Is the body responsible for looking into serious complaints against British cops fit for purpose?

At nine minutes past seven on the evening of March 3, Anthony Grainger was sitting in a car park in the Cheshire village of Culcheth at the wheel of a stolen red Audi, together with two friends. They had been there for 24 minutes when a second Audi, a grey estate model, screeched to a halt in front of them.

One of its occupants fired a single bullet from a Heckler & Koch sub-machine gun. It made a neat hole in Grainger’s windscreen, and then, because he had turned sideways in a futile attempt to protect himself, passed through both of his lungs and his heart.

Aged 36, and the father of two children, Grainger became the first person to be shot dead by police in Britain since Mark Duggan died in Tottenham, North London, on August 4 last year, triggering widespread riots.

The men in the grey Audi were specialist armed officers from Greater Manchester, bound by strict rules stating they may open fire only when the threat to innocent life is ‘imminent and extreme’.

However, neither Grainger nor his friends, who cannot be named for legal reasons, were carrying weapons, and none were found in their vehicle. There was no one else in the car park.

The Mail on Sunday has obtained a police document that raises grave doubts as to whether the shooting was justified. Officers, it reveals, had spent the previous six weeks watching Grainger and his associates – but had few apparent reasons to suspect they were armed.

The document, an official ‘Summary of Evidence’ drawn up soon after the shooting, states that Grainger’s death was the culmination of Operation Shire, a ‘proactive investigation into an organised crime group’ believed to be planning to commit robberies. But it also suggests the only evidence police had that the men might have weapons was worryingly flimsy.

According to the document, it consisted of the fact that four days before the shooting, officers had seen one of Grainger’s friends putting a hacksaw in the boot of a different vehicle. On another occasion, the men were observed with a black bin liner containing ‘a large round object’, as well as a ‘lanyard type object and a small red-coloured bag’.

On this basis, the document adds, the police concluded that ‘they have been in possession of items which may be used either as weapons or tools to gain access to potential target premises’.

They had also ‘made numerous circular routes around the village that would allow them to observe a number of commercial premises, financial businesses and banks. The suspects have spent extended periods of time within a car park which would give them the view and the time to discuss planning potential robberies in that immediate area’.

It is indeed the case that like other large villages, Culcheth, a busy commuter dormitory settlement 15 miles west of Manchester, has a number of shops, banks and restaurants.

Finally, says the document, Grainger and his friends were wearing rolled-up balaclavas, which could have been ‘pulled down over their faces’.

This was the background to what the document terms the ‘arrest situation in the car park’, when ‘Anthony Grainger was shot by an authorised firearms officer, of which [sic] injuries sustained proved to be fatal’.

Grainger’s mother, Marina, said yesterday: ‘My son was a dedicated, loving father, and I want answers as to why he was killed.

‘Even if the police had evidence that he was up to no good, why did they shoot him dead when he was doing nothing more than sitting in a car park without a weapon?’

Disclosure of the Grainger document comes amid mounting concern that the body responsible for investigating fatal police shootings, the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC), is not fit for purpose.

‘As an idea, the IPCC is important,’ said Keith Vaz, chairman of the Commons Select Committee on Home Affairs. ‘The committee has investigated its work several times, and unfortunately we have always found it wanting. It seems to have lost its way.’

Last week, Mark Duggan’s family were dismayed to discover there will never be an inquest into his death without a change to the law, because the police operation that led to his being stopped while riding as a passenger in a taxi arose from intelligence gathered from phone taps.

Under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, phone-tap transcripts cannot be disclosed to coroners.

Like inquiries into previous shootings, such as that of Jean Charles de Menezes, who was wrongly identified as a suicide bomber and killed at Stockwell Tube station in July 2005, the IPCC investigation into Duggan’s death has become marred by severe delays.

The Mail on Sunday has established that eight months after Duggan was shot, IPCC investigators have not interviewed any of the 31 officers involved in the incident and its aftermath – something Mr Vaz found ‘astonishing’.

In fact, the officers, represented by the Police Federation, have declined to be interviewed, although, as is usual in shooting cases, they wrote brief statements at an early stage. The Commission has no legal powers to compel such interviews, unless an officer has been formally placed under investigation.

Steve Evans, secretary of the Federation’s professional standards committee, said this ban would only be lifted ‘if we get categorical assurances that they are being interviewed as witnesses, not as possible suspects.

‘While they will want to co-operate, they also need to be able to control what is said. The bottom line here is that we have to feel comfortable.’

Such assurances, he added, could be given only after the IPCC had submitted a report to the Crown Prosecution Service – whose deliberations in similar cases have taken many months.

