What does the case of Valdo Calocane – convicted in January 2024 for the killings of Ian Coates, Grace O’Malley-Kumar and Barnaby Webber in Nottingham – mean for private security, Mark Rowe asks.
According to the review of the case ‘there was no single point of failure, but a series of errors, omissions and misjudgements’. Nor, we can add, did the man drop out of a blue sky; according to the CJC timeline, he was first detained under the Mental Health Act in May 2020. He was then under the care of Nottinghamshire Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust (NHFT) until September 2022, when he was discharged back to his general practitioner. We can add that this getting people off the books – because others are equally in need of treatment; and, to be less charitable, it may make the stats look better – is not confined to mental health care, but truants in schools; or indeed the way that police get crimes off their figures, whether resolving them by ‘community resolution notices’ or similar paperwork that means nothing in practice.
In the case of discharging the mentally unwell back to GPs who aren’t specialists in mental health and indeed who are so busy themselves it’s hard to even get an appointment – according to the CJC, Calocane in those years 2020-22 had ‘indicated beyond any real doubt would relapse into distressing symptoms and potentially aggressive behaviour’. Early on Tuesday, June 13, 2023, Calocane killed three and severely assaulted a further three.
Like the probation service handling offenders, healthcare for the severely mentally ill is about risk, in a word, ‘any potential risk they could pose to themselves or others’, to quote an open letter from Ifti Majid, Chief Executive, Nottinghamshire Healthcare in response to the CJC publication. As CJC’s Interim Chief Inspector of Healthcare, Chris Dzikiti, put it somewhat delicately, ‘the risk he presented to the public was not managed well’.
Among those commenting on the case has been the psychiatrist Dr Benji Waterhouse, author of the memoir You Don’t Have To Be Made To Work Here, admitting ‘near misses’; and how such professionals in effect (or literally?) have to cross their fingers that their patients do not commit crime, if in the community rather than occupying the finite care beds in institutions.
Britain has long – since the early 1990s – committed to ‘care in the community’, avoiding locking people away; even before, risk was unavoidable – the author Evelyn Waugh with his rare wit in his short story Mr Loveday’s Little Outing treated what could happen when someone was inappropriately let out of a mental institution. But ‘care in the community’ implies care taken to see that patients are taking their medication – the CJC found that Calocane in 2020-22 ‘presented with symptoms of psychosis and appeared to have little understanding or acceptance of his condition’, and ‘issues with him taking his medication were also recorded from early on’. To use plainer English than the CJC appears able to use, Calocane was not taking his meds.
As for risks from others, the CJC does state that ‘many of the issues’ identified in the Calocane case ‘are consistent with the problems we found in our wider review of the quality of care and safety of services at NHFT’. And Chris Dzikiti of CJC said: “We have made clear recommendations to improve oversight and treatment of people with serious mental health issues at both a provider and a national level. Wider national action is also needed to tackle systemic issues in community mental health – including a shortage of mental health staff and lack of integration between mental health services and other healthcare, social care and support services – so that people get the right care, treatment and support when and where they need it.”
Talking of wider action, the CJC recently admitted that a review of its ‘operational effectiveness’ showed that for it, too, ‘improvement is urgently needed’.
Implications for private security? SIA-badged officers are the ones facing the public, at all hours, of all shapes, ages and behaviours, no matter how erratic. Officers at the entrance to convenience stores, in central public libraries in the main cities, on buses and trams and at railway stations, on university campuses (Calocane graduated from the University of Nottingham in 2022) and at hospitals, and pub doors – in fact anywhere, because those with mental health difficulties, from anxiety upwards, also the suicidal, can go anywhere the same as the well.
As featured in Professional Security Magazine last year, police have sought to set the threshold of their response to mental health incidents, to avoid acting beyond their competence, setting a national ‘Right Person, Right Care’ policy, agreed nationally, whereby police will only attend if a crime is in progress or there’s a ‘real and immediate risk’ (that word again) to life. That makes sense; why have someone in mental distress, in a police cell or handcuffed in a police car, when they need care, not the criminal justice system? Custody cells are at capacity in any case. The pattern, then, is across public services: far more demand for services than supply.
