Do make sure you're sitting down. Something quite extraordinary has happened. The police have issued an abject apology for two deaths in their custody, and announced that the officer responsible will be prosecuted. How to put this momentous announcement into context? How to throw it into the sharp relief which is deserves? Well, according to monitoring carried out by the organisation Inquest, there have been 954 deaths in police custody in England and Wales since 1990 – the figure includes shootings – with nary a successful prosecution for murder or manslaughter.
And so to this historic case, which has seen top brass abandon their traditionally minimalist statements on such tragedies, unless of course they take the bizarre decision to pretend that the victim had leapt over a ticket barrier or some such. The deaths have caused "immense sadness", according to the relevant force's chief superintendent. "We will certainly take any lessons we can get from this process, and make sure we put them in place so this sort of thing never happens again. We understand the upset that this has caused the public and members of our staff … There is a sense of shock and sadness at the news of the death of two of our police dogs."
Ah yes. Forgive my getting your hopes up. It's the case of those two dogs who expired in a car outside Nottingham police headquarters earlier this month, having been left in the vehicle on a searingly hot afternoon. Following an urgent RSPCA investigation, the officer responsible will face animal cruelty charges. The force's own inquiry apparently continues.
A horrible business, evidently, and we must pass on our condolences to those who knew the animals. Indeed, the police have established a tribute area, where they and members of the public have laid wreaths.
But after we've done that, I'm afraid we must contrast Plod's reaction with, say, that to the death of Ian Tomlinson, who died of abdominal bleeding at the G20 protests in March, shortly after being struck by a Met officer. The police have sweetly judged this to be something worth offering their "sincere regret" about, but refuse to comment further, while the Independent Police Complaints Commission continues one of its famously fast-paced investigations. It would be funny if it weren't so bleeding wretched.
The contrast has not been lost on some of the families with relatives who have died in police custody. At a recent meeting of their number, a speaker read out the Nottingham chief super's expressions of anguish. One attendee says the room went quiet as everyone wondered to which death in custody such expressions of frank remorse related. When the dog punchline was revealed, how they didn't laugh.
There isn't quite the space to reproduce the official police comments on all those 954 deaths, but let's challenge any copper who fancies a grim afternoon to delve among them and produce a statement as abjectly apologetic or anguished as the one concerning the two dogs.
Of course, there's a point to be made about some people's prioritising of animal injustice, where its human equivalent elicits less concern in them. In 2006, more money was given to a single Devon donkey sanctuary than to all the most prominent charities dealing with violence and abuse of women.
For today, though, these are diversions, because there is something so undeliciously neat about the dog tale that you could be forgiven for thinking it was a staged satire. In an alternate reality, the police would have offered a variation on that cliched explanation for a death in custody – the suspect kicked himself down the nick stairs – perhaps suggesting that the dogs were involved in some sort of asphyxiation game gone tragically wrong.
If the story had failed to catch on, they might have floated a version of the theory that the Met put to Ian Tomlinson's family in the days after his death – namely, that the officer who struck him could have been a member of the public "dressed in police uniform".
This idle speculation could go on for ever, or at least until the IPCC completes its inquiries into the G20 cases, which increasingly seems a similar time frame. Nicole Fisher, the protester who was filmed being struck by a police sergeant, told the home affairs committee that the IPCC had informed her that they expected it would take "between 12 and 18 months" to complete their inquiry. Considering it was such a "distressing" and high-profile case of assault, ran the committee's report, "we cannot imagine why this amount of time is needed".
An obvious solution suggests itself. A crack team of RSPCA investigators must be seconded to the IPCC to teach the latter how to bring in an investigation in under 18 months. Or would that upset the fine equilibrium of this most credible of public bodies, in whose official logo the "I" is helpfully greyed out? After all, a third of the IPCC's investigators are former police officers. Given their continuously triumphant record, one can't help feeling that's a little like a third of the RSPCA's investigators being former circus lion tamers.
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