31/10/2011 Inside Out London

Policing the streets but going too far. You're hitting him, a lot of

punches. Yes. It looks like you are giving him... It does. Where do you

draw the line? If you are dealing with members of the public in high-

stress situations, occasionally you get it wrong. When police officers

get it badly wrong, what is the punishment? I do fear that both of

those officers should have lost their jobs. Discipline handed down

behind closed doors while some officers simply walk away. It is

not very open. It is not. I think nobody would suggest it is a

particularly open system. Tonight, we ask, just to his policing the

police? I blame the police for not doing their job properly, and I

When Anna officer starts his shift, he has no idea what he will face.

Sergeant Andy Sutherland is patrolling East Durham. There has

been a suspected attack. It is about a mile away to the address,

maybe a mile and a half. Every call-out involves a set of split-

The minute he stepped inside the house, he will have to decide what

to do. If he gets it wrong, his job Everyone in sight is OK. The

situation is sorted. We will go and have a look and see if we can find

in... But every call he attends carries a risk. You do not know

what you are coming to, 90 times out of 100 it will be exactly like

this, but on another occasion there will be something far more sinister

or potentially very violent. If the police get it wrong, it can have

A busy night in Wigan town centre. Like most towns on a weekend, it is

rowdy, there is lots of alcohol, It is a world that the delight but

knew well. As a special constable, volunteering as an unpaid police

officer, this was his beat. always was happy to get involved,

and I wasn't frightened of being, you know, arresting people, getting

involved, doing the actual job of a police officer, rather than being

somebody just standing mayor in a uniform. But getting involved

changed his life. Filmed on CCTV, he and two full-time colleagues

were called to deal with a man outside a nightclub. The only thing

we knew was that he had been causing problems, and we had been

called by the door staff to deal with it. He was pushed, he stumbled,

and he fell into the road and banged his head on the floor. He

came back and started remonstrating with us. The three officers tried

to move him on, but he would not go, During the arrest, the man on the

floor, Mark Aspinall, bites one of the officers are on the leg. It

takes the three of them to carve him. There has been situations

throughout my service that have been like that and worse.

Situations like that in Wigan happen all the time. Magistrates

found Mark Aspinall, a former soldier, guilty of assault and

public disorder. So everything seemed pretty straightforward to

Peter Lightfoot, a normal night on the streets, if you like, but

everything was to change, and in the end he would find himself here

Mark Aspinall later complained about the way he was arrested and

appealed his assault conviction. The CCTV footage was watched again.

This time, the appeal judge said it was the police officers who had

behaved badly, abusing their powers. Mark Aspinall's conviction for

assault was quashed. Greater Manchester police launched an

investigation into the way their own officers had acted that night.

It looks like you're banging his face. I have got hold of his head

there, and what he has tried to do is move his head forward to bite,

and I am pulling it back, but it looks like I am rubbing his head on

the floor. But that is not what I was doing. It also shows him

repeatedly punching Mark Aspinall. So you have hit him. Yes. And again.

Yes. A lot of punches. Yeah, six. It looks like you're giving in a

leather ring. It does. I took my own initiative from remembering

what you can do within the training that we were given, to punch a

muscle area on his shoulder to try and make him release his arm. On my

sixth bunch, he actually released his arm enough to wrench it out,

and then we got the handcuff on him, and that was it, game over. Peter

Lightfoot and the two full-time officers face criminal charges. It

went to trial. His colleagues were cleared, but Peter was jailed. He

served seven months of a three-year sentence for assault and perjury.

At the heart of policing is your ability and the great British

tradition to use the minimum of force, to deal with violent

situations, to not lose your temper, and that is the standard that we

set. And Mr Lightfoot fell below that standard. I do not believe I

went too far, I did what any other police officer would do. The

problem is, when you are there at the situation, you have got a split

second to deal with and to make a decision on what you are going to

do, and you have got to live with that decision. It does not matter

what your record is or how many lives you have saved or whatever.

