Thursday would have been my youngest brother's 33rd birthday. A Pisces born in March under the sign of water. He would have, I should imagine, thrown some type of family dinner celebration with all his children, friends and family present. Marc loved nothing more than being surrounded by all the people who loved him. He would be stood in the kitchen with a huge grin on his face, laughing with his friends and asking for a second helping of whatever it was cooking on the stove. The kids would be running up and down the hallways high on birthday cake and Marc would be telling them to slow down and be careful, ‘my angels’.
Instead, it’s raining, the wind-driven type of rain that
whips around your face like ice and makes your ears ache. My mum is standing at
the head of her son's 8-foot grave, laying bright orange and yellow tulips. She
doesn’t like to go. None of us do, but she can’t leave the grave untidy so she
goes religiously and talks to her son. Her child who was killed three years ago
during a mental health crisis by police officers.
It is not real. Not to any of us and that may sound odd
after three years but only a family who had been through the hell of having a
child and brother killed by an agent of the state and subsequently dragged
through one of the most traumatic ‘systems’ on earth would ever be able to
relate. It took 7 months for Marc’s badly decomposed body to be returned to our
family in such an appalling state that the funeral director advised us that
Marc would be best left in a sealed coffin. That furthermore, we wouldn’t be
able to dress him for burial or view him. At all.
You need a funeral to make the death of your child real
don’t you? But how can you accept that it is real when you have no body to
bury? How can you function every day knowing your brother is lying in a morgue
with his organs missing for nearly a year? How can you ever begin to comprehend
a country in which it is ok for an officer of the law to take the life of your
child, then take the body of your child, then take the organs of your child and
to then take the burial of your child?
Three years later we attended an Inquest, just recently in
January. These last three years have been agonizing and nearly driven us to
lose our minds on several occasions. You cannot grieve with proceedings like
these hanging over you. You cannot engage in any trauma-therapy at the same
time as constantly and continuously having to read graphic evidence about your
brother's last moments that is being slowly drip fed to you as the case
progresses. You cannot heal whilst at the same time fighting a protracted legal
case and justice campaign. Make no mistake, the system following a death after
police restraint is deliberately designed to grind you down. It wants you to
get sick and to suffer. It hopes that you will shrivel and retract and go away.
It hopes that it can blame the victim for his or her own death.
Marc had been at his friends’ house when he suffered an
episode of psychosis. Marc had mental health issues and was struggling and
fighting against himself, knowing he needed medical help but at the same time
feeling terrified of doing so. Instead Marc had used drugs to self-medicate on
the night he died which had exacerbated his pre-existing mental health
condition. It is hard for most people to understand what psychosis must feel
like, but on a basic level it is a disorder of perception. The way you perceive
the world becomes distorted. You may see or hear things that appear absolutely
real to you but are not really there. You may hold beliefs about things
happening that appear absolutely real to you but are not really happening. Most
people who experience acute psychosis experience extreme terror and fear.
My brother died absolutely petrified. He was running away
from people he believed were trying to kill him. His thoughts were racing and
disordered and his palpable terror was clearly demonstrated to anyone who saw
him that night. He wasn’t violent. He wasn’t aggressive. He wasn’t
antagonistic. He wasn’t deranged. He was very urgently unwell and he was terrified.
That part of the run-up to Marc’s last moments on earth culminated in him self-harming
with a knife.
Four police officers who attended that night said that Marc
needed to be stopped from self-harming and fired a Taser at him. Then they
reactivated it and held the trigger down and kept electrocuting Marc for 42
seconds. A total of three times. While Marc was lying on his back, in the prone
position, not resisting, not moving, just lying helpless on the floor. Then
they used a metal baton to strike Marc’s wrist twice before applying double
cuffs to his wrists.
Less than four minutes later Marc was still cuffed when he
went into catastrophic cardiac arrest. 20 minutes later he was dead at the
scene.
