UK: Policing - the beat(ing) goes on
01 March 1998
The unrelenting payment of damages for assaults involving officers from the Stoke Newington police station, north London, continues unabated. In January the Metropolitan police were obliged to make two payments to black people. In the first case a couple who complained after witnessing the violent arrest of a man were subsequently charged with obstruction and assault. The charges were later dropped but Audley Harrison and Hazel Bruno-Gilbert brought a civil claim for unlawful detention, assault and malicious prosecution; they won £62,500 damages despite the police denying the allegations. In the second case Mikal Efekele won £7,500 for wrongful arrest, false imprisonment and assault. On awarding the damages the judge said: "This is one of many instances when police act on inadequate grounds to stop and search which does so much damage to their relationship with people who feel victimised just because they are young and black".
Outside of London the situation is hardly better. On Merseyside a taxi driver, George Randles, who was assaulted by police won a record £450,000 damages after a jury at Liverpool Crown Court awarded exemplary and aggravated damages after they heard that he had been assaulted by police following his arrest in 1989. Mr Randles told the court that he had been stopped by police while driving his taxi; following a disagreement he was kneed in the groin, pushed to the ground and punched unconscious. The award came only two days after the Court of Appeal reduced the damages awarded to another victim of a police beating, Danny Goswell, from a record £302,000 to £47,600. Mr Goswell, who won his action against the police in 1996, was also ordered to pay police costs of £5,000.
In the Midlands a man was awarded £200,000 damages after serving five years in prison as a result of being racially abused, threatened with a syringe and beaten by police who then fabricated a confession. George Lewis was a victim of the infamous West Midlands Serious Crime Squad which was disbanded in 1989 after a Police Complaints Authority investigation confirmed anecdotal evidence of root and branch corruption. Among the police officers who framed Mr Lewis was DC John Perkins who also helped to fabricate the evidence that convicted the Bridgewater 3; they were jailed for life for the murder of schoolboy Carl Bridgewater but their conviction was overturned a year ago. Perkins, who is now dead, was allegedly involved in at least twenty other cases in which he fabricated evidence.
Hackney Gazette 8 & 22.1.98; Guardian 20.1.98 & 10.4.98.