If you break the law, you are just as liable as any other citizen, and

we set a very high standard, and I do not apologise for that. So, open

and shut, but it took three court cases before it was decided that

The thing about his case is that we know all the details. There was a

trial, his mistake and his punishment for a public. -- were a

public. But most police disciplinary matters are kept away

from the public gaze. Virtually every case is dealt with behind

closed doors, and that can be very hard for those affected by their

Is this the only place you had ever lived, then? Yes. It brings back

quite a few memories. How do you feel as we walked down here now?

feels weird. Yeah, I just feel a bit weird. 18-year-old Aaron and

his sister Hayleigh will never forget the night they have to call

I ran down the stairs, and I heard Anne Aaron shouting, get off me.

And then he started coming towards me, so my mum got Inbetweeners.

From that moment, I saw him with a knife in his hand, stabbing mum.

When they caught Northamptonshire Police, then mum's partner, armed

with a knife, was still in the house, and Aaron was trying to keep

his mother alive. I was just expecting the police to come

straight away. Time was going so slow, I did not know what to do. I

started to wonder whether they would come. Paramedics had arrived,

but the police had not, so they were stuck outside. The police did

not arrive until 19 minutes after the first 999 call. Martin Ashby

was arrested. Then mum, a Louise Webster, was dead. It was too late.

He felt like part of you had just died. One the family did not know

was that two Northamptonshire Police officers were practically at

the bottom of their street when Louise Webster was being attacked

and in children asked for help. The call to the emergency services was

made at 11 minutes past midnight. No, we know where the police

officers work, because there was a GPS transmitter in their car, and

at 12 minutes past, one minute later, and again at quarter past,

we know they were in the immediate vicinity of Abbots Way. They were

just down the road. It took an inquiry by the Independent Police

Complaints Commission to discover that, minutes later, as they left

the village, the officers refused to attend the emergency call.

they were and our shoes, they would want everything to help them, but

we had nothing that night. We had to rely on each other, to look

after each other and to look after mum, and to just try and be as safe

as we could within that half hour. Why would the officers not respond?

They said they were busy on an operation based six miles away in

Northampton. They claimed that they ended up at the bottom of the

Websters Panorama Road because they had followed a car there, but then

notebook show they had not dealt with a single incident in the

previous six hours. -- the West theres' Road. They knew it was a

serious crime, at the end of the day they should have gone. No two

ways about it. It would not have cost them anything to have gone.

Medical experts said that Louise Webster's life could not have been

saved. Kirk Ola, Martin Ashby, was jailed for life. -- Birkenau. --

Birkenau. The IPCC ruled that the officers had failed in their sworn

duty to protect life for at least attempt to do so. They are forced

decided this was a case of gross misconduct. The definition of gross

misconduct his conduct for which an officer is likely to be sacked, so

clearly that is the risk the officer is facing. So would they

lose their jobs? That was another decision for Northamptonshire

Police. Two senior officers and an independent person looked at the

information, and the result was that the two offices kept their

jobs and received a final written warnings. It really does not mean

anything at all. Just make sure you keep your nose clean in the future,

that is it. What is wrong with that? If they are not doing their

job properly, they should have been some other form of punishment,

surely. They should have left their jobs for that. If they could not

turn up to something so important, like that, then what are they

actually going to turn up to? this case, the family thought the

officers got off incredibly likely. I can understand how they feel like

that. I can only say, from our point of view, these things are

investigated very seriously, and the panels take them very seriously.

When it comes to misconduct cases, the police investigate themselves.

The IPCC have a role in only a small number of very serious cases.

