Is anyone restraining the British police?

The use of narrative verdicts is working against the families of victims such as Mikey Powell, who died in police custody

An inquest reached a shocking conclusion this month, though you'd be hard-pressed to have heard about it. In a damning "narrative" verdict, the jury concluded that Mikey Powell had died from positional asphyxia following police restraint. He had been deliberately hit by a moving police car, sprayed with CS gas, struck with a baton and restrained on the ground while suffering a psychotic episode.

It was 7 September 2003 when Powell died. He was 38 years old, had three children, and worked as a team leader in a local metal factory. Known as Mikey Dread because of the extravagant dreadlocks he had worn as a young man, Powell was well loved in the Lozells area of Birmingham, where he lived. He also suffered from terrible depression, and on the night in question he cracked up. It was 11.30pm, he was raging outside his mother's house and he broke a window. His mother, Claris, called the police. She had always believed British bobbies were the best in the world, and that if there was a difficult situation you called them out for help. A couple of months earlier, when Powell had suffered another episode, she had called them out, and it had all been sorted.

But this time the police didn't calm Powell down. When the officers screamed at him to get on the floor, he took off his belt and hit the car with it. The police drove straight at him and ran him over. Then came the CS gas and baton, and he was restrained on the ground till a police van arrived to take him to the station. The inquest heard that Powell was put on to the floor of the van, face down, "like a dog". The van parked in the station yard and Powell was kept in it for three minutes before he was carried, still face down, into the "drunk cell". It was only then that officers realised he was not breathing. His cousin, the poet Benjamin Zephaniah, said that in their treatment of Powell the police had acted as a "force, and not a service".

Over the past 30 years, more than 1,000 people have died in Britain in police custody – a disproportionate number of whom are black men, and many, like Powell, suffering mental health problems.

In a now familiar pattern, death is followed by character assassination. After Powell died, a local paper reported that the police had driven their car at him only because he waved a gun at them. The gun was, in fact, his belt. When the family complained about this to West Midlands police, they were told it had been a mistake made by a source close to the investigation. By then the damage had been done. In the public mind, Powell was a crazed gunman who deserved to die. The truth was that he did not have a criminal record, and had even campaigned against gun crime.

In 2006, six officers were charged with battery and failing to treat Powell with due care and attention. All were cleared. Three years on, the family has finally gained the result it was waiting for. After the inquest, Powell's sister, Sieta Lambrias, said: "At long last the truth has come out. The jury have found that the position the police put Mikey in killed him."

It was a powerful and unusual verdict. Yet the story was conspicuously ignored by the media. The only national newspaper report was an appalling column in the Sunday Telegraph arguing that the inquest was a waste of public money.

Why the lack of interest? The reasons are alarming. In 2004, narrative verdicts were introduced at inquests. This was a descriptive verdict that answered questions rather than the traditional short-form verdict that simply stated how and why somebody had died. It was designed to provided more information for families, but its very nature meant it was less easy to sum up in a soundbite. The ultimate soundbite for a death in police custody is "unlawful killing", but since 2004 this verdict has never been reached.

Deborah Coles, co-director of campaigning group Inquest, supports narrative verdicts but she worries that they have led to less coverage of controversial deaths. "They allow more meaningful outcomes for families and can be very powerful commentary on individual and systemic failings. But the negative side is they are difficult to report on because of the detail. The significance of the narrative verdicts is being overlooked. People are not understanding how damning these narrative verdicts are."
Coupled with this are our changing attitudes to what we like to regard as "old-fashioned" policing. It has become known in legal circles as the "Life on Mars" defence, a reference to the TV satire on 1970s policing. Inquests are sometime not heard until years after the death. In the six years since Powell's death, many people in authority – from judges to newspaper editors – assume that policing has been transformed. To paraphrase, the logic goes: yes, we know officers were bent, racist and brutal, but the past is the past and let's focus on the future.

Recent deaths in custody, though, suggest this may not be the case. And if we are not interested in highlighting the potential abuses suffered by the likes of Powell, why should the police fear acting with a similar lack of restraint in future?
(From CIF Guardian)