Before the Inquest started, Devon and Cornwall Police
asserted that the Taser download log, which automatically records the times and
durations of all Taser firings, was faulty. They also submitted an application
to give evidence anonymously, which they later withdrew. During the Inquest it
transpired in evidence, that the officer PC WILSON gave three different
statements at three different times. He only admitted to tasering Marc twice.
It soon became clear that he had actually tasered Marc three times, actively
lied and then admitted under cross-examination that he had been given advice
about what to say about his use of force against my brother by the Federation
of Police.
PC Kevern embellished an account of Marc’s demeanour stating
that he was walking around with his top off and that he was ‘growling’ and
aggressive. Growling is a word officers like to use in an attempt to dehumanise
the person they have killed. It is often used by officers to dehumanise victims
who had been suffering mental health issues, which should go some way to
explain the regard with which officers attend mental health patients who need
urgent medical attention. When pressed under cross examination she still
maintained that Marc was aggressive and resisting and had his top off.
All of this was directly and very quickly shown to be untrue
and deliberately falsified when the attending Paramedic told the court that
after Marc had been tasered he had to actually cut Marc’s top off to give him
emergency CPR. Multiple eye witnesses who witnessed the entire scene said that
Marc was only gesticulating as if to harm himself. He hadn’t actually harmed
himself but that they were all concerned for his welfare. They all said that
they did not feel threatened by Marc in any way because he was not violent or
aggressive. He just seemed unwell.
A critical eye witness then said she saw police officers
charging at Marc and screaming at him to put down the knife. She says she
clearly heard and saw Marc say ‘why what have I done?’ A second eye witness saw
and heard Marc say this. They both said he sounded scared and confused. Both
eye witnesses said that the police did not give Marc a chance to reply or even
respond. They just kept charging at him and it is my understanding that this
mishandling of the situation and failure to deescalate an urgent medical
emergency situation using their training is what then forced Marc in his terror
and confusion to self- harm.
This was then they fired the Taser at him. The eye witness
said Marc went down like a sack of spuds and didn’t ever get back up again. The
Taser discharges for a period of 5 seconds on the X-26 model before having to
be actively retriggered again. PC Wilson retriggered the Taser twice more with
only one second between each firing. So Marc endured a near continuous 42
seconds of electrocution which is nearly ten times the length of what he
actually should have been tasered for, as each cycle is only five seconds long.
That is the longest recorded case of Taser torture, actively
and significantly being a causative factor in the death of a young UK citizen
with mental health issues in the history of this country. Medical experts who
specialise in Cardiology said that the timeline of events was particularly
significant in Marc’s case. They agreed that yes, Marc had cocaine in his
system, but that he was ok until he was tasered, after which he dropped
immediately to the floor and went into cardiac arrest within 4 minutes. Put
simply, he didn’t suffer a cardiac arrest after using cocaine over 30 minutes
earlier. He suffered cardiac arrest after being tortured with a Taser for ten
times longer than he should have been.
Marc’s self-harm wounds were proven in pathology to not have
contributed to his death in any way. No traces of cocaine were found in Marc’s
brain or heart chambers, suggesting that the drug metabolised very quickly and
that there was no history of chronic or sustained drug abuse in his organs, so while
the cocaine certainly pre-disposed Marc to the enhanced risk factors of Taser-torture,
it wasn’t a case of drugs being the precipitating causal factor.
After hearing all the
expert evidence, the jury made the correct decision and found that the Taser
actively made a significant contribution to the causative factors in my
brother’s death. They directly linked the Taser to the death of Marc Cole and
actively rejected the embellished version of events given by Devon and Cornwall
Police. They found no evidence of violence or aggression on Marc’s part but
instead concluded that Marc had been behaving erratically and self-harming due
to mental illness and the use of cocaine.
