At last, a crack team to take on cops who kill: the RSPCA
originally published:
24 July 2009
Do make sure you’re sitting down. Something quite extraordinary has happened. The police have issued an abject apology for two deaths in their custody, and announced that the officer responsible will be prosecuted.
How to put this momentous announcement into context? How to throw it into the sharp relief which is deserves? Well, according to monitoring carried out by the organisation Inquest, there have been 954 deaths in police custody in England and Wales since 1990 – the figure includes shootings – with nary a successful prosecution for murder or manslaughter.
And so to this historic case, which has seen top brass abandon their traditionally minimalist statements on such tragedies, unless of course they take the bizarre decision to pretend that the victim had leapt over a ticket barrier or some such.
The deaths have caused “immense sadness”, according to the relevant force’s chief superintendent. “We will certainly take any lessons we can get from this process, and make sure we put them in place so this sort of thing never happens again.
We understand the upset that this has caused the public and members of our staff … There is a sense of shock and sadness at the news of the death of two of our police dogs.”
Ah yes. Forgive my getting your hopes up. It’s the case of those two dogs who expired in a car outside Nottingham police headquarters earlier this month, having been left in the vehicle on a searingly hot afternoon. Following an urgent RSPCA investigation, the officer responsible will face animal cruelty charges. The force’s own inquiry apparently continues.
This is just a scandal……
We always knew that the British love their dogs, but this is just disproportional and disrespective to all those victims that have died in police custody.