The most they can do is identify misconduct. The punishment is

completely down to the individual officers' force. The panels which

decide the outcome of misconduct hearings almost always sit in

private. Individual forces deal with their own cases behind closed

doors. Jocelyn Cockburn is a lawyer who specialises in handling cases

against the police. The problem is that you get inconsistency, but

there is not transparency in the first place. That is where there is

a gap here, because there's very little evidence to show that

lessons are being learned. Police misconduct can be anything from

rudeness to physical violence. Now, the police are supposed to be one

of the most regulated public bodies, but who is making sure the

misconduct panels do their job? There is no overall body that has

responsibility for the police misconduct system, other than the

Home Office, I daresay. So no-one was watching that area. Individual

forces report to individual police authorities, so the authorities

have a role there, but a single overarching body? I don't believe

there is. Should they be? Very So, how many decisions are made

about police misconduct with little or no national oversight? Well,

it's not easy to find out. We put in freedom of information requests

to 53 forces in the UK. 47 of them responded.

We discovered that there were 1,915 guilty findings against officers

for misconduct between 2008 and 2010.

382 were dismissed or required to resign. So nearly a fifth of

punishments handed down ended in officers leaving the force.

And all of these decisions about police misconduct are being made in

private, with almost no national oversight.

What is lost, do you think, the fact that nobody has that single

overview? Well, I think it makes consistency a problem. Guidance can

be a problem. And I think it does have an impact

on public confidence. Are you confident with a system

with no national overview? Well, we have 43 forces in the country. So

we are not a national system. The Independent Police Complaints

Commission has a system? They are away what is happening with

misconduct. They say it is not down to them.

They do report cases, trends. They don't have to? Police

authority is locally overseeing what is happening. They are aware

of the case, the complaints, they take it very seriously.

So what can the police forces do to make sure that their officers get

it right in the first place? Back in Durham, they're preparing their

officers for the complicated situations that they might face.

But as Sergeant Andy Sutherland knows, training won't always

protect officers from complaints by the public.

How often have complaints been made against you? Hmm in my service,

probably seven or eight times. Is that common? Yeah, I think it is

probably reflective. If you are dealing with members of

the public in high-stress situations, occasionally as a

police officer you are going to get it wrong.

Those public complaints against Andy were not upheld. Last year

around 30,000 were levelled at the police nationally, but when jobs

are on the line, can officers afford to admit that they might

have made a mistake? Do you think that the majority of officers find

it difficult to admit that they are wrong? It is not that they find it

difficult, but they are suspicious. They don't trust the system. We

need a more common-sense approach that admits that the police

officers are human. That they do sometimes make mistakes and is

accepting of that. That is hard when police failures

lead to terrible loss. Harder still when you are let down not just by

one force, by four. I heard a car pull up. I didn't

look out of the window. Sometimes you see a car, you listen or look

out of the window to see who it is, that night I didn't.

That was... That was the night that he came and picked her up outside

of my house. In Darlington, Andrea Hall's 17-year-old daughter, Arbly

was befriended online by a 33-year- old man pretending to be a young

lad. Would she talk to you about

boyfriends? That was the odd bit. Yeah, she used to tell me

everything until that night. 24 hours after Ashley walked from

the door, her mother's frantic calls to her mobile phone were

answered. By this time I was shouting down

the phone, "Who are you jj" he would ask who I was, but I said

that this was my daughter's phone, I wanted to know why he had it.

It was a police officer. Ashley's phone had been found after

being arrested for a driving offence. When he was taken to the

This man is Peter Chapman. He had just confessed to killing Andrea's

daughter. You get that horrible, horrible

feeling inside you like it is just... I can't explain. Just like

your heart is being ripped out. Ashley had been raped and murdered

by Peter Chapman, her body found in a ditch at the side of the road.

If I had stuck to saying "no", she would never have gone, sorry...

Sorry. She wouldn't have gone. She would

have stayed. You can't blame yourself.

Yeah, but you do. What Andrea did not know then is

that Peter Chapman could have been stopped. He was a known sex

offender, supposing to be monitored by the Merseyside Police, but for

nine months they did not know where he was.

One force had lost track of him. Three others then failed to stop

him. Because just three days before

Ashley was murdered, a Nationwide alert had been put out for Peter

Chapman. During that time his car was spotted near Ash ley's home 16

times by special police cameras that recognise registration numbers.