Further delays have been caused by the fact that when the IPCC interviewed the most critical non-police witness, the Urdu-speaking taxi driver, it used an incompetent interpreter. The result was that his statement was riddled with obvious errors and had to be taken again.

Former Metropolitan Police commissioner Ian Blair – now Lord Blair – said the IPCC had not remedied two crucial failings highlighted by the de Menezes case, which blighted his tenure. He said: ‘The first is the length of time it takes to carry out investigations. The second, which both the de Menezes and the Duggan cases have at their heart, is to make clear to the public and the families some of the salient facts.’

With Duggan, he added, this applied especially to the vital issue of whether he had a gun when he was shot. A weapon – which did not bear his DNA or his fingerprints – was found on the other side of a fence 14ft from his body. However, its provenance has never been disclosed.

The IPCC’s problems are not all of its own making. Its annual budget of £34 million allows it to employ just 120 investigators for the whole of England and Wales, who must somehow cope with 170 major inquiries each year – not just deaths, but also allegations of serious assault and corruption.

For comparison, the current police inquiry into newspaper phone hacking will spend £40 million this year and has employed 150 detectives.

The upshot is that the families of police shooting victims feel powerless and abused. ‘Imagine what would happen if a group of armed men who weren’t police officers shot a member of your family dead,’ said John Schofield, Anthony Grainger’s stepfather. ‘There would be an incident room, a huge team of detectives.

‘But if you have the misfortune to have a family member shot by police, you’re in a totally different ball game, with totally different rules. ‘The team working on Anthony’s death is tiny. The way it feels to us is that the cover-up starts on day one.’

In both the Duggan and Grainger cases, early media reports of the incident were totally misleading. For example, the IPCC wrongly told reporters that Duggan had fired at the officers who killed him.

After the death of Grainger, reports claimed that the police had told the men in the vehicle three times to put their hands up, but that he failed to do so.

Yet at the time he died, the car park was completely dark, and as The Mail on Sunday established one night last week, it would have been impossible to see whether he was putting his hands up.

In addition to the single shot that killed Grainger, the police fired a CS gas grenade into the car, and burst its tyres with a shotgun.

‘But what was the order in which these things happened?’ asked his girlfriend, Gail Hadfield. ‘We still have not been given the autopsy report. Was there CS gas in his lungs? If there wasn’t, that would mean he’d already been shot when they threw that grenade. The IPCC hasn’t given us any answers.’

Grainger had a criminal record, a long string of motoring, insurance and car theft offences, all but one of which were committed at least 11 years ago.

He had also been cleared in 2010 of serious drug charges, in a case described by the family solicitor, Keith Dyson, as ‘murky’: the jury acquitted him after hearing evidence of police corruption.

Last August, Grainger was arrested on suspicion of stealing a computer memory stick, said to contain highly sensitive information, from a police officer’s car. It was only in January, a few days before Operation Shire began, that the police told him that this case was closed and he would not be facing charges.

However, like Duggan, he had never been arrested or convicted for any crime of violence.

‘You meet the IPCC and it quickly becomes obvious there’s a total inadequacy of resources,’ Mr Dyson said. ‘As for the fact that they won’t be able to conduct interviews, it’s hopeless. How else can they begin to establish what was going through the officers’ minds?’

Delays, underfunding and incompetence have a further consequence. Seven years after her son Azelle Rodney was shot eight times by police in North London, apparently because of false intelligence that he had some kind of machine gun, Susan Alexander is still fighting to discover what happened.

Like the Duggan family, she has been denied an inquest because of the phone-tap law, although a public inquiry, conducted by a judge without a jury, is finally set to open later this year. ‘I never imagined it would take this long,’ she said. ‘But I just have to keep going. I need to know the truth.’

Her solicitor Daniel Machover said that the delay was ‘unforgivable’. But what makes him ‘nauseous’ is his belief that if the Rodney case had been properly examined in public, ‘there may well be lessons learnt that could have led to other operations being run differently. It’s possible that others who have also been shot might still be alive’.

Because it doesn’t involve phone taps, an inquest will be held into Grainger’s death.

A Greater Manchester Police spokesman said the force could not comment on any aspect of the shooting because the IPCC was investigating it.

An IPCC spokeswoman said the body is to conduct a ‘review’ of its handling of shootings. She added: ‘We are particularly keen to invite families and those affected by our investigation to help us look at our approach to these cases, and what we can do to improve both the system and the way we work.’

Original report here




(And don't forget your ration of Wicked Thoughts for today. Now hosted on Wordpress. If you cannot access it, go to the MIRROR SITE, where posts appear as well as on the primary site. I have reposted the archives (past posts) for Wicked Thoughts HERE or HERE or here