Despite this conclusion being made on the grounds of expert
medical evidence, no officers were charged with manslaughter or even
misconduct. There has been no recourse to date for any of the officers who
deliberately lied in statements, or under oath and sat laughing and joking
throughout the whole traumatic proceeding as if it was a bunch of pals out on
their jollies. PC Wilson and his barrister tried to submit that he had been
suffering with PTSD. No clinical evidence was submitted to the court to support
this claim. However, one has to ask, if an officer genuinely is suffering with
PTSD as all members of my family are, it should follow that the officer should
have a restriction placed on all his operational duties. Returning to work
after 3 weeks and carrying a Taser again is not usually the course of action a
traumatised individual would take. PTSD takes a lot longer than 3 weeks to be
clinically diagnosed and in any case an individual suffering any type of flashback-related
symptoms should not be left in charge of a Taser on the grounds of profound
unsafety.
The attending paramedics offered sincere condolences to us
at the Inquest. In contrast the police did not. I didn’t see one ounce of
remorse on their faces as I watched them exposed in lie after lie. But that’s
okay, because the truth keeps talking long after the conversation has finished.
There may not be any man-made justice for my poor brother, but to be honest I
don’t think it’s mans’ to give. When you are involved in the loss of a human
life, when your actions take a father from his children, when you destroy
multiple families, when you choose to make a deliberate decision to self-preserve
instead of tell the truth, then that is no longer between you and a judge. That
is between you and God. You cannot wash the blood of a man from your hands
quite as easily as you can laugh in the face of a grieving family in a court-room.
If a different emergency-responder had attended first I
believe sincerely that Marc would still be alive today. I truly feel that going
forwards we need to urgently implement a new system in dealing with mental
health in the community. The police should not be anywhere near a person who is
experiencing a mental health crisis. Too many people die in the hands of the
police, despite ‘mental health training’ they do not appear to use it and
routinely dehumanise people who just need a bit of empathy and a calm person to
make them feel safe. The best scenario would be for the government to invest in
mental health first-response cars consisting of paramedics and mental health
nurses.
This scheme was piloted in London but I definitely feel that
Cornwall urgently needs a similar mental health emergency response given the
prolific numbers of young people in crisis, particularly young men in the area.
Specialist ambulance crews are what is needed and a suitable place of safety
for patients to be taken to. Police cars and A & E departments are not
desirable places for people in acute distress. Sending a group of police with
an increasing militarised response to aggressively restrain a terrified person
is barbaric and never ends well.
The government needs to put less police onto the streets and
more funding into mental health and community-led services. If you address the
issues in society that lead to mental ill-health in the first place, then the
police wouldn’t need to be called and people would not end up dead in their
incompetent hands.
There have been 1,732 deaths after police contact in this
country since 1990. Zero prosecutions of police. The IOPC reported in their
annual review of 2018-19 that a total of 10 people with mental health issues
were found dead after police restraint and a further 13 people with co-morbid
drug or alcohol issues were also found dead in police custody. You only have to
look at the well-publicised cases of all the young men and women aggressively
restrained or neglected in police custody who end up dead to see that police
forces all over the country continue to dehumanise, deliberately misunderstand
and fail to learn from people presenting with mental health difficulties.
Marc Cole, Adrian McDonald, Darren Cumberbatch, Andrew
Pimlott - all tasered to death during a mental health crisis. Sean Rigg, Seni
Lewis, James Herbert, Thomas Orchard, Kingsley Burrell, Mzee Mohammed (18) -
all restrained to death during a mental health crisis. Devon and Cornwall
Police alone have been involved in the deaths of Marc Cole, Thomas Orchard,
Antony Kitts, Leslie Douthwaite, Andrew Pimlott and Logan Peters.
Theresa May actually called for a review into the use of
force by police citing that physical restraint and Tasers were more often used
against victims who had mental health issues. She found that 30% of people
tasered by the Metropolitan Police had mental health difficulties and a
staggering 50% of people tasered by police were from black or other BME backgrounds.
In the year 2017, the year that Marc’s life was taken, 25 victims died
following contact with the UK police. That was the highest and sharpest rise in
deaths after police restraint since 2008.