On some occasions the police had looked for him, but twice, in

Cleveland, 48 hours after Ashleyy was killed, they didn't.

The police were given information, they were looking alt information

from the cameras. Then, the problem was not spotted. The people who

were supposed to be watching were not logged on to the system. By

this time Ashley was in his car. As the night moved on, he was spotted

again by cameras across the north- east, but nothing was done.

During that journey, Ashley was killed.

Who do you blame for her death? blame him because he did it, but I

also blame the police for not doing their job properly. I always will.

The IPCC produced two reports into Ashley Hall's death. They called

for a review on the way that the police cameras are operated and

criticised Merseysideside's poor monitoring the of sex offenders.

They said that although the murder was missed it may not have been

possible to prevent the death, but her mother is clear, the police let

her and her daughter down. Now I have read that, I know for a

fact that my daughter would still be here today. There is no

questions about it. She would definitely be here. That makes me

feel worse now. They could have prevented all of this.

What concerns Andreas the most about the IPCC report is that no-

one was blamed. In no place was anyone held accountable where the

killer was spotted. Only two low-ranking officers

received management advice. Across the whole Merseyside force no

senior officers were held to account. So why isn't the IPCC

harder on the police? All of the criticisms, it is normally low-

ranking officers that may end up with the punishment, is that a fair

criticism? No, I don't. We follow the evidence where it takes us if

it takes us to higher levels in the organisation, there are examples

where we have done this, we expect to see action taken at those levels.

So you expect it see action? Yes, and we will take action. Determine

a case to answer at that level if that is appropriate.

It took Andrea nearly two years to find out what went wrong. Even now

she is still not happy about the way she's been treated. Durham

Police apologised to Andrea, for failing to react when Chapman's car

was caught on its cameras, they believe that forces need to change,

that when things go wrong, the police should be more open.

I think whenever a family is bereaved, there is a sense that

something could have been done more to prevent it we are trying to very

carefully move the culture of the organisation to one of openness.

Where we say sorry, where we list and then we explain and then we

show people that this is what we have learned.

So, in Durham, they are changing the way that complaints are handled.

Now officers may have to deal with their accuser, face-to-face.

Panorama was given access to the very first time an officer was

called in to explain himself to the woman he arrested.

So, how does it feel to be here today? I'm nervous.

Donna was arrested during a row with her neighbours, she think that

the officer was heavy-handed. In my opinion I was arrested for no

reason. Whilst being arrested I suffered injuries to my hands and

thumb. Donna, I'm Gary Davidson.

Donna wanted the police officer to answer for his actions, this is the

first time she has seen him since he arrested her.

The first person I see in the street is quite an aggressive

female. When you walked in, you had a face

like you wanted to make an arrest, straight away.

I could see that your behaviour was difficult.

The next thing I know, the cuffs are on, I am being led down the

street. That made you angry? I'm in too much pain to be angry. Maybe

you mistook my pain for aggression. Offen it is useful for the officer

to listen to the victim in a non- threatening environment to what the

person has to say, then for the person to listen to what was going

on through the officer's mind. remember now. I might adopt a

different set up the next time. I appreciate the conversation. I

have learned, maybe you have learned.

Donna did still not agree with the arrest, but she did have her say.

This system is about being as open as possible when the public

complaints, but Panorama found when the police themselves have a case

to answer, the situation can be different. There is a back door

available to officers who don't want to go through the misconduct

proceedings. You simply retire or resign. Make

the decision yourself, a way of avoiding justice.

We have discovered just how many police officers do walk away.

Our freedom of infection requests, show that over the last three years

at least 489 officers have chosen this route.

If they are allowed to leave the police without any stain on their

character, then there is a chance that they will go and work in

another force. That does happen. There is a judgment about do you

want to wait for a long drawn-out disciplinary procedure, which you

know is likely to end in that officer losing their job, or if