OpinionPolice This article is more than 15 years oldOne law for us, one for the Met
This article is more than 15 years oldCath ElliottAs is clear with the Banaz Mahmod case, incompetent police officers can expect promotion rather than punishmentIt's impossible to know for sure what would have happened if PC Angela Cornes had paid more attention to Banaz Mahmod on the night Mahmod was discovered collapsed and bleeding in a café doorway. Perhaps if Cornes had listened to Mahmod's claim that her father had just tried to kill her instead of writing her off as a melodramatic, attention-seeking drunk, the young woman would still be alive today; or perhaps it would have made no difference, and three weeks later Mahmod would still have died after being raped and tortured by the men her father and uncle had hired for the purpose.
What's not in doubt though is that Cornes's attitude towards Mahmod that night was completely unprofessional, and that her subsequent actions, such as refusing to go with her to the hospital and then later telling Mahmod's father about his daughter's allegations, breached police guidelines to such an extent that the investigation by the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) into the case recommended disciplinary action.
So why is Angela Cornes about to be promoted to sergeant? And why is she about to receive a pay award, backdated to cover the period during which her promotion was put on hold pending the outcome of the disciplinary hearing?
According to the Metropolitan police there was insufficient evidence against Cornes and other officers who faced similar charges of misconduct over their handling of the case to enable the hearing to go ahead as planned last month. The IPCC, which has the power to overrule this decision and to insist on the hearing, has instead accepted the Met's advice, and all charges against Cornes and her colleagues have now been dropped. As Diana Nammi of the Iranian and Kurdish Women's Rights Organisation (IKWRO) says in her open letter to the IPCC, the Met and the Met's Directorate of Professional Standards:
A successful disciplinary action against PC Cornes was … necessary to restore some faith in the police amongst vulnerable women and girls from Middle-Eastern and south-Asian communities.
Knowledge of the failures in this case has led them to conclude that violence against minority women is a low priority for the police, a conclusion that can only be reinforced by the perception that PC Cornes's negligence, which may well have led to the death of Ms Mahmod, is similarly a matter of little interest to the Metropolitan Police.
But Cornes is not the only police officer in recent times to have been rewarded with a promotion instead of being made to take responsibility for their professional incompetence.
Cressida Dick, who was the senior officer in charge of the botched operation that resulted in the execution of Jean Charles de Menezes, was promoted to the rank of deputy assistant commissioner shortly after the shooting, and, if Ken Livingstone is to be believed, is now a potential future candidate to head the metropolitan police.
It seems that despite all the efforts that have gone in to improving the reputation of the police after the excesses of the 1980s, they're still being allowed to operate under an entirely different set of rules from the rest of us. While members of any other profession would be looking at certain dismissal if they made mistakes that put other people's lives at risk, monumental cock-ups that result in innocent people's deaths appear to present no barrier to career advancement for the men and women in blue.
Anil Gomes recently pointed out how "the debates in recent weeks over the death of a young child in Haringey and the death of an innocent Brazilian man in Stockwell have – in their different ways – illustrated the confused and confusing ways in which we talk of responsibility". Gomes contrasts how Haringey council officials were held directly responsible for Baby P's death with the way the police who actually shot de Menezes managed to shirk all responsibility.
By the same token I'd also add that the media led public outcry over much more minor events, like the crass behaviour of Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand, or the hysteria over the ill-judged arrest of Damian Green, when placed alongside the relatively muted response to the collapse of the disciplinary proceedings against Cornes, not only illustrate the confusing ways we talk of responsibility, but also illustrate confusion as to where exactly our priorities lie. After all, no one died when Ross and Brand left their inane message on Andrew Sachs's answer phone, and yet the great British public wasn't satisfied until heads were seen to roll.
So why isn't there similar public and political outrage over the failure to hold police officers to account for their role in the death of Mahmod? Why haven't the phone lines at the IPCC been ringing off the hook since the Times reported the collapse of the case against Cornes back on 1 December?
What exactly does it take to galvanise people into caring as much about the death of a young Asian woman as they do about an insult to a popular ageing actor? Is it, as Nammi's letter implies, that violence against minority women is seen as a low priority, not just for the police but for the media and the public alike? Or is it simply that we've all become so inured to our inability to hold the police to account that we've given up expecting anything better from official investigations?
Whatever the reason, just as the De Menezes family are right to demand a judicial review into the recent coroner's inquest into the case, so IKWRO are right to demand justice for Mahmod. No one should be above the law in this country, least of all those tasked with upholding it.
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