissonance involved when the individual knows they were wrongfully accused”

(Samantha Kay Brooks and Neil Greenberg, Med Sci Law 2021 Jan: 61 (1): 44-54)

My casework has also demonstrated to me that there is a very significant difference between the experience of being arrested in a scenario in which you can come to terms with the fact that the Police were legitimately investigating a third party’s accusation against you (i.e. any malice originated from that third party) as opposed to being arrested because of malice or incompetence on behalf of the Police or the Court system i.e. where the agents of justice are themselves the bad actors and originators of the crisis.

By way of an illustration of this, I turn to a case which I have recently settled, on behalf of a client whom I will identify as Sajid. 

Sajid was originally arrested in January 2023 following an accusation that he had been involved in a ‘road rage’ incident, and was thereafter detained for some four and a half hours before being released on bail. 

In December 2023, the same Police Force arrested Sajid again – but this time entirely unlawfully. Sajid was informed that he was under arrest for failing to attend a Court hearing, about which he knew nothing.

He was kept in Police Custody overnight before being transferred to the Court in handcuffs, where he was further detained in the Court cells. When his case was eventually heard later that afternoon, it was established that the Court Summons had been sent to an incorrect address as a result of a Police error.  My client had indeed known nothing about the missed Court hearing for which he had been arrested.

In support of Sajid’s claim, I arranged for him to be examined by a Consultant Clinical Psychologist who assessed the impact which this wrongful arrest had had upon him and determined that he had developed a condition of Specific Phobia and depression as a result of the incident. 

Sajid’s mental health difficulties following the incident included the following–

• Struggling to fall asleep because he was thinking a great deal about what had happened.

• Loss of weight due to a loss of appetite presumed to be relating from stress.

• Anxiety about the Police – articulated in the phrase “They will come to get me”.

• Feelings of paranoia about the Police – that they were now “Out to get me”.    These feelings of fear and paranoia were manifesting themselves in Sajid’s day to day life in such ways as him not walking his dog as often as he used to, for fear that his dog – who is not of a dangerous breed – would nonetheless be labelled as dangerous by the Police, who might then use this as another excuse to arrest him. 

• Irritability and withdrawal from others and a lack of self-care, which lead to him developing an oral infection.

When I presented Sajid’s case to the lawyers acting for the Police Force they sought to argue that my client would have experienced a similar range of symptoms in any event, owing to his earlier arrest in January 2023.

I was able to cogently argue that this suggestion was incorrect.  There is a world of difference between experiencing a lawful arrest (i.e. one in which the Police are acting upon an ostensibly reasonable third party allegation) and then experiencing an unlawful arrest as a result of an apparently inexplicable Police error.  My client’s psychological symptoms thereafter were intrinsically tied into the shock, confusion and sense of vulnerability, persecution and paranoia which would be generated in most of us by an arrest on demonstrably false premises.  Such an arrest causes a sense of instability and distortion, opening a Kafkaesque trap door beneath a person’s confidence in the fairness of the system, which a lawful arrest does not do.

Thankfully, the type of expert medical evidence which I was able to obtain in Sajid’s case not only helps to define the full extent of the psychological impact of a wrongful arrest – allowing appropriate levels of compensation to be sought over and above that laid down for loss of liberty counted only by the hours of the Custody clock (as per the Thompson guidelines), it also provides a treatment plan, in that the expert will assess how much and what form of therapy is likely to benefit the victim of a wrongful arrest best, such as Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT), Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing (EMDR) or, in certain cases, the provision of appropriate antidepressant medication. The cost of such treatment on a private basis can then also be built into a negotiated settlement package. In this way, the expert solicitor and the medical expert, can help the victim of false imprisonment, no matter how long its duration, to access the treatment they need to overcome the psychological harm inflicted.

Because it is often only with the closure of a successful claim, that a person can fully escape the closing of that cell door upon them.

My client’s name has been changed

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.

