Custody visiting is a scheme under which members of the community can make what are supposed to be unannounced, random visits to police stations, and check and report on the welfare of detainees in custody.
The idea was first proposed in the early 1980s, by Michael Meacher in the House of Commons, and by Lord Scarman in his 1981 report on the Brixton riots.
Their concern arose from the conduct of the police in custody blocks, some of which resulted in deaths in custody. They believed that the police would be deterred from misconduct if they knew these visits could take place at any time.
The Conservative government did not legislate for a visiting scheme, but were forced into setting up a voluntary, non-statutory scheme, called lay visiting.
The scheme was designed by the Home Office and the police to cause the police the minimum of trouble. Despite that, the scheme was operated with some success by some determined activists in London, but without a statutory framework it made little general impact.
In 2002, the Labour government introduced a statutory framework obliging police authorities to run custody visiting schemes in each part of England and Wales. These schemes are known as independent custody visiting schemes and are now operated locally by Police and Crime Commissioners (PCC).
Lack of independence
The word ‘independent’ is inconsistent with the PCC’s complete control over the visitors: the PCC recruits, hires, trains, manages and fires the visitors. In particular, the visitors have no way of speaking to the public without the permission of the PCC.
As well as lacking independence, the scheme lacks effectiveness. As part of the National Preventive Mechanism, custody visiting should be providing regulation of the police, but it doesn’t. Custody police are almost entirely self-regulated: in other words, they mark their own homework.
The visiting scheme receives very little publicity. I first heard of it when seeing an advertisement in the local paper seeking recruits. I am a retired commercial solicitor and mediator. I have always had an interest in police custody.
Without any intention of writing about it, I applied to join the local scheme in Dyfed-Powys, the part of rural Wales where I live. I worked as a visitor there from 2009 to 2012. I was not happy with the way the scheme was run.
The experience prompted me to look for discussions of custody visiting other than those in the official literature, and I found very little was available. I decided that my time would be better spent studying and writing about it rather than continuing to work as a visitor, and that I would not be able to write a worthwhile book about it without academic help.
Research custody visiting
That is why I applied to the University of Birmingham Law School, to write a PhD thesis on the subject, with a view to publishing a book based on the thesis. No funding was available, so I funded the research myself.
Apart from wanting to write a book on an otherwise largely unknown subject, my motivation sprang from the belief that, despite so little attention being paid to it, custody visiting matters, because what happens in custody matters, and custody visiting has the potential to provide scrutiny of what happens there.
Custody is a very important component of the criminal justice system, and it determines the outcome of many cases by producing guilty pleas. The adversarial principle and the presumption of innocence do not apply in the custody block.
A very locked-down environment
What custody is like is unknown to the public: Channel 4’s programme 24 Hours in Police Custody is about investigation, not the conditions in the cells. As described by one former custody sergeant interviewed in the research, the custody block is ‘a very locked-down environment, the police’s world, which nobody else except custody visitors really gets a view into.’
The custody block can also be a very dangerous place for detainees, some of whom lose their lives there.
My research into custody visiting went much further and deeper than any previous enquiry. The research was conducted by means of interviews and observation.
I met detainees, visitors, police officers, lawyers, and the PCC’s official who runs the local visiting scheme, and I analysed how they interacted with each other.
I particularly watched out for what the visitors should have been doing in an effective visiting set-up, and noted where the visitors took no action. A striking example is the visitors’ failure to inquire why a detainee had been sent to hospital: had he been injured by the police?
The case study was carried out in one large metropolitan area covered by a major police force. A national study would have had to be conducted on the internet. A great deal would have been lost: most importantly, it would have been impossible to meet detainees. Answers to internet surveys miss many of the nuances that can be gleaned from a face to face interview. I believe that this was the right approach, and that custody visiting does not differ much from area to area.
A fundamental power imbalance
Whatever their differences, all custody visiting schemes, like the custody blocks, are contained within the same statutory provisions and codes of practice. And behind that common formal structure lies the fundamental power imbalance between the police and the visitors, with the police firmly in control of every custody block. This has a decisive impact on the way all visitors work.
This imbalance is the crucial unchanging factor explaining both the lack of independence and the ineffectiveness of custody visiting, and it is a characteristic of all schemes across the country. No other research of this type has been published, and I contend that the findings of the research can be applied generally, unless and until other research disproves that contention.
Dr John Kendall is author of Regulating Police Detention, voices from behind closed doors.
This is the first of two articles. The second will look at why custody visiting fails to achieve anything for detainees and how it could be made to work.
