Channel 4 - To Catch A Copper

[NameChangeAsICouldBeOverReacting]

Thoughts?

I was luckily able to watch this during work due to my job and it absolutely SHOCKED me to my core and really affected me.

People like @DEEinKENT aren’t intelligent, that’s the issue. They lack critical thinking skills and so become ignorant and racist. Until it affects them in some way, then there will suddenly be an issue.

It is depressing that such narratives exist, but I’m glad so many people on mumsnet do see the issue and are smart and able to form rounded and fair opinions. Critical thinking and approach needs to be taught better in schools.

@DEEinKENT he had a brain aneurysm, he didn't break and enter he was in a state of medical emergency and probably broke in due to his clear CONFUSION. Luckily the police have nurses in custody to check on people like that, oh shit, no I forgot, they didn't bother checking out his bizarre behaviour despite his clear distress and calls for help.

Are you an Avon police officer by chance? Maybe the chief inspector, or a member of the IOPC.

Omg I'm on episode 1 . My you g child was retrieved by police numerous times due to MH and it breaks my heart to think of what they may have said or done if I hadn't been there to advocate for them. And fgs sex with a drunk woman is ok if you have ptsd, like a get out of jail ??

Not racist at all, but I still say that no matter what had been shown, it was never going to show the police in a good light.

Do you really think that was all the people that were arrested that week? What about all the white people, Asians, Africans, Eastern Europeans etc that get the same treatment, I don't see any of you decrying their treatment or do you think they get cookies and tea?

I have been stopped and had my car searched in the night coming back from visiting family and with my young child in the car and you don't hear me seeking compensation or making a complaint.... it is what it is.

Yes, unfortunate sometimes bad things happen, its a tough job and they are not perfect. However, if the woman on the bus had accepted the fact that the driver can refuse anyone access and just got off when she was asked instead of acting all entitled, none of what you saw would have happened, I know I would have!

As for the pay off at the end, well obviously that was so the usual riots and looting didn't take place, I didn't hear her say 'no thank you' !!!!

So stop being all 'isn't life awful, and poor me' and thank the police for the bloody difficult job they do keeping you and me safe the best they can.

IIdentifyAsInnocent In reply to your post, no I am not in the police force. But by the way to speak about the police is very disappointing but I am sure they would be the first you call in an emergency or would you stick to your skewed principles and deal with it yourself?
And yes Reon did break into someone's home, and yes he did get arrested for it. If it was my home that he had broken into I would expect nothing less or should the poor homeowner have checked his medical records before calling the police? She/He was probably frightened out of their wits having some strange man invading their home whether he was black, white or purple. I am sure you would have invited him to dinner and a a chat!
I am sure that the police handle many, many difference people every day of the week and each come with their own medical, social and mental issues you can't check on them all before arresting them just to make sure they are genuinely criminal or ill, that is ridiculous.

Again, if Reon had just said why he wanted to see the nurse instead of being rude to the police I am sure he would have had one attend asap. I know when I phone up my GP the first thing they ask is what is the problem and she is the lady who answers the phone!

And to you janiceiand, you are not interested in any opinions that don't agree with yours, I think you are the one who is lacking in intelligence and critical thinking skills and obviously need to start thinking about why some of these things happen and not just to whom.

And again, I am not a racist at all, I have a very diverse friends base and the same in my close family so please excuse me for having an opinion.

This is one of the issues here, I disagree with you, you accuse me of being a racist and the circle goes round. Maybe, YOU ARE WRONG and a RACIST did you consider that?

Wow, we've even had "I'm not racist, some of my friends are black on this thread"

Ffs

The reason why we can & should expect the police to have recognised that Reon was seriously ill was because (a) his symptoms were obvious and (b) because the police, as an emergency service, ought to know basic first aid.

And that's all it would take - basic first aid skills.

The difference between someone off their face on alcohol vs Reon was night & day.

So, either they ignored their training in favour of some ingrained bias or they lacked the most basic of training and shouldn't have been given any more powers than the bus driver.

