Deaths in Police Custody

Shabana Mahmood Excerpts

Wednesday 10th September 2014 Westminster Hall

[Shabana Mahmood (Birmingham, Ladywood) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mrs Main. I am grateful for that guidance, which I also received from the Clerks in the Table Office earlier today. I confirm that it is my intention to talk about my constituent’s case, but to do so in a way that takes account of the fact that there will be a coroner’s inquest early next year. I am grateful to have secured the debate and for the opportunity to highlight the very important issues of concern to my constituents and to one family in particular, whose case I have been working on for some months.

Deaths in police custody are an issue of growing concern, both in this House and across the country, and the matter has been raised several times in the House recently. In particular, there has been a recent focus on deaths in custody in which the deceased had a mental health illness that was not dealt with properly, either by officers or by NHS staff. I understand that the Home Affairs Committee is currently looking at that issue and took evidence on it last week. However, as I said, I will focus on the case of my constituent, Kingsley Burrell, which raises other issues in relation to deaths in custody that show shocking procedural failures, which add to the pain that is suffered by families of the deceased and contribute to an erosion of trust between the community and the police.

The facts of Mr Burrell’s death, as the Independent Police Complaints Commission found, are that on 27 March 2011, emergency services were called to a reported firearms incident in Ladywood in my constituency. They ascertained that the complainant was Kingsley Burrell and also found that a firearms incident had not occurred. Mr Burrell allegedly displayed symptoms of mental health illness and was therefore detained and sent to the Oleaster mental health unit. He was later transferred to the Mary Seacole mental health unit in Winson Green, again in my constituency. On 30 March, staff at that unit called police and reported an incident, after which Mr Burrell was restrained and taken to A and E, where he received treatment, but on 31 March, he was pronounced dead.

Those mysterious and tragic circumstances are difficult enough for Mr Burrell’s family to cope with, but the aftermath has placed significant stress on the family, and the way in which this case and others very similar to it have progressed since the deaths occurred is completely unacceptable. It adds to the suffering of these families and I believe has a wider impact on police and community relations.

Kingsley’s mum, Janet Brown, told me about some of her experiences in the aftermath of her son’s death. She told me that the IPCC investigation into the conduct of the officers took far too long. She also told me that it was a year before the IPCC asked Dorset police to look into the actions of the NHS staff involved in Kingsley’s care. Both police and NHS staff had had contact with Kingsley in the lead-up to his death, and although the IPCC began immediately investigating the officers, it was a further year before anybody looked into the conduct of the NHS staff.

There was also a delay in receiving Kingsley’s body for burial. The family had to wait 18 months before the IPCC instructed the pathologist to take samples from Kingsley’s body. Janet also told me that the IPCC did not want to include in its investigation Kingsley’s own accounts of what took place when he was placed in the Mary Seacole unit in Winson Green. He had been logging his experiences in a diary and the IPCC’s initial reaction was that that evidence would not be included in its investigation. The family had to meet them and insist that the commissioner, Rachel Cerfontyne, insert that information into her investigation report.

It took the IPCC a year and four months to complete its investigation into the conduct of the officers who had contact with Kingsley in the lead-up to his death. The Dorset police force, which did not come on to the scene until a year after Kingsley had died—as I have said—took a year and nine months before they reported into the actions of NHS staff who had had contact with him in the lead-up to his death. The file was passed to the Crown Prosecution Service in October 2013, and it was only a couple of months ago that the CPS made the decision not to prosecute any of the officers, NHS staff or other individuals who had had contact with Kingsley in the lead-up to his death. Only now do we have a preliminary inquest hearing coming up—next month—into Kingsley’s case, and the full inquest will begin in 2015, nearly four years after he died.

As far as I can tell, it does not get much more serious for the police than when somebody dies in their custody, on their watch, or very soon after coming into contact with them, but the very clear lack of a process when a death in custody occurs and the inordinate length of time that it take to investigate these matters implies—to me, my constituents, and in particular, the Burrell family—a casual and complacent attitude towards deeply serious issues of concern to the whole community, as well as to the deceased’s family. It is also deeply disrespectful. There seems to be no empathy in this whole process, or any recognition that these people are grieving, and there is no thought given to how one of us might feel if we were in the shoes of Kingsley’s family or those of other families who have suffered in a similar way.

[Rehman Chishti (Gillingham and Rainham) (Con)]

I congratulate the hon. Lady on bringing the matter forward for debate. She talks about other families; Colin Holt, a constituent of mine who suffered from schizophrenia, died as a result of how he was restrained by the police. Officers in that case were prosecuted but acquitted at Maidstone Crown court, where the judge, Mr Justice Singh, said—

[Mrs Anne Main (in the Chair)]

Order. I ask the hon. Gentleman to return to his seat. He is making a speech, not an intervention—it should be an intervention and a question to the Member whose debate it is. We should have the courtesy of allowing the hon. Lady the time to speak.

