Police monitors fear service will be axed
originally published by: Streatham Guardian
11th January 2010
A service helping prevent deaths and inhumane treatment of people held in police custody in Lambeth is under threat, according to its chair. Cuts to the Independent Custody Visit (ICV) service across London were made by the Metropolitan Police Authority (MPA) this month.
The volunteers – who make random visits to custody suites in the borough’s three main police stations at Streatham, Brixton and Kennington – can now only report its findings to the MPA four times a year.
Lambeth’s ICV panel chair, Jane Warwick, said the move will “neuter” the service’s effectiveness and is the latest in a string of attempts by the MPA to weaken and eventually remove the independent service.
Previously it was able to pass on its findings to the MPA – responsible for maintaining conditions in police cells and custody suites – monthly.
Mrs Warwick said: “It is vital the service is maintained, not diluted.”
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It is imperative that the Independent Custody Visit service (ICV) has complete freedom to do an essential job. Any institution or organisation, which incorporates violence into its agenda, be it restraining techniques or solitary confinement (which is violent to a detainees psychological makeup) should be independently monitored.
Many of these institutions are literally getting away with murder. The reason these institutions don’t like to deal through the criminal courts is because there are so many cases it would severely affect the courts timetables – and more importantly to them, their self-inflated integrity.
Let’s do away with the ‘mask of respectability’ that they hide behind. The police essentially have to be aggressive in their nature as the two biggest frighteners to the average person would be violence and incarceration. There are many young offenders whom, at their point of arrest, would have been let off, had they not been ‘cheeky’ to the police, this is evident in many of the police documentaries we see on our television screens.
I watched a police officer in one these documentaries say to a kid “If you hadn’t have been so cheeky to me you wouldn’t be going to court!” Are we really allowing police officers to send young offenders into the jaws of the Young Offenders Institutions because of their inflated egos? Will we all be sending our children into danger because they ‘cheek’ us? As a parent I would say absolutely not. Would we as parents use the nose distraction technique against our children? (Which is basically a punch to the nose) If we did we would be sent to prison, and rightly so.
Restraining techniques within our YOIs and child-care homes are commonplace every day. Children are regularly taken to hospital with injuries caused by these restraining techniques. The Police Force and Army have a higher ratio of drink and drug abuse, divorce and domestic violence than any other professions. Many ex-soldiers with psychological dysfunctions are being used as guards to take care of our children. Our prison population has 20,000 ex-military personnel serving prison sentences.
The ICV is an absolute requirement in any correctly run democratic nation and its ethos should be practiced and strengthened in all cases of detainment whether they be babies, children or adults.
In the documentary films that we make we persistently ask for a ‘social’ police force and not a ‘paramilitary regime’ that would appear to be a wall around the powerful elite.
Bill Maloney
Film Director
http://www.pienmashfilms.com