For what it's worth, I have also been stopped by police. They were completely professional and I had no reason to complain...but then I wasn't a black woman being prejudicially treated as a violent risk to armed police officers.

Expect police to know how to non-violently descalate a minor dispute about politeness? Whatever next!

Hear hear @StBrides

@DEEinKENT "So stop being all 'isn't life awful, and poor me' and thank the police for the bloody difficult job they do keeping you and me safe the best they can."

Getting a woman off a bus without violence, or not raping a drunk woman is what I expect the police to do,. If what this program shows is the best that they can do then I'll get by without them thanks.

Also, look in the mirror, your racism is showing through, you might want to touch up your disguise.

The IOPC is not fit for purpose if the statistic of 1% of complaints ending in a prosecution is correct.

Getting a woman off a bus without violence, or not raping a drunk woman is what I expect the police to do,. If what this program shows is the best that they can do then I'll get by without them thanks.

Hear hear!

I still say that no matter what had been shown, it was never going to show the police in a good light.

You know that the programme is called ‘To Catch a Copper’, right? The whole premise of the show is that the Avon and Somerset police have decided to make public their investigations of officers. So yes, the police are not shown in a good light. That is the whole point of the show.

If they had shown lots of officers treating people with respect and kindness (and we all know some officers are excellent), there would have been no investigation, so therefore not much of a show.

Do you really think that was all the people that were arrested that week?

This comment suggests you don’t understand the premise of the programme. ‘That week’- which week? You think all of the incidents in the programme took place over one week?

The fact that arrests presumably took place in which officers were not racist does not mean that the incidents shown were not racist.

Did you watch the show the previous week in which people in mental health crisis were treated appallingly and one woman was almost certainly possibly raped by an officer? I’d be interested to know what you made of that, though I think I can guess.

Ignoring all the nonsense in this… HE DID ASK TO SEE THE NURSE. Did you not watch???

@janiceiand, that poster’s gripe is that Reon didn’t say WHY he wanted to see the nurse (pretty sure he was within his rights to ask for medical assistance without disclosing the reason to the police, leaving aside the fact he was in a state of confusion anyway).

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DeathoffChristopherAlder

Not the first time police have made this mistake
Reon was lucky not to die. Christopher Adler wasn't so lucky.

I know police are not Drs but confusion, head and neck pain that was obviously severe from his behaviour and particularly vomiting. I think that combination of symptoms is pretty well known even by the general public to suggest head injury. I don't blame them for arresting him in the 1st place but they should have got him medical attention sooner.

Police do get training about signs that a person might be unwell rather than misbehaving. Diabetes or sepsis can also cause people to behave bizarrely and come into contact with police. They always ask people who come into custody if they have any medical or mental health conditions in order to pick these things up and there is a nurse on duty for that reason. These measures came into place to prevent deaths in custody and it's really disappointing to see that he still did not get access. I do think his race (and age and sex) was a factor. He was a bit arsey and did not respond in a textbook way but people who are ill often are. Police should have seen past that and got him help.

I think the other dynamic that happens is that black people (in this programme and more generally) are seen as being uncooperative with police and that is then said to justify force being used but not taking into account that it actually IS more threatening and risky to be detained by police as a black person and that is well known. That will mean that black people feel more threatened when stopped or arrested for good reason and they respond from fear with less co-operation than a white person might give in the same situation because the white person has more trust and feels less unsafe. Then they are responded to with violence, this makes that person and everyone they know, who they tell about their experience or who sees that feel more scared and less trusting, react more defensively and so goes the downward spiral.

@ThePure well said

I know police are not Drs but confusion, head and neck pain that was obviously severe from his behaviour and particularly vomiting. I think that combination of symptoms is pretty well known even by the general public to suggest head injury.

Exactly. The vast majority of average, not-medically-qualified people, would seek medical assistance for our friend or family member if they were presenting with those symptoms. The police (presumably) aren’t stupid; they very obviously should have got him some help sooner.