Often in today’s data- rich world, human errors can lead to ‘mistaken identity’ arrests – arrests which demonstrate that the vast volume of modern information can prove to be a hinderance to law enforcement – unless it is applied with some good old-fashioned common sense…

In autumn 2019 my client Xavier, a professional musician, had been working on a video shoot in Spain.  He flew back from Malaga to Stanstead Airport in the UK, accompanied by his girlfriend, his manager, and several other people who had been on the video shoot.

Unfortunately, on the plane’s touchdown at Stanstead Airport, my client’s life was turned upside down. Several Officers of Essex Police boarded the plane and shouted Xavier’s name. When Xavier stood up and identified himself, the Officers told him he was under arrest, handcuffed and escorted him from the plane. Xavier was devastated and deeply humiliated – feeling the eyes upon him of not only all the strangers on that plane but his girlfriend, manager and work colleagues. Xavier could only imagine that they were thinking the worst.

No reason had been given to Xavier by the Officers for his arrest (which I will pause to observe was, in itself, a breach of Section 28 of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act sufficient to have rendered the arrest unlawful) and this continued throughout his journey from the airport into Police Custody.

It was only when Xavier arrived at the Police Station that he was informed that he was under arrest in respect of warrants issued for a failure to attend the Magistrates Court and in respect of breaching previous Court Orders and a Community Order. The person identified in these warrants, however, was not Xavier but another individual with a completely different first name and surname, whom I will refer to for the purposes of this blog as Gabriel.  Xavier was not familiar with this person and had no idea as to why he had apparently been mistaken for him.

This was despite the fact that Xavier was, of course, in possession of the best form of identity verification possible i.e. his passport, as he had been engaged in international travel. 

Having been arrested on a Saturday night, Xavier was then kept in Custody until Monday morning when he was transported in handcuffs to Bromley Magistrates Court where he spent a miserable 8 hours or so, before being released after the Duty Solicitor who had attended upon him persuaded the Court that Xavier was not the ‘wanted man’ Gabriel – the Solicitor had seen a photographic image of Gabriel (who was clearly not Xavier) and furthermore was able to point out the difference in their dates of birth.

When I presented a claim for wrongful arrest on behalf of Xavier to Essex Police, their lawyers initially disputed liability stating that the warrants for the arrest of Gabriel had been legitimately issued by the Magistrates Court and then circulated on the Police National Computer system (PNC) by the Metropolitan Police, and furthermore that Xavier’s name was linked to Gabriel’s profile on the PNC as an ‘alias’ of the wanted man. It was said that this ‘alias’ information had been added to the PNC by Cambridgeshire Police in 2016 following a previous arrest of Gabriel. 

In the circumstances, it was necessary for me to present letters of claim on behalf of Xavier to Cambridgeshire Police and the Metropolitan Police, both of whom maintained that they had no responsibility for linking Xavier’s PNC record to Gabriel’s PNC record.  They pointed the finger of blame back at Essex Police.

In the meantime, I had obtained expert evidence from a psychologist to assess the anxiety, depression and trauma which Xavier had suffered as a result of his very public and humiliating arrest and I commenced Court proceedings on behalf of Xavier in order to protect his position to bring a claim for breach of the Human Rights Act.

After thoroughly investigating the involvement of the multiple Police Forces referred to above, the Magistrates Court and the UK Border Force (a non- Police, Law Enforcement Command within the Home Office) I was able to establish that there was no legitimate basis for Essex Police to have believed that my client was the wanted man Gabriel, that they therefore had no power to arrest him under the warrant, and hence they were liable for his wrongful arrest. 

In October 2021 settlement terms were reached with Essex Police whereby they agreed to pay Xavier £17,500 damages for deprivation of liberty and the psychological trauma of the arrest, plus his legal costs. 

That, however, was not the end of this story.  

PNC Profiling Problems

One of the virtues that I pride myself in is leaving no stone unturned when it comes to investigating/fighting my client’s cases.

I considered the evidence which had been uncovered during my successful pursuit of Essex Police for damages relating to Xavier’s unlawful arrest at Stanstead Airport in 2019, as related above.

Although Essex Police were ultimately unable to avoid carrying the can for that arrest, I was intrigued by the suggestion that Cambridgeshire Police had potentially sown the seeds of future trouble for Xavier by recording his name as an ‘alias’ of the career criminal Gabriel. 

