THE Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) has decided that two Metropolitan Police officers who shot Harry Stanley in 1999 should not face any disciplinary action, even though the officers presented a consistent but incredible account of how the shooting took place. As a result the IPCC is urging the police service to change the way officers write up accounts of fatal incidents.
It often comes as something of a surprise to the uninitiated that police officers are allowed to collaborate when they write up their notebooks after an incident. The incident written up often involves an arrest. The police officers involved need to record what happened as soon as possible if they are to be permitted to refer to their notebooks later in the witness box. The usual practice is for some or all of the officers to decamp to the police canteen and to pool their recollection of events while writing up their individual notebooks. Naturally, the result of this process is remarkably similar accounts recorded by all the officers. Sometimes only one version of events is recorded, then signed by all the officers.
This practice has been sanctioned by the criminal courts for many years. The reality however, is that it leads to contaminated evidence given to the criminal courts on a daily basis. Contamination in this context is used to describe the process whereby the evidence of one witness is adopted by, or affects, the evidence of another witness. For example, if a number of police officers in the canteen say that they saw the suspect pull a knife, it must be tempting for another officer who did not see this to record it in his or her notebook to preserve a consistent “line” adopted by the police.
The problem identified by the IPCC is where this practice is also used in other areas. If a person dies in custody or is wrongly shot, like Mr Stanley, the officers involved are simply ordinary witnesses to what happened. Why should they pool their recollections before the investigation into the death commences? Surely it would serve justice better if they all recorded separately what they knew without collaborating with other officers? As the IPCC indicated in the Stanley case, a joint but clearly wrong version of events simply leads to a strong feeling that that account must have been fabricated.
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In the Stanley case the IPCC decided that because the pooled account was wrong did not mean that the officers were necessarily deliberately lying. That conclusion will be hard for the Stanley family to take, and the IPCC’s call for an end to the practice of writing a pooled account must be heeded — perhaps not just when officers record events after a death in custody, but every time officers are required to write up notebooks after an arrest as well.
Stephen Cragg is a barrister specialising in public law at Doughty Street Chambers E-mail:s.cragg@doughtystreet.co.uk