I'm only up to woman on bus. So she didn't have change and her card didn't work but she still expected to remain on bus as she had to pick her child up from school. Bus driver refused and police were called.

Police gave her an alternative option to get to the school and she refused as she didn't want to be seen getting out of a police car. She then refused to get off the bus so police used force to get her off and the rammy ensued as she refused to let go of child.
Pava was deployed (totally unnecessary in my opinion).

So it's basically racist to say anything other than 100% for the woman and that she should've been allowed to travel despite not having the means to do so and didn't want to be taken there as the police are racist?

So it's basically racist to say anything other than 100% for the woman and that she should've been allowed to travel despite not having the means to do so and didn't want to be taken there as the police are racist?

Believing that the woman has been treated unfairly and that the situation could have been handled differently with a much better outcome is not the same as being ‘100% for the woman’. She behaved badly- she too, could have made better choices- but she isn’t in the police.

I totally get why she didn’t want to get into a police car.

I totally get why she didn’t want to get into a police car.

Yeah absolutely, but that was discrimination towards them too, rightly or wrongly. They gave her a viable option to get her there. The language towards her was wrong, but she started displaying aggression and isn't above the law either. She refused to get off the bus. I'm all for calling out cops who are in the wrong but not this blanket 'they are all racist so leave her alone'.

I'm a former police officer and have very mixed views on this.

Reon's head injury must have been incredibly distressing for him and his mum and I completely understand their anger. I don't see any evidence that it was individually racist though - I think the same would have happened had he been white.

We can still consider it institutionally racist because black people are 2.4 likely to be arrested than white people and so they are disproportionately affected.

Officers receive maybe 5 minutes training on head injuries. No one mentioned a fall or a fight before Reon was arrested so officers would not have suspected a head injury in the same way they would had that been mentioned. The odds of a spontaneous brain bleed are very small and although officers will have had an input on strokes, Reon's age would have meant that wasn't at the forefront of their minds. 9x out of 10, a person presenting as Repn did would be doing so as a result of substance intoxication and/or poor mental health. I don't think the general public has any idea how many people with both these factors the police deal with every day. Back when I was a PC probably 4 out of 5 people I arrested. My DH who still works as a Custody Sgt says he literally cannot remember the last time he booked someone in who didn't smoke cannabis and that around 80% of detainees are vulnerable in some way. Reon's presentation in that environment would not stand out unless someone was properly monitoring him, which is where the problem lies. When everyone is at risk, who do you prioritise?

Custody units have minimum staffing/detainee ratios but these assume detainees who need additional monitoring are in the minority. This isn't the case so only those considered particularly risky end up getting constant monitoring. Cops can be called off frontline duties to sit with those at risk but this leaves fewer cops to deal with 999 calls from teams which are already understaffed. The whole thing is just chronically understaffed and contributes to a conveyor belt approach to people where cases such as this are a statistical probability not a one off. Unfortunately, because it works most of the time, the powers that be refuse to acknowledge the underlying problem, condemning a certain number of people to become the cases where it doesn't work.

Reon absolutely should have been on constant obs had a head injury been suspected but it wasn't. The question is why not. Having been on the inside I don't think it was because of Reon's race. No one thought "he may have a head injury but I don't care because he's black". It happened because people don't look further than their immediate involvement and responsibility because of this conveyor belt approach I've described. The cops probably didn't notice anything that unusual about Reon's presentation and knew the Custody Sergeant would ask Reon questions about his health and well-being. Job done, on to the next. The Custody Sergeant only knows what they're told or can see. They cannot send everyone who seems confused or who complains of a headache or being unwell to hospital (well over half of their detainees do) so unless they can see clearly that someone needs to go to hospital NOW they will simply request an HCP to check over a detainee they have concerns about. Risk transferred to the HCP, onto the next prisoner. Unfortunately, it's not unusual for the HCP (who is sub-contracted) to not be on site and take a couple of hours to get there. In this case that nearly resulted in someone dying.

