Would you, if you were running a manufacturing business, put an employee who was in a relatively junior position and who had only been with you three years in the position of supervising a new entrant to use dangerous and business critical machinery in your factory? Would you do that if any mistake by either the new entrant or the junior person supervising could result in the deaths of members of the public? I certainly wouldn’t. Firstly I’d want a person with more seniority and at least five years of satisfactory experience training up the new person and would not let the new entrant do anything that might have adverse outcomes.
Sounds like common sense doesn’t it. After all, with so much at stake you wouldn’t want someone who had only done 12 shifts with your firm controlling a gantry crane or a furnace or a metal stamping press or handling dangerous materials would you?
Unfortunately that’s exactly what Leicestershire Police did in the run up to imported madman Valdo Calocane’s knife rampage through Nottingham, a rampage that took the lives of three innocent people. Leicestershire Police let a rookie who had only done 12 shifts with the force be supervised by a police constable who himself had only three years service, deal with Calocane and the paperwork surrounding his arrest.
The result of this error was that the true nature of Calocane and the fact that he was wanted on a Magistrates Warrant and therefore had to be arrested following a violent incident in Kegworth was missed. Three people have died because Leicestershire Police did not allocate a more senior officer to train a rookie officer with the result that this rookie was not properly supervised and given tasks that she had not been properly trained for.
This is monstrously bad management. If it happened in the private sector it would be called out as bad practise and possibly result in bankruptcy or legal action, but in the public sector it’s just normal behaviour.
The Daily Mail said:
"A rookie police officer has apologised after she admitted making a series of blunders which left a future triple killer free to strike.
Libbie-Mae Taylor was only 12 shifts into her job with Leicestershire Police when she was called to the scene of a warehouse assault on May 5 2023.
The suspect, Valdo Calocane, had fled the scene but was already wanted for skipping bail after being charged with assaulting an emergency worker.
But PC Taylor failed to notice Calocane should have been arrested when she received his full name and date of birth to enter them into the police log at a later date.
She then closed the incident without obtaining detailed statements from the victims, despite a legion of eyewitnesses at the warehouse who saw the unprovoked attack, including claims Calocane was reaching for a knife.
Calocane went on to stab three people to death, and seriously injure three others in Nottingham on June 13. An inquiry is looking into what went wrong in the build-up to the atrocity.
The young officer - who was in charge of the case, despite her vast inexperience - today apologised for her mistakes.
She told the inquiry in London: 'I think that in this incident, I made mistakes."
I do not wholly blame the rookie WPC Libbie-May Taylor for the entirety of what went wrong with the handling of Calocane, she should never have been given mission critical work like this to do without her and the work being closely supervised. I don’t even completely blame her supervisor PC Connor Amos-Perkins as he was only doing what his senior officers told him to do even though I don’t believe that someone of so little policing experience should have been involved in training.
This was a systemic failure by Leicestershire Police and the blame for that lies with the senior management team who have allowed this sort of situation to occur.
From reading the description in the Mail article about how this incident was happened it seems that it happened at a time when the force was overstretched and overworked and officers were having to use their rest days to ‘catch up’ with work. It sounds to me like the junior officers on the ground were under extreme pressure to complete tasks with falling levels of resources with which to do that work with.
However, there does seem to be money sloshing around in Leicestershire Police that might not be spent as well as it could have been. A brief websearch using the terms ‘Leicestershire Police’ and ‘diversity’ seems to show that a lot of resources and police management time has been used for ‘diversity based activities.
This case does make me wonder whether the various obsessions of the police management class such as ‘diversity’ and other nonsense has bled resources away from front line policing? The officers handling Calocane should have been better resourced, better trained and more closely supervised by officers of Sergeant or Inspector level but they were not. The junior officers were just left to get on with things with very poor support it seems. The result of the failures by Leicestershire Police’s senior management team is that three innocent people are dead.
Every organisation that had had contact with Calocane has failed. The NHS failed because they dithered about sectioning him under the Mental Health Acts because NHS staff were concerned about what they saw as a problem of a ‘disproportionate’ number of Black men being sectioned, the police failed because they sent very junior officers to deal with a man who was a known problem and who missed vital details such as that Calocane should have been arrested immediately. Most importantly however the biggest failure has been the Home Office. As the lead government department in charge of border control the Home Office and its agencies should never ever have allowed Calocane, a Guinea-Bissau/Portugal dual national, to enter the UK in the first place. The bottom line is that if Calocane had been kept out of the UK he would never had had the opportunity to carry out any of the crimes that he did and innocent people would not have been murdered or seriously injured.
Whilst individual officers failed to do their jobs the actions of senior police management contributed a great deal to that failure. Police leadership failed to properly resource the policing front line and that failure is firmly and squarely in the hands of those who led Leicestershire Police and the management of every government agency and department whose hands Calocane passed through.
Link to Daily Mail story
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-15635549/Rookie-police-officer-admits-mistakes-failing-arrest-Nottingham-killer-warehouse-assault-weeks-stabbed-three-people-death.html