Increasingly children up and down the country are being
routinely tasered in playgrounds and pupil referral units. These children often
have SEN Needs and mental illness. In 2018-19 for example in figures obtained
from a freedom of information request, Cheshire Police had tasered children a
whopping 25 times. We need to urgently
push back against this militarisation of the police. Police have absolutely no
place in schools and especially not with Tasers. Of particular concern is the
uncertainty and confusion that officers appear to present with when questioned
on the safety of Tasers in relation to their use on vulnerable people.
In the Taser training manual that had been used to train
Devon and Cornwall Police, only ONE power-point slide was included in the
effects of tasering vulnerable people. People vulnerable to tasering are
specifically referred to as having enhanced risk factors. They can be read
about in other research and reports, however the training provided to rank and
file police officers in this one power point slide was incredibly sparse. It
seems that officers do not know much about the risk of death and serious injury
when using Tasers against people with enhanced risk factors. Enhanced risk
factors that make people vulnerable to death and serious injury following
tasering are any person presenting with mental ill health, intoxication,
pregnancy, epilepsy, the elderly or children. The Taser trainer stated that
there was an incremental increase in risk the more times a Taser firing was
repeated.
However, despite there being very clear and serious evidence
regarding the very real risk of death when tasering vulnerable people, there
does not appear to be ANY guidelines whatsoever on the safe upper limit of time
that you can Taser a person for without causing cardiac arrest. The advice
given to officers is to just keep on tasering at your own discretion.
This is highly disturbing given the scientific evidence
presented by DOMILL in relation to enhanced risk factors, the increasing number
of deaths in the UK following Taser restraint (see Cole, McDonald, Begley,
Cumberbatch, Pimlott, Atkinson) and the very fact that a UN committee of ten
experts declared that Tasers are a form of torture that CAN kill. Given that
Marc’s Inquest found that the Taser played a pivotal role in his death due to
electrocution, it follows that his death directly violates the UN’s Convention
Against Torture.
As a result of Marc’s Inquest conclusion the Coroner has
written a Prevention of Future Deaths Report to the Home Office and they have
56 days to respond. Our family are also waiting from a response from the
Secretary of State with regards to a meeting and Louise Haigh MP has also
raised the issues arising from Marc’s death in Parliament.
We sincerely hope that Marc’s death has not been in vain and
that an urgent review of the safety of Tasers, particularly when used to
restrain vulnerable people, will be conducted. We do not want any more people
in mental health crisis to die in the hands of the very people who should be taking
them to safety for medical treatment.
*
The preceding statement, written by the sister
of the deceased man, is a harrowing testament to the reality of our nation’s
way of dealing with a mental-health crisis. I am convinced that Marc Cole’s
death was totally unnecessary. The facts, as detailed above, speak for
themselves. Marc was in need of skilled intervention, of help that would not be
perceived as threatening. Far too often, in situations like this, force is used
by police to try to subjugate the person in crisis and typically, the suffering
individual is terrified and further traumatized by the forceful approach of
police and these already highly stressed situations are escalated when just the
opposite approach is what is needed.
Such escalation frequently results in tragedy.
My own particular angle on all this is that I
have been campaigning against police use of Taser stun-guns for ten years now
and have seen the death-toll in Britain grow from just one in 2010 to over a
dozen and, as I fearfully predicted back then, I have lived to see this dubious
weapon of torture bring death into my local area.
My attempts to discuss the legality of Taser,
particularly in view of the UN’s position on stun guns and Britain’s
non-ratification of the UNCAT, have met with such a solid and unyielding
brick-wall that I have become convinced that true democracy and the rule of law
are flouted at will by those paid and entrusted with upholding them. Approaches
to former MP Andrew George (Lib Dem) bore no fruit. Promises from current MP
Derek Thomas (Tory) to raise the above matter in Parliament have proved false.