None of this is an excuse BTW but appetite for change needs to directed to the way the police is organised NOT at individual officers. One of the reasons I left the police was because if you try to be that officer who takes personal responsibility for each and every person you deal with (as I did) you will eventually burn out. I was regularly doing 10-20 hours of unpaid overtime per set to manage all the stuff I hadn't been able to do during paid time because of dealing with people properly. Yet I knew that if I didn't do this or missed something because I was human and overwhelmed, someone might be seriously hurt or die and I'd probably be found at fault because the organisation would just point to the policies no one has time to follow and refuse to back me. That's simply not sustainable and after too many years of missing out on my own DCs life, I gave it up. Good cops get worn down or leave and it is one of the reasons why the police keep making the same mistakes - because the causes aren't being addressed. Senior leaders and politicians just blame individual officers for organisational factors that actually push them to behave as they do because it suits their agenda to not spend money on the police.

But my point is that officers, who deal with people from very different backgrounds and lives, should be sensitive to emotional responses & triggers in different people. De-escalation when encountering a situation such as this should have absolutely been the path they took.

It absolutely isn't unreasonable to have such expectations of police - this is basic stuff. If so many of us can manage it in daily life & our jobs, then they certainly can.

Furthermore, I'm genuinely outraged that the internal investigations around this were completely oriented around 'you've done absolutely nothing wrong'.

This fails the officers as much as it does the public - there is a big difference between charged / sacked & accepting and recognising where something has been mishandled and how it could have been done differently. Doing so isn't abandoning the officers, it isn't not-supporting or understanding them - quite the opposite.

These same officers no doubt bemoan "gentle" and permissive parenting and a lack of consequences among children being brought up and what that does to them. Learning , correction & instruction should absolutely be part of a police officers day job.

(As it is for the rest of us in professional careers, not dealing with emergencies)

But my point is that officers, who deal with people from very different backgrounds and lives, should be sensitive to emotional responses & triggers in different people. De-escalation when encountering a situation such as this should have absolutely been the path they took.

I agree, but we only saw a snippet of what probably happened. Who knew how long they were trying to negotiate with her for. The language the male cops used was unacceptable but if she's refusing to get off a bus she's refusing to get off a bus!

I would hesitate to get into a police car thanks to Wayne Couzens et al. That’s me discriminating against the police for good reason. The onus is on the police to improve their public rep.

Did you honestly not see any issue with the fact that all of those involved in the decision making as to whether the police had acted fairly seemed to be white people? (And all/mostly men too as far as I could see).

Your initial response to that post was 'hey racist, how's it going'. Wonderful display of critical thinking.

Just because you don't agree with a point of view doesn't automatically make them racist and all the other nonsense you came out with. Some debate/conversational skills being displayed here 🙄.

When I saw the bus incident my initial thoughts were that the officers had poor de-escalation skills. As with Reon, I didn't see any evidence of direct racism and think it would probably have gone just as badly had she been white.

That said, I agree that officers have a responsibility to understand that some demographics are more likely to have a deep-seated distrust of police and so more patience may be needed when trying to de-escalate these situations. Again, that's institutional discrimination but against anyone who doesn't have social power - frontline policing system is set up to work against officers taking their time to deal with situations patiently and sensitively and instead officers are constantly being pressured to finish up and move on to the next job. This impacts more on everyone who is less well able to advocate for themselves whether due to race, age, mental illness or disability or whatever.

Again it's the conveyor approach resulting in disproportionate impact rather than officers being individually racist. This is what needs to change. Create the environment where people can do things properly then you can hold them properly to account when they don't. More training won't change anything other than the behaviour of a small few.

On a different note, police officers often have links with other forces and I've heard that officers had been trying to persuade the woman on the bus to leave for 40 minutes before the video started. If that is the case, and we're talking about critical thinking skills, it's interesting to speculate why Channel Four chose not to mention that.