In discussing past events with Xavier, I had discovered that my client had been arrested by the Metropolitan Police in the Spring of 2016.  At the time, he had not done anything about this, but I now encouraged him to pursue the matter further, suspecting that this arrest was a result of incorrect links on the Police National Computer system between him and Gabriel.

The documentation which I had seen indicated that Cambridgeshire Police Officers had entered Xavier’s name onto Gabriel’s PNC record as an ‘alias’, in around mid-February 2016, and had then gone on to place a ‘wanted/missing’ marker on Xavier’s PNC profile in mid-March 2016, indicating that Xavier  (not Gabriel) was wanted for arrest for intent to supply Class A drugs in Cambridgeshire. Basically, whoever had done this was treating Xavier and Gabriel as if they were the same person –  with two different PNC records – when clearly they were not. ‘Aliases’ are one of the oldest tricks in the criminal’s book, and it is baffling, and concerning, that Police Officers could so easily fall into the trap of ‘contaminating’ an innocent person’s profile with the crimes of a separate individual like this.

As a result of this mistake, on 15 March 2016, whilst parked in his motor car in the area of Croydon, Xavier was arrested by two Metropolitan Police Officers who, having run an ID check on him (after asking to see his licence), were informed over their radios that Xavier was “Wanted for conspiracy to sell Class A drugs”. Accordingly, he was arrested, handcuffed and taken into Custody at Croydon Police Station.

Xavier was subsequently released on Police bail and told to report to Cambridge Police Station in April 2016. When he did so, Xavier was informed that no further action was to be taken against him – notwithstanding this, however, we now know that Cambridgeshire Police then doubled down on the mistaken misidentification of Xavier and Gabriel by adding Xavier’s date of birth to Gabriel’s PNC profile. 

Then, in June 2016, an event which was significant in all of our lives took place; the Brexit Referendum and the UK’s vote to leave the European Union – but which was all the more significant for Xavier as he was a Dutch National living in the UK.  He therefore subsequently had to apply for Leave to Remain under the EU Settlement Scheme.

In December 2019 the Home Office wrote to Xavier, informing him that his application for Leave to Remain could not be progressed due to “ongoing criminal investigations”.  We now know that this related not to anything that Xavier was suspected to have done, but to the erroneous ‘ghost in the machine’ connection between Xavier and Gabriel’s PNC profiles, which appeared to have originated with Cambridgeshire Police’s mistaken data entry of March 2016 (posting Gabriel’s wanted marker on Xavier’s profile) – kickstarting the series of arrests that I describe above, and which apparently suggested to the Home Office that Xavier should be considered a Persona Non Grata.

I am pleased to confirm that in October 2020 the Metropolitan Police directed Cambridgeshire Police to expunge Xavier’s name and date of birth from Gabriel’s PNC record.

But very real damage had already been done as a result of this ‘virtual’ mistake.

Although this error originating with Cambridgeshire Police – treating Xavier’s real identity as if it were just a mask or alias of the career criminal Gabriel – did not result in any more actual arrests after those of March 2016 and November 2019, it continued to indirectly affect Xavier’s life in numerous ways.  He became wary of the Police and felt like he was constantly ‘looking over his shoulder’.  He got into the habit of carrying his passport and official Court documentation around with him in order to be able to explain this misidentification if another incident occurred and in particular felt scared of international travel knowing that the airport/border was the place where this type of electronic mistaken identity was most likely to affect him.

On behalf of Xavier, I pursued Court proceedings against Cambridgeshire Police for breaches of the Data Protection Act and have recently recovered £35,000 damages for him, plus legal costs.

This makes a grand total of £52,500 damages which I have won for my client against the two Police Forces who through their errors of their own making – which could have been easily avoided with a bit of human brain power, rather than a rote-response to PNC data – had so badly affected his life over a period of 8 years.

Let this be a lesson to them: With Great Data Resources Comes Great Data Responsibility!

Names have been changed for the purposes of this blog (…but not confused).