Auto Amazon Links: No products found. Blocked by captcha.
The former chief constable of Nottinghamshire Police, Kate Meynell, has acknowledged that Valdo Calocane, who went on to commit a triple homicide, should have been apprehended prior to the fatal attacks. Calocane took the lives of Barnaby Webber, Grace O’Malley-Kumar, and Ian Coates, and attempted to injure three additional individuals during a series of assaults in Nottingham on 13 June 2023. Despite a warrant being issued in September 2022 for Calocane’s arrest after he failed to appear in court following an assault on a police officer in 2021, the warrant was never actioned and was still outstanding at the time of these violent incidents.
The case is currently under investigation through an inquiry led by retired Senior Judge Deborah Taylor KC, which began hearing evidence on 23 February and is expected to last nine weeks at Mary Ward House in London. Evidence presented revealed that Calocane was scheduled to appear in court in September 2022 for allegedly assaulting PC Barnaby Pritchard the previous year while being detained under the Mental Health Act. However, Nottinghamshire Police neglected to execute the arrest warrant. Even when Leicestershire Police were involved and noted the outstanding warrant in their logs, no further steps were taken to detain Calocane.
When questioned, Meynell accepted full responsibility on behalf of Nottinghamshire Police, stating, “I accept on behalf of Nottinghamshire Police that VC should have been arrested in relation to that.” Counsel to the inquiry, Rachel Langdale KC, pressed that there could be no institutional excuses for failing to act upon the warrant once it was known. Further issues highlighted included the warrant being issued within the police computer system but directed to an inbox that was not regularly monitored. Although Meynell acknowledged these failings, she expressed uncertainty about whether executing the warrant at that time would have necessarily prevented the later tragic attacks, a point debated during the inquiry.
The inquiry also brought to light other concerns related to the handling of the case after the attacks. Families of the victims expressed dissatisfaction with how the police communicated with them, especially regarding notifications of the deaths and misconduct investigations involving officers connected to the case. Some officers faced disciplinary action over inappropriate WhatsApp messages about the investigation, which families only learned about through the media rather than direct police communication. Meynell admitted, “Yes,” when asked about fundamental communication failures with survivors and lamented the lack of information sharing with the victims’ families. Additionally, she acknowledged a mistake in arranging a “non-reportable” media briefing without informing the families, which led to unintended consequences and public criticism of the police force
Read the full article from The BBC here: Read More
Auto Amazon Links: No products found. Blocked by captcha.