AIBU to think a man accused of throwing a child into a crocodile enclosure should not get bail?

[YourKeenOliveNewt]

Aibu to think the man who threw an unknown 3 year old into a crocodile enclosure shouldn't be out on bail?

If anyone could provide any insight into the reasoning behind why was granted bail I would be very interested to hear it.

AIBU: He's a danger to society
AINBU: Innocent until proven guilty

A risk assessment should identify possible risks based on the facts, of which past behaviour is only one. If he’s a grown man with the cognitive ability and unpredictability of a toddler, there’s always the chance that he might hurt somebody, even unintentionally through play. That should have been picked up in the risk assessment, and his carers should have been hyper vigilant in such an environment if it was deemed suitable for him to be there at all. They should have been right next to him and ready to restrain him if he even touched a child.

If there was a history of violence, the failure to foresee this event is even more troubling.

Which was?

I was left alone 1:1 in the community (shopping) with someone who had extreme violent thoughts and behaviours. It was only after I was told of his history. I purposely wasn’t told so that I wouldn’t treat him differently. I left that area of work because I couldn’t trust the organisation to keep me safe. I would hope that that would not happen these days but I don’t think we should blame the carers until we know more.

All these people blaming the carers. Carers not security guards or bouncers fucking carers. Anyone laying blame on the carers should be ashamed of themselves. @Ritasueandbobtoo9. That's awful 💐

Yes, it does. I didn't say anything about him being angry. Nor did I mention locking him up. I'm not sure where you're getting any of that from. You said that he could've knocked the child out of his way. I said no, he actually picked the child up and threw him. I'm not sure where on earth you're getting all this other imagined stuff up?

Well it depends what the carers were doing if they were ignoring him and on their phones they wereb not doing their job.

Why? The clue is in “Carer” They were in charge of him. If they couldn’t do that , he should not have been taken out.

I blame the carers who were reportedly on their phones. They are the ones who should be ashamed.

Well reportedly is a stretch, the only comment about the carers was from someone who said she seen someone who might have looked like a carer who was on her phone. She did not know whether it was actually a carer or indeed whether it was this man’s carer.
Didn’t stop her running to the sun or whatever though!

This . So much speculation on here.

I have my own experience here in a way.

I work in a pub. A few years ago a man moved to town, to secure accommodation. He had quite severe learning disabilities and was always on a 2:1 ratio in the community - or at least he was meant to be. The turnover of carers is stupidly high for some many reasons. So Jason would never have the same staff twice.

He used to come in for food with carers. He liked it when the younger female staff took his meal over. He said they were his favourites. If a male staff member took his food he got very, very angry. He would refuse to eat, shout, demand and eventually flipped a table. His staff that day were told he could not return.

What followed was months of him absconding from his carers and coming to the pub to try and gain entry. He told me once he had superpowers and if I didn't let him in he would rape me hold me hostage like he did his mum. Almost every day I would have to try and keep staff safe, him safe, and get him collected.

This progresses to him turning up saying he had taken an overdose and demanding an ambulance. Or asking others to call him one. Once his carers left him in town because they were scared of him. One week he called 6 ambulances in 5 days - all to my pub.

The last week he was around he had changed tact and told me if I didn't call him an ambulance he would kill me. He said it with a smile on his face. I'm 5ft 2, he was 6ft. He meant it. The police attended and that was the last time I saw him, I think he was moved out of area.

I dont know what the answers are with adult social care. Its woefully inadequate. But there are some service users who cannot be in public safely.

Nope, it’s in the news that at least one of the crocodiles attacked.

The adult care sector is understaffed. This is an excerpt from a government survey of the care providers, who were asked to self report the issues they were having with staffing. The full thing is worth reading, tbh.

The survey found that 71.0% of provider locations reported that they found the current workforce recruitment situation challenging and 37.0% were concerned about sustaining the current level of service delivery over the next 6 months. However, 58.6% also said that the recruitment challenges they faced had remained unchanged compared with the same time last year (August to September 2023). Respondents said that the primary challenge to both recruitment and retention is better pay outside the adult social care sector (27.8% and 35.2% respectively).

Domiciliary care settings reported greater recruitment and retention challenges than residential care settings. In domiciliary care settings, 74.0% responded that recruitment was challenging, and 58.5% reported the same for retention. In comparison, 66.7% of residential care settings found recruitment challenging, and 53.9% reported retention difficulties. These workforce pressures may be linked to staff morale, with 46.1% of domiciliary care settings reporting low morale, compared with 41.4% in residential care settings. Less than 1% of respondents answered that recruiting social workers, occupational therapists and nursing associates has become more challenging compared with last year.

Nationally across the sector, it's generally quoted that there are over 100,000 vacant posts at any one time. So in practice care settings employ anyone just to have boots on the ground.

To provide care well, you need dozens and dozens of soft skills, including timekeeping, task prioritisation, empathy, de-escalation of heightened emotions, symptom recognition, compassion, ability to build rapport with service users, and to be able to give your full attention and patience to what your client is telling you about trains/going dancing at the Locarno even if your client has told you the exact same story over a hundred times this month.

And you need to have the capacity to do this with adults you have no prior relationship with. There is something about human evolutionary psychology that means it is much easier to find patience with children (especially your own), than it is an elderly adult who is on the level of a child due to dementia or learning disabilities.

But technically, it's not a role you need GCSEs in to start, so there are so many staff in the sector because they need a job that doesn't require qualifications. They find the clients dull, so they stare at their phones until clocking off time.

When people speculate "if he had a history of violence", what do they mean? Do they mean someone that used to lash out a bit as a kid before they learnt strategies to communicate from their special school? Do they mean someone who had a single sensory meltdown when they were 19 and kicked a staff member? Do they mean frequent low level aggression like lightly pushing when frustrated? Or do they mean regularly punching people?

