Mehigan, James

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Open Research OnlineThe Open University’s repository of research publicationsand other research outputs[Book Review] Deaths after police contact:constructing accountability in the 21st centuryJournal ItemHow to cite:Mehigan, James (2018). [Book Review] Deaths after police contact: constructing accountability in the 21stcentury. Policing and Society, 28(4) pp. 503–505.For guidance on citations see FAQs.c© [not recorded]Version: Version of RecordLink(s) to article on publisher’s website:http://dx.doi.org/doi:10.1080/10439463.2018.1406443Copyright and Moral Rights for the articles on this site are retained by the individual authors and/or other copyrightowners. For more information on Open Research Online’s data policy on reuse of materials please consult the policiespage.oro.open.ac.ukFull Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found athttp://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=gpas20Policing and SocietyAn International Journal of Research and PolicyISSN: 1043-9463 (Print) 1477-2728 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/gpas20Deaths after police contact: constructingaccountability in the 21st centuryJames MehiganTo cite this article: James Mehigan (2018) Deaths after police contact: constructing accountabilityin the 21st century, Policing and Society, 28:4, 503-505, DOI: 10.1080/10439463.2018.1406443To link to this article:  https://doi.org/10.1080/10439463.2018.1406443Published online: 28 Nov 2017.Submit your article to this journal Article views: 150View related articles View Crossmark dataDeaths after police contact: constructing accountability in the 21st century, by DavidBaker, London, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016, 233 pp., £63 (hardback), ISBN: 978-1-137-58966-8It is easy to think of deaths after police contact as relating to police shootings or deaths arising out ofovert police brutality. However the category is much broader than that and encompasses the deathsof many who have been failed by the police and other agencies. When an officer is dealing withsituations where ‘something-that-ought-not-to-be-happening-and-about-which-someone-had-better-do-something-now!’ (Bittner 1974) they often have to deal with vulnerable people whoneed support from multiple agencies. Those who die after police contact have often thereforebeen in contact with numerous facets of the state. To this end Baker’s work argues that the veryname of this field of study – ‘Deaths after Police Contact’ (DAPC) – is an imprecise and perhaps dis-tracting description of the issues at play in the causation of these deaths. Instead he suggests thatthey might more accurately be referred to as ‘deaths after multi-agency involvement’ (p. 188). Inmany cases those who die after police contact may have been let down by other services as wellas, or rather than, the police.This can create huge challenges for the construction of accountability in cases of DAPC. In thiswork Baker engages with this challenge by looking in depth at two fora for the construction ofaccountability in DAPC cases: the coroner’s court and the Independent Police Complaints Commis-sion (IPCC). In particular he looks at the narrative conclusions produced by the former and thereports produced at the end of the investigations conducted by the latter. His dataset looks at 68 nar-rative conclusions (summarised helpfully in an appendix at the end of the book). More than half of thecases also involve contact with agencies other than the police.The value of this approach is that it does what the coroner can’t do in an individual case: take thewider view. It is a problem endemic in the role of the coroner that they must look at the cause of theindividual death (or deaths) and restrict that review to a relatively tight time period and set of issues.Determining the scope of an inquest will often determine how much can meaningfully be said aboutthe causes of death, who may or may not be responsible and what could be done to prevent futuredeaths. It is a consistent theme in this work that lessons are not being learnt, notwithstanding thevarious processes that come into play when someone dies having been in contact with the police.It may well be that the tight scope of so many inquests prevents this.The analysis of narrative conclusions provides some fascinating insights. One finding is that if thedeath arises out of an incident involving multiple agencies, juries are more likely to be critical of thenon-police agencies. However when the police are the sole agency involved, juries are more likely tocriticise their acts or omissions (p. 86). Baker also finds that juries usually see police use of force aslegitimate, perhaps because they see the police’s social function as enforcement. This is in contrastto their view of healthcare organisations, which have a life preservation role and therefore juries aremore critical of their failings when they lead to deaths (p. 96).The dataset includes six police shootings. While juries may criticise deaths caused by restraint,there are no examples in the (admittedly small) dataset of juries being critical of the police use offirearms. These cases generally do not involve other agencies and the immediate cause of death isitself clear. It is this clarity that appears to make it less likely for juries to criticise the police. Whilenarratives may use euphemistic language around the use of force, they are unequivocal in their lan-guage when dealing with firearms, which may be because of the higher levels of