[Shabana Mahmood]

I am pleased that the hon. Gentleman had the opportunity to put his constituent’s case on the record. Restraint methods are an issue in cases involving deaths in police custody. My focus is particularly on the way in which these investigations take place and the amount of time that it takes to conduct them.

If the process got results, answered the questions that families have and ensured that the lessons that need to be learned are, in fact, learned, I suppose one could tolerate the fact that sometimes the investigation takes a very long time. But that is demonstrably not the case in the vast majority of cases involving deaths in police custody. The process takes far, far too long and it often leaves families with more questions and much greater pain. That is not something that any of us should continue to accept.

The impact on the wider community is also very profound. Contentious deaths in police custody include an ever-increasing number of people with mental health illnesses, and a disproportionately large number of people from black and minority ethnic backgrounds—and, sometimes, people from BME backgrounds with mental health issues. If those cases are not seen to be taken seriously and investigations are not seen to be conducted with due seriousness and as quickly as possible, trust in the system erodes seriously, breeding justifiable anger and resentment, and it is incumbent on all of us to do whatever we can to address that.

Sometimes it does not seem that deaths in police custody are treated as cases in which potentially a crime has been committed. The starting point should always be that we simply do not know what has happened, so all possible scenarios are on the table, but many families report that that is not how it feels to them. In practice, it feels as though a judgment has already been made and an end result is already in mind, long before the investigation has begun.

Despite the more than 900 deaths in police custody and several verdicts of unlawful killing, there has yet to be a single successful prosecution—a point that the hon. Member for Gillingham and Rainham (Rehman Chishti) also raised—of any police officer involved in those deaths. Again, that does not create much confidence in the wider public that the system is robust enough to ensure that when things go seriously wrong, as they do in many of these cases, we will get proper answers and accountability. It is the lack of accountability that bothers so many of my constituents, and it is the potential for lack of accountability that is keeping Janet Brown and her family awake at night. They fear that their questions will never be answered and someone will never be held to account for the death of Kingsley Burrell.

There are other issues in relation to deaths in police custody. People would expect sensitive and thorough handling of the investigation in the immediate aftermath of a death—the so-called golden hours, which are critical to evidence gathering and setting the direction and quality of the investigation that is to follow. Again, many families report that that does not happen in practice.

The independent charity INQUEST also tells us of particular problems in relation to IPCC material and disclosure, including ahead of inquest hearings. For a bereaved family trying to engage in an IPCC investigation, the organisation’s reluctance to provide early and full disclosure or to explain clearly, in language that ordinary people can understand—not lawyer-speak—why they cannot provide that evidence at the early stages of investigations, and when they expect to do so, fosters mistrust and is alienating and deeply unhelpful. Families often feel that they are not kept up to date and involved in the progress of the investigations. Of those who felt that they were kept involved and informed, many reported dissatisfaction because the information given to them was inadequate, difficult to obtain or delayed.

It seems to me that we have an ad hoc and chaotic system for investigations into deaths in police custody. There is no agreed method or structure and no checklist of what needs to happen and when. We need a uniform approach that allows professional judgment to be exercised on a case-by-case basis, but always in the context of a coherent and consistent national protocol for the structure of the relationship between investigating officials and the bereaved, and clear guidelines about the time frames that need to apply. That is the only way we can give the families who suffer in this way some confidence that they will at least understand the system and the process that is supposed to apply, and that they can hold to account the individuals involved.

I have mentioned the IPCC, and I believe that it has lost the confidence of the public and is not fit for purpose. It should be abolished and replaced by a new police standards authority, whose job it would be to take action and raise standards when policing goes wrong. Such an authority should be tasked with creating the national set of guidelines or protocols that should apply to the investigation of deaths in police custody, so that we can ensure that everyone knows what is meant to happen and when.

At this point, however, we still have the IPCC. I know that the Government have started their own review and it would be helpful if the Minister, when he responds to my remarks, could set out exactly what is planned for that review. But whoever ultimately has responsibility for these investigations—whether the IPCC, as now, or another organisation—its key task in the aftermath of a contentious death following police contact must be to begin immediately an independent, effective, accountable, prompt, public and inclusive investigation, so that the rule of law is seen to be upheld and applied equally to all citizens, including those in police uniform.

Young constituents of mine made this point to me only today when I was doing an interview on a local community radio station. They said, “Sometimes it feels that if you wear a uniform, you are above the law. You are there to enforce the law and to keep us all safe, but you should not be above it.” They make a fair point. It sometimes feels as if officers are not held properly to account. That relates not only to the potential for successful prosecutions and convictions but to the sense that if misconduct occurs, it will be challenged.