I'd imagine a third of the population, or more, has a "history of violence" if we're counting everything from above the age of criminal responsibility at 10.

None of us have seen this man's risk assessments. You can't just "lock them up" indefinitely forever in case they might hurt someone. We don't even do that in prisons for people who have hurt someone.

When you don't have enough resources it's inevitable than managers will play down real concerns until they become critical because there isn't an easy solution.

And what happens when they get critical on a regular basis?

Either the 'care' gets more crude, or the public get exposed to more danger.

I wonder which way it will go.

I also suspect that people who work in this area don't always have realistic expectations of how the public will react. I get it, when you work with people that may do things like lash out you get used to it and it's easy to forget that it's not something that the average person on the street is used to.

This is a good point. A toddler group person I know works in mental health, and she was saying she took a group of LD men to a swimming pool complex. Well, they all started masturbating. She was telling it as a funny story but I don’t suppose the other patrons found it amusing in the least.

That’s chastening and whoever did that to you is a danger to others.

However, the fact that there were 2 carers suggests that the risk assessment included the possibility that it would take two people to stop him doing something dangerous - that is the reason for there being two of them.

“Detectives are said to be examine the role of the two carers who were meant to be supervising” according to the ToL today.

Well no but in my LA at least we a hydro pool complex specifically for the use of disabled people.

There are a few things on the thread that could probably do with clarification. Mental health/learning disabilities are a really complicated part of the criminal justice process. Disclaimer - I've been out of criminal practice for a few years, so not fully up-to-date with all procedural changes, although I do tend to keep up with big developments.
A large part of my work was in police stations and magistrates' courts, so at the more robust and less polished end of the criminal justice system. Capacity/fitness was always a tricky area because there wasn't a single smooth path to the most appropriate end result. There's a difference between lack of capacity/understanding at the time an offence was committed, and lack of fitness to stand trial for that offence. There's also a difference between permanent lack of capacity and a changing state of health due to temporary mental illness.
In terms of the decision to bail, this is unlikely to have had anything to do with any judge or court. When someone is arrested for an offence, the police have a set amount of time to question them - standard is 24 hours. One question you often hear asked in the custody suite is 'how much time left on the custody clock/PACE clock?' There are circumstances where this can be extended, but those are limited. Within that time, things have to be actually happening. The purpose of police station detention is for someone to be questioned about an offence, and a decision reached as to the appropriate outcome. It's not just a holding position. Most arrests lead to an interview within a few hours, then either an immediate charge or bail with a return date, while further investigations take place.
If someone is unwell or has a learning disability, the immediate question is whether they are fit to be detained - usually comes up when someone is in an acute mental health crisis, or with serious physical health issues. This is assessed by an on-call medical professional. If they're not fit to detain, a decision has to be made about where they go. There's also fitness for interview, which the medical professional should also consider. Sometimes it's not immediately obvious, and might be raised by the solicitor after the consultation. Someone could be completely cooperative, but convinced that they're the king of England and everyone in the police station is an alien.
If they're not fit to be interviewed, the next question is whether they will ever be fit. If they're in a mental health crisis, chances are they might recover enough for an interview at a future time. If they're seriously disabled, they may be permanently incapable of giving an account or even sitting through the questions. At this point, there are going to be all sorts of meetings and phonecalls happening, to try and reach a practical way forward. The police need time to investigate, and they can't just lock the person up in a basic police station cell for however long it takes. In severe cases, you could have that person screaming, repeatedly running at the door, hitting their head against the wall, soiling themselves, refusing food etc.
The police can therefore bail them, with or without conditions, and with a date to return - which may be a holding date that will be pushed back multiple times. It doesn't go to court, because it's pre-charge. They can't be remanded in custody, because it's pre-charge and our law doesn't allow people to be locked up without being charged with an offence. Even if someone is brought out of prison to be questioned about a new offence that's come to light, they still have to be bailed until they're charged. It's just technical bail, that has no actual effect because they're on remand/serving a sentence for other matters. They can also be granted technical bail if they're sectioned. The police bail them because they're being detained under mental health provisions.
Once someone is charged with an offence, the courts decide what happens in terms of bail. It also starts getting messy. I'm not going to go into the whole fitness to plead procedure here because it's extremely complicated and there are various situations that aren't really covered. But to cut a very long story short, you can finish up with a situation where it is agreed that someone committed an act, but that it isn't an option for them to stand trial for it. There are a limited number of options open at that point, and one might well be that the person goes back to their old life, and appears to have had no consequences. But there will have been all sorts of reports and investigations leading up to that point.
I hope that makes some sense. It's a very rough summary of something that often comes down to the OIC, the custody sergeant, a doctor, a support worker, and a solicitor all standing around the custody desk, with a social worker on the end of a phone, all trying to work out a practical way through a situation that the criminal justice system isn't set up to cope with. In a case like this, there will have been all sorts of people/services involved, and whatever the bail situation is, it will be something that has been given a huge amount of thought and investigation. Bail also doesn't mean that there's any doubt about what actually happened - just that they're not in a position to move through the usual interview-charge-court process and there's no provision for the police/courts to detain someone without charge.

I completely get it. If we didn't have the ability to desensitise ourselves to unpleasant parts of our jobs we wouldn't be able to do them. While I think we've made some progress in people having more understanding about disability I think some folk are delusional about how much we can expect people to tolerate behaviour wise.

Yeah, bring back mob rule.

I'm not interested in him or his "problems", he needs to be locked up away from the rest of us if this is what he does when he has carers with him. He should not be around children ir womwn ever. Why are violent men always given a pass?

Violent men are not always given a pass but men and women who commit a crime and lack capacity to understand thr impact of their actions
Will be treated differently to those who can.