In a previous article, I argued that police custody visiting both lacks independence from the police and is ineffective in safeguarding detainees
In this article I discuss why custody visiting fails to achieve anything for detainees and how it could be made to work.
Lack of independence
My research on police custody visitors found that visitors were recruited by the Police and Crime Commissioner’s (PCC) official, and some of the potential appointees were nudged in that direction by organisations favourable to the police such as Neighbourhood Watch. No such channel runs from organisations like Liberty.
Visitors tended to be older people, some of them retired. Generally, they were quite well-disposed towards the police, some with close family connections which they did not think created conflicts of interest. They were trained by the PCC’s official: the training was of poor quality, some of it positively misleading; the training described custody visiting as just common sense; and the training showed no understanding of the relationship with the police.
This was followed by a six-month probationary period where the new recruits were mentored by an experienced visitor. Here the new recruits got to know the world of the custody block.
The custody block is the police’s everyday place of work where they have all the power, and where the visitors drop by occasionally and are, frankly, not taken seriously by the police. The visitors tended to behave in the way they thought the police thought they should behave.
This follows the syndrome noted by Steven Lukes: the party with less power behaves in this way even when there is no force applied and no overt conflict. I found visitors hardly ever made challenges to the police.
The visitors generally had pro-police attitudes. One of them said: ‘I do the job best knowing the police accept me as part of the team.’ They had no concept of acting as regulators of the police. One visitor expressed neutrality in these terms: ‘If I can help the police I will, if I can help the criminal I will.’ He clearly thought all the detainees were guilty: innocent detainees did not exist.
Another visitor told a detainee: ‘The more you cooperate, the sooner you’ll be out.’ The detainee may well have been encouraged by that to make a false confession.
Very few visitors thought it was their job to protect detainees. This issue became strikingly clear when I asked them about deaths in custody. They had very little understanding of how the system works or even that they might have a part to play. The subject has been airbrushed out of the training they received.
They apparently saw nothing wrong in the police asking them to put a positive spin on the story of a death at the police station they visited. They also thought they had no role to intervene when they noticed a detainee was unresponsive.
Ineffectiveness of custody visiting
Visitors went to the custody blocks in pairs, often at expected times. Sometimes they had to wait to gain access to the block, on the pretext that it would be dangerous. This gave rise to suspicions that the police had something to hide. On one occasion visitors were kept waiting for an hour: they found that the reason was that one of the detainees was a serving police officer.
Visitors were accompanied on their visits by a member of the custody staff. Detainees were naturally suspicious of visitors with lanyards and notebooks. The custody staff were told to stand within sight but out of the hearing of the detainee: an extraordinary piece of bureaucratic nonsense. The detainees could not speak to the visitors in confidence and did not do so.
In the words of one visitor, which I thoroughly endorse, this proximity of the custody staff ‘destroyed the whole purpose of custody visiting’.
Visitors wrote reports of their visits. The reports were vetted by the custody sergeant who sometimes lent on the visitors to change their reports. The reports were then sent to the PCC’s official, who was supposed to take up issues raised in the reports with the police, but I was not allowed to see records of those discussions. There was therefore no means for visitors to follow up issues they had detected.
No details from the reports ever became public. The visiting scheme had no effect on the behaviour of the police and achieved nothing, except to provide custody with a thin veneer of legitimacy which obscured the need for reform.
How should custody visiting be reformed?
For custody visiting to work well, radical changes would be necessary. Recruits should be properly trained to have a full, professional knowledge of the criminal justice system, including deaths in custody and the inquest system, by a range of people, including former detainees and defence lawyers.
The visits would have to be properly random, unannounced and unexpected, including taking place during the night, a time when things often go wrong: but that never happened during the research.
Statutory powers would need to be given to visitors to enable them to act as regulators. For instance, they would need to have the right to be admitted immediately to a custody block, and to be able to use their mobile phones to record what they find. This would force the police to take the visitors seriously, and it would go some way to dealing with the most difficult issue, the power imbalance between the visitors and the police.
Custody visiting should be detached from the PCCs, who are generally not concerned with the welfare of detainees, but in getting value for money. There should be a new national organisation dedicated to safeguarding detainees, and it should have a visitor membership, unlike the current supervising body, the Independent Custody Visiting Association.
These are some of the reforms which could turn a watchdog which doesn’t bark into an effective regulator of police behaviour, and it could save lives.
Dr John Kendall is author of Regulating Police Detention, voices from behind closed doors.
This is the second of two articles. The first explained that custody visiting is a system supposed to safeguard detainees in police custody.
