Following a call by Parliament’s Joint Committee on Human Rights for a national oversight mechanism to ensure that lessons are learned from deaths in prisons, Clair Hilder reflects on the growing number of cases that demonstrate the failure of our current system to protect vulnerable prisoners.

Parliament’s Joint Committee on Human Rights (the JCHR) is currently carrying out an inquiry into mental health and deaths in prison, looking at three broad themes…

On 13 February 2017, the Metropolitan Police Federation (MPF) published findings of its survey it had announced in January 2017. The survey was sent out to all of its 32,000 members of the federation, yet less than half, 11,000, responded.

The Guardian newspaper recently published an article about a man who was wrongfully arrested whilst shopping in Waitrose in Chesham, Buckinghamshire. A legal commentator quoted in the piece suggested the man had little possibility of legal redress but Cormac McDonough argues, he could have potentially brought a claim,

Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Constabