The Thin Blue Line of Accountability: How Citizens are Holding Britain’s Broken Police Forces to Account

Walk through the Saint Paul’s area of Bristol; you will see ACAB – ‘All Cops Are Bastards’ – graffitied on walls and wheelie bins. The tension between some of this part of the city’s residents and the city’s police force is palpable. 

In 1980, the area was the scene of civil unrest, which resulted in nineteen policemen and six other people being hospitalised. Many in the community point to the overzealous stop and search policies and armed patrols targeting young black men used by the police as a key factor which led to the disturbances. Some feel the over policing of certain communities in Bristol continues today.

“They beat me up, they broke my teeth […] I didn’t get a solicitor. I didn’t know why I was being arrested. I didn’t get read my rights.” Alice’s eyes tell a story of affliction as she recalls an armed raid Avon and Somerset police carried out on her house. 

“They took 2 dresses, a bag and a hat, lying to me all throughout the event. I don’t think I would be here if I hadn’t been on the phone with a friend.”

Alice is one of the 81,142 people in this country who have made an official complaint against the police over the last year. Normally when a complaint is made, it is dealt with by that police force’s own professional standards department. 

Bridget, from Bristol Copwatch tells me how the police are ‘unique in the way that they investigate themselves against any wrongdoing’ and explains how consequently officers are often not held properly to account for their actions.

Similarly, Habib Kadiri, a spokesperson for Stopwatch, a group which conducts research into police behaviour in England and Wales, tells me: “We find a lot of the time there is a massive accountability gap between the way the police should behave and the actual reality.”

“The public have found it quite difficult to hold the police accountable and gain any real justice.”

Some communities have organised themselves to monitor and challenge police malpractice. One such organisation is Bristol Copwatch. The non-hierarchical organisation was started three years ago to support people like Alice, who are in the process of making complaints against the police. Alice initially sought out Bristol Copwatch for advice but on seeing the important role Copwatch could play in her community became a member.

Bristol Copwatch works with people who are in custody or are about to appear in court by helping them seek appropriate legal representation. Dahlia, a former paralegal specialising in prisoners’ rights and member of the group, reflects on how she recently spoke to somebody who had just gone to prison. “Just having somebody there who understands that legal process can be a huge offer of solidarity,” she says. 

Bristol Copwatch also aims to empower citizens through holding public meetings, giving free ‘know your rights’ training courses and hosting stalls where they offer step by step guidance to people who may find themselves in an interaction with the police. 

Matt, who joined Bristol Copwatch over the last year, explains how they also conduct street monitoring which involves filming police interactions. He describes a recent incident, where he noticed two members of the public getting arrested in Lawrence Hill. 

He started filming the interaction and very quickly the police had taken the people out of handcuffs. ‘`I’m not saying they got de-arrested because we were there.’ He pauses before adding: “But I guess it’s an example of how when we do things correctly, that’s what can happen”. 

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Trouble on the Avon

Bristol Copwatch is just one part of a growing movement of Copwatch groups throughout the country. However, due to a string of high-profile incidents involving the city’s police force, Bristol Copwatch is amongst the country’s busiest groups.

Infamously in 2017, Avon and Somerset police shot their own race relations adviser, Judah Adunbi with a stun gun. A year later, Adunbi was again mistaken for a wanted man by officers in Bristol. 

Fast forward to 2021, and during the aftermath of Kill the Bill demonstrations against anti-protest laws, the city’s police were forced to retract statements they made about supposed broken bones and punctured lungs. Which officers were said to have sustained during the protest. Later, an inquiry by MP Geraint Davies found that Avon and Somerset police had ‘overreacted at the time [,] had misled the press and tried to mislead [the] inquiry.”

“They stood up in court without any culpability, crying and saying they feared for their lives,” Bridget says. Defendants included a lot of young people who were “literally mauled and bruised”. 

Despite compelling evidence suggesting the police made a variety of mistakes during and after the protest, Bridget sombrely recalls that ‘people from those trials were sent to prison for 112 years collectively’ and charges are still being laid as of this October. 

Meanwhile, the local force, Avon and Somerset police, failed to log 13,100 alleged offences in 2022, according to an inspectorate report this March. Over 8,000 were violent and 420 were sexual.

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Capital Offences

James from Camden Copwatch explains how one of the roles Copwatch groups must play in society is ‘on the digital front’ by offering a counter narrative ‘to what’s being said, or challenging views’ presented by the police and the mainstream media.

The Copwatch movement is growing quickly in London with groups in Camden, Lambeth and Southwark gaining impetus in response to the high-profile murders of Sarah Everard and Chris Kaba at the hands of London’s Metropolitan Police officers. 

Public consent is something that the British model of policing relies on, but some surveys have found people’s trust in the police has fallen by 20% since 1981. This confidence in policing was further eroded during the recent Undercover Policing Inquiry started by Thersea May, which found that at least 42 officers used fake personas based on the details of dead children.

To make undercover officers’ fake identities more credible, the police were known to have visited neighbourhoods where the children lived, researched children’s family members and even visited graves. 

They would then use these details to obtain driving licences and passports in the name of dead children. Tactics such as these and the ones used by police to get close to families such as the parents of Stephen Lawrence have meant the Met Police has been under increased public scrutiny. 

James also highlights how more recently facial recognition technology has been used in Camden, with no prior warning or apparent rules on how it’s implemented. 

‘Effectively the police are saying well, we’re going to do it and you can trust us to get it right. It doesn’t have a particularly good success rate, it’s untested, unreliable, unregulated technology. I’m just really concerned that people are walking around unaware of this,” he tells Byline Times. 

Recently the Met Police also adopted The Right Care Right Person strategy which aims to decrease the number of mental health calls officers attend as part of an initiative with the NHS. 

Back in Bristol, Bridget highlights how police in the city are still called to incidents which should be dealt with by ‘support services’ but ‘each and every one of those have had their funding cut and cut and cut again.’

Bridget lets out a deep breath. “Why the hell is a police force sent out wh