Similarly, the promise of dialogue from Chief Constable of Devon and Cornwall
Police, Sean Sawyer has proven empty. All this correspondence has been documented
exhaustively on this website over the last ten years, mainly categorized under
the RESIST CARDIAC ARREST Campaign. In conclusion, having exhausted all the
official channels of redress and debate and found the ‘authorities’ lacking any
desire to live up to the transparency and
accountability they like to boast of, I feel that we, the ordinary people,
have to try to put forward our own positive solutions to these problems.
Police are fighters. As part of their job they
have to tackle violence in public life so they naturally have a strategic
mentality. Whilst this may be necessary in some areas of life, it renders them
particularly inappropriate responders to mental-health crises. By studying many
cases of fatality-by-police, certain patterns emerge and similarities crop up
again and again. But lessons that could easily be learned are not being
successfully integrated into police-training.
I strongly support the idea of a new
emergency-service, tasked with responding to mental-health emergencies and
treating them primarily as a health issue, rather than a matter of subduing a person who is seen as acting
disturbed in public.
There are serious problems over justice in the
case of Marc Cole, as in so many cases. For example, can you imagine being
caught lying in a Court of Justice and facing no disciplinary action if the
case concerned the death of a police-constable? And yet two of the constables
involved in the death of Marc Cole were found to have been lying but faced no
perjury-charge or reprimand whatsoever. Would the ordinary public get away with
such falsification if the case involved a police-constable? I don’t think so.
While police in fatality-cases are provided the
finest QC’s to plead their cases – at tax-payer’s expense, ordinary folk who
lose their loved ones have to go through the Legal Aid minefield or somehow
stump up money for a lawyer themselves. There is currently a campaign to
equalize this process and provide automatic free legal aid to those bereaved by
State-violence.
The so-called ‘Taser’ evolved from a simple
cattle-prod into a hybrid electric harpoon that delivers 50,000 – yes, fifty
thousand, volts to its victim. It has been associated with hundreds of cardiac
arrest deaths around the world and is known to stop the heart if the prongs hit
the cardiac-area during a certain point in the rhythm of the heartbeat.
Combined with excessive levels of adrenalin (from stress) and also intoxicants
and restraint, the Taser is all too often a bringer of death. The police have
every right to defend themselves – but not with a weapon that violates the
UNCAT – even though Britain secretly never ratified the Convention we had helped to draft! The UN informed me of
Britain’s failure to ratify UNCAT when I complained to them about a previous
case of Taser-torture by Falmouth police. Ironically I only went to the UN
because the local police would not take on the complaint.
With the continuing Wall of Silence from police
and MPs over these issues it seems unlikely that stun-guns will undergo the
immanent legal-challenge they so badly need. And with the policy of ‘Austerity’
that has so withered public services and undermined the healthy fabric of
society, it seems that more vulnerable people will be harmed or slaughtered by
this sinister new weapon that has been imposed upon us without debate or consensus.
Which raises the question of what can people do
to try to foster and protect mental health in our communities and what steps
can we take to try to save people from the tragic fate of 30 year-old Marc Cole
from Falmouth?
Even when we are dissatisfied with our political
representatives, I think it is still worth trying to talk to them and trying to
get them to commit to making mental-health a top-priority when forming policy.
Why is suicide the number one cause of death of young men between 25 – 35 in
Britain? This is an epidemic and it needs to be treated as such, not responded
to with military-style force in our streets.
My own view is that if the government fails us,
then we have to look out for each other more – to come out of our personal
bubbles more and reach out to others and say ‘are you alright?’ or ‘would you
like a chat’ or whatever, to merely break down the isolation between people and
look with a loving eye on our neighbours, friends and families. There are also
various groups and societies, holding meetings where people can share their
feelings and help each other through difficulties. There is a lot of good in
the community and this can always be built on and increased. However,
ultimately matters of policing, mental-health etc are largely the business of
government and until officialdom can treat people decently and fairly and enter
into dialogue on these issues, and until those in power are willing to uphold
the rule of law and truly represent the populace, the deadly threat of Taser will
remain with us.
This needs to change.