planning, controland supervision that go into armed operations (pp. 98–99).Baker finds that the narrative conclusion provides a rich source of qualitative data on DAPC whichenable ‘diverse, multi-causal and complex verdicts to be recorded’, but by treating the deaths as aseries of individual cases, which is inevitable without a national oversight system, it is impossibleto learn from these deaths (p. 103).While the narrative conclusion has a diversity of style and content which derives from the ‘non-standardised, regionalised and discretionary nature of the coronial system’, the IPCC is a nationalPOLICING AND SOCIETY 503body with statutory foundations (p. 111). This research contrasts the approach taken by juries inwriting narrative conclusions to the IPCC in compiling its reports by looking at the IPCC report andits corresponding narrative conclusion. Baker concludes that the IPCC often explains the issues ingreater detail while the coronial system tended to be more analytical and critical (p. 132). So whileboth structures should be working towards protecting the right to life under Article 2 of the EuropeanConvention of Human Rights, both have a very different approach to it.Throughout the book Baker looks at the overarching issues related to the construction of account-ability in DAPC cases. While he refers to many high profile examples, he uses one particular death,that of Sean Rigg in Brixton police station in 2008, to connect his work to a tangible example ofthe death of a vulnerable man, who needed support from numerous agencies. The death of SeanRigg is used to illuminate the issues for the reader. There was a major conflict between the conclu-sions of the coroner’s jury and the IPCC report. Officers were clearly shown by video evidence to haveperjured themselves in court. The differences between the IPCC’s conclusions and those of the jurysignified a crisis of legitimacy for the IPCC and led to a significant review of the operations of the IPCC(Casale et al. 2013). The case gets to the heart of the challenges of accountability in instances of DAPCand Baker uses it skilfully and respectfully.There are many lessons to be learnt from Baker’s work, not least in the way he has mapped theslippery mechanism by which those involved in the death of vulnerable people after policecontact can be held to account, but if I may, I would like to look at two that drew my attention.The first is the idea that police officers should be re-conceived as ‘safety officers’ rather than ‘enfor-cers’ or ‘crime fighters’. The majority of those who died in this study were not resisting arrest or beingviolent. By re-imagining the role of the police, perhaps officers might make the preservation of life thenumber one priority in such encounters in future.The second lesson is a legal one and that is the impact that Article 2 has had on the construction ofaccountability. Article 2, according to the evidence in this book, has had the effect of improving thequality of inquisition that now takes place into deaths where the state may have had a role or respon-sibility. This is a well-known development. However, something within it which Baker starts to bringout with his research is the potential for juries to speak truth to power when dealing with state fail-ings that have led to deaths. In many cases, including that of Sean Rigg, it is the plainspoken narrativeconclusion that overturns the police version of events and forces us to consider the failings of thestate.This is a book that should be read by anybody interested in police accountability and the role ofpolicing in a democracy. DAPC remains a constant concern for anyone who works with or studies thepolice. Since the book was published there has been a change in personnel at the top of UK policing.The most senior police officer in the country is now somebody who ran a failed operation which ledto the homicide of an innocent young man. The inquest jury was barred from considering whetherthis was an unlawful killing but returned an open conclusion having rejected the police version ofevents that they had been acting lawfully (that inquest pre-dates the dataset in this book). That some-body with this background could become the most senior police officer in the country speaksvolumes about the state’s interest in reducing DAPC.Over the past summer at least four black men have died after police contact with forces across thecountry. It seems that the relentless human toll of policing is not something that we as a country areprepared to seriously engage with. If we are to achieve any reduction in such deaths it will only beafter considering the work of scholars such as Baker and taking their findings and proposals forreform seriously.ReferencesBittner, E., 1974. Florence nightingale in pursuit of Willie Sutton: a theory of the police. In: Herbert Jacobs, ed., The poten-tial for reform of criminal justice, Vol. 3. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage. now in Egon Bittner (1990), Aspects of Police Work, 233–68. Boston, MA: Northeastern University Press.504 BOOK REVIEWSCasale, S., Corfe, M., and Lewis, J., 2013. Report of the independent external review of the IPCC investigation into the death ofSean Rigg. London: Independent Police Complaints Commission.James MehiganDepartment of Criminology, Open University, UKjames.mehigan@open.ac.uk© 2017 James Mehiganhttps://doi.org/10.1080/10439463.2018.1406443POLICING AND SOCIETY 505

[Book Review] Deaths after police contact: constructing accountability in the 21st century

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