tim's experiment

I am not a fan of the Independent Police Complaints Council. It s an incurably complacent body. Its latest report offers a truly mind-boggling example of the council’s ability to overlook the forest while looking closely at a tree.

The complaint concerns a man arrested by the police for alleged possession of drugs, and was made by his daughter.

Mr X – the IPCC report naturally does not give names – was detained in an unspecified police station and in pursuit of their inquiries the police confiscated his trousers. The drugs were allegedly found in his trouser pocket. Apparently the police guidelines require police to try to arrange replacement clothing in situations of this kind but the defendant was left to the tender mercies of the Station Sergeant working the case, who loaned him a pair of the sergeant’s own shorts.

A day later the daughter, later the complainant, turned up at the police station with a shirt, jacket and pair of jeans to be passed to her father. The PC behind the desk refused to accept the jeans and shirt, without giving an explanation, and accepted the jacket. But when her father turned up in court he was not wearing the jacket either.

He was then released on bail. Two days later he died of pneumonia.

The IPCC’s response to this is delightfully bureaucratic. The complaint about the PC refusing the clothing was “substantiated”, because the erring constable should have consulted the Case Officer about whether the suspect was allowed extra clothing. The IPCC also registered a count of “Substantiated other than Reported” against the Station Sergeant, because lending a trouser-less suspect a pair of your own shorts was “inappropriate”.

The IPCC noted without comment that the complainant “opined” that “her father’s death might have been caused by the Police’s failure to provide adequate clothing to her father during his detention”. This apparently, was not worth further investigation or indeed thought. One imagines that it was the meat of the complaint, in the complainant’s view. And it was ignored.

A word about the effects of low temperature. Technically pneumonia is not caused by low temperatures; it is a condition caused by a variety of microbes, viruses or fungi. On the other hand it is well established medically that exposure to low temperatures causes diminished effectiveness of the immune system and is particularly hard on the lungs so “The main causes of cold-related deaths are respiratory and cardio-vascular diseases” (says the Barcelona institute for Global Health) of which pneumonia is one.

Well how cold can a police cell be? Very cold, apparently. Mr Sam Bickett, who appeared in this space recently when he was convicted of obstructing a policeman who repeatedly denied he was a policeman, took to Twitter to relate his own experience, which was that the cell he was incarcerated in after his arrest was so cold that after what seems to have been at least 24 hours he turned a lurid colour and was taken to hospital.

In the meantime he was occasionally allowed out into a warm room and invited to confess without the presence of the lawyer and consular representative he had repeatedly requested.

In the hospital he met a doctor who “knew about the freezing room interrogation method for prisoners and said he ‘sees it often’” Note that this is not only a form of duress. The National Geographic, in a piece of advice for masochistic hikers, says that “hypothermic people easily become confused” and consequently “It’s particularly dangerous if you have to make a crucial decision in the cold.” So it appears that frozen detainees may be encouraged to take important and legally binding decisions in a condition where their reasoning is impaired. 

This ought to be worrying. The evidence may be a bit thin. Our complainant is anonymous and Mr Bickett is a convicted criminal, though he is optimistic about his prospects on appeal and so am I. The doctor’s evidence is hearsay.

On the other hand this is a very serious matter. We have been told on numerous occasions that various rights which we fondly believed to be protected by law were not in fact absolute, and could lawfully be infringed in the interests of some important conflicting objective, like national security.

When it comes to the right not to be tortured, though, the international law is refreshingly clear. It is an absolute right and there are no circumstances in which states are allowed to infringe it.

Unfortunately we come at this point to a sad feature of Hong Kong as currently run. If you suspect that the police are violating the rights of arrested people, who are you going to call?

The Complaints Against Police Office is a branch of the force, the IPCC is a pompous joke, the Secretary for Security is a cop, as is the Chief Secretary. And the Chief Executive, only last week, suggested that Legislative Councillors who had urged, two years ago, an independent inquiry into the policing of then current disturbances should apologise.

This seemed particularly unkind as she was addressing the surviving rump of the purged Legislative Council. Some of them complained that, as indeed one might have expected under the circumstances, they had called for an inquiry in the confident expectation that it would exonerate the police on all counts.

There was no inquiry. Police persons now complain bitterly that people are unsympathetic when a blameless one of their number is killed on duty, and that some people still believe lurid stories about what they got up to in 2019. Well Macchiavelli said that every prince must choose either to be loved or to be feared. Those who choose the latter should remember that the two choices are exclusive. You are not allowed both.