So often in relation to these cases, we say, “Lessons must be learned,” and we imply that lessons will in fact be learned. However, in my experience the lessons are not learned, because the cases of deaths in police custody that keep occurring all seem to follow the same pattern, and the same mistakes are often repeated. The families involved all report the same things going wrong in the investigations.

The experience of the Burrell family and the amount of time that it took for the investigations to conclude is very similar to that of other families who have suffered in similar circumstances. That says to me that the phrase “lessons must be learned” means nothing. Lessons are not learned, and it is about time that we started to get that right. If people are not held accountable, if there are no prosecutions and if there are no grounds for misconduct charges, at the very least we must fix the processes that apply when someone dies in these circumstances, given that we know there is a problem with them. That is one way in which we can start to give people confidence in the system again.

A few weeks ago, Janet Brown said to me that she has not yet grieved for her son and she will not do so until all her questions about his death have been answered and until she feels at peace that she has done everything she can to get justice for him. I think that making good, decent people wait so long and placing them at the mercy of a very chaotic system is a scar on our collective conscience. I really hope that the Minister, when he responds, can give Janet, the Burrell family and me some confidence that the Government understand not only the policy implications of these cases, but the emotional impact that they have, and that he and the Government will do something about it.

[The Minister for Policing, Criminal Justice and Victims (Mike Penning)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mrs Main, even though it is obviously enormously sad that the hon. Member for Birmingham, Ladywood (Shabana Mahmood) has had to bring—quite rightly, in her opinion, and probably in mine—this case to Westminster Hall this afternoon.

Let me say at the outset that any death, whether or not in custody, is regrettable, and a death in custody is enormously regrettable. It must be enormously traumatic for the Burrell family, and I fully appreciate the hon. Lady’s concerns. However, I cannot agree with many of her comments, because I think that she has almost predetermined what will be in the report from the IPCC, which has not yet even been released. I know that you, Mrs Main, said that we had to be careful in talking about the ongoing case, which is going to go before the coroner’s court for the inquest. The IPCC report is not out yet. That is the independent—I stress, independent—report.

There are some areas where I do agree, so let us do the bits that I do not agree with first and then we can move on. I do not recognise, as a constituency MP, the view of the IPCC and police as being above the law. I have patrolled with the police for more than 20 years, in many different capacities, and one of the things that I have found is this. There are, clearly, bad people within the police and bad people within our community. It is our job to make sure that we get them out of the police; they should not have got there in the first place in many cases. But the vast majority of the police—I want to put this on the record—99.9% of the police in this country, do a fantastic job for us, keeping us safe, not just in this place but in our homes and our businesses throughout the country.

This is an enormously difficult subject. The hon. Lady used quite emotive language in her speech, and I partially understand why, but not fully. May I touch, before I make progress with some other things, on the question of deaths in custody of people from the black and ethnic minority community? When I first thought about deaths in custody, my first thought was that that meant people who were being held by police in custody cells, but that is not always what happens. It is important to put on record that a death in custody occurs where the police have come into contact with somebody, even briefly, who has subsequently died. The IPCC will immediately become involved in such cases. The cases are sometimes enormously complex, much more so than I understand, although I am not as close to the case as the hon. Lady is. The way in which the news is communicated to families and loved ones is critical, and that is something that I am interested in looking at. I will come on to the IPCC review in a moment.

I will return to the hon. Lady’s comments about deaths in custody, particularly regarding people from the black and ethnic minority community. The IPCC did a 10-year study on deaths in custody between 1989 and 2008-09, and it found that 22 of those who died during that period were black. The view expressed in the report, which is a public document, is that that was in line, sadly, with the ethnic make-up of the detainee population. In 2010-11, there were, overall, 20 deaths in custody, one of which was sadly of an individual from the black community. In 2013-14, there were a total of 11 deaths in custody; clearly that is still too many, but the number of deaths has nearly halved since 2011. One of those deaths was, in the terminology used by the report—I do not like this terminology—of a mixed-race detainee. I am only using the language that has been given to me by lawyers, and I apologise for it. I am not very politically correct myself.

To recap, in 2010-11, there were 20 deaths in custody; in 2011-12, there were 15; in 2012-13, there were also 15; and in 2013-14, there were 11. I think that the report of this debate will show that the hon. Lady spoke about “growing” deaths in custody, although I may not be using her exact words. I know that black and ethnic minority groups feel that the situation is disproportionate, but the evidence that has been presented to me does not support that view.

[Shabana Mahmood]

I would like to clarify that I said that there was growing concern about deaths in police custody. I was talking not about the number of deaths that occur, but about the over-representation of people with mental health issues and about how trust in the police is being eroded in BME communities.

[Mike Penning]

I understand the point that the hon. Lady makes, and I will come on to talk about some work that I have been doing with a Minister in the Department of Health on mental illnesses. I repeat that the evidence shows that there were 20 deaths in custody in 2010-11—too many—one of which was of someone from the black community. Of the 15 people who died in 2011-12, one was a black individual and one was from a mixed-race family. In 2012-13, there were 15 deaths, one of which was of someone from a mixed-race family. In 2013-14, one of the 11 people who died was from a mixed-race family. The evidence speaks for itself. I understand how the situation is sometimes perceived, but it is our job as constituency MPs to ensure that our work is based on evidence rather than perception. It is the job of the police to do the same.

I am a new Minister in the Home Office, and I make the hon. Lady the same offer that my predecessor made: it would be good to meet outside the format of a debate to discuss the issues that she has raised. It is difficult for me to comment on the case, because the inquest will soon come before the coroner’s court and because the IPCC has not yet published its report.

There is no doubt that a review is needed into the IPCC’s work. That is not a criticism of the commission, but we need to look carefully at the nature of the work that comes before it. As a constituency MP, I regularly see cases where my constituents say, “I would like this case to go to the IPCC,” but I often look at the cases and think that they should have been resolved with the constabulary, rather than going to the IPCC. I am looking at guidance on that matter at the moment, and it will form part of the review of what the IPCC should look at. These cases are often complex, as is the case that the hon. Lady has raised. Before anything could happen, it was essential to ensure that any trial was not prejudiced, which is why the Crown Prosecution Service considered the matter before it progressed to an inquest. Of course, the IPCC now needs to report.

I do not believe that the previous Administration thought that the IPCC was flawed or broken and needed tearing up and throwing away, and I do not think that either. Is the IPCC perfect? No, it is not. Do we need to do some work with it? Yes, we do.

Without going into the details of the case that the hon. Lady has raised, there is one area that we need to work on, which has been the poor relation for many years. When I was a fireman in Essex, I used to go to road traffic collisions, which used to be called road traffic accidents. If someone was badly injured in an incident, we would extricate them as quickly as we could, the medics would do their job and the person would be taken to hospital for the treatment that they needed. The simple fact is that if someone has a mental illness, invariably the police will be called and the individual will end up in a cell rather than somewhere where they can get the medical help that they need. Is that the fault of the police? No, because their job is not to diagnose a mental illness but to make sure that the individual and the public are safe.

I was on patrol in Holborn only the other day when we received a call and went out. We thought that we would be dealing with a domestic incident, but the gentleman was having what his family described as an episode. The police did everything in their powers not to arrest him, but to take him to a hospital where he could get the correct treatment. I stress that the correct treatment is important. I have been working with the Department of Health to ensure that in such circumstances, people are not simply taken to an A and E department that does not have the required expertise, in which case they will be back out on the streets again five minutes later.

My view, and the view of the Health Minister with responsibility for the initiative, is that it is crucial that people with mental illnesses are treated as well as those with any other illnesses. People with mental health issues may also have learning difficulties and addictions to alcohol or drugs. The police still have a responsibility, however, not only to try to understand the circumstances of people who are brought before them, but to make sure that they can be taken to trained individuals with the right expertise. There are interesting projects going on at the moment. In Herefordshire, experts in the field such as nurses with mental health experience go out on patrol, particularly on Friday nights. It is important to have that sort of expertise alongside our patrolling police, and it provides a source of knowledge to ensure that the public feel safe.

I think that there is a real problem with the public, as well. The Olympics clearly showed us that public understanding of people with physical disabilities had really moved forward. The Paralympics was a great way of showing the world the wonderful things that people with long-term conditions and disabilities can do. However, all the evidence suggests that, although people with physical disabilities have seen such benefits, people with mental health issues and learning difficulties have not. We, as politicians, should do everything we can to tackle that.

I would love to have gone into a lot more detail, but with the ongoing investigations into the case, it would have been difficult for me to do so. I have every sympathy with the family. If I was the constituency MP, I would be sitting where the hon. Lady is sitting and asking exactly the sorts of questions that she has asked, but I always stand at the Dispatch Box—or, in this case, in this wonderful room. I just managed to get here in time, even though I went to the usual one first; it is a good job I always turn up early.

We are dealing with incredibly complicated issues, which will not be resolved in a half-hour debate. I look forward to meeting with the hon. Lady, and perhaps with the family, to see how we can move forward. Let us first see what we agree on, and then work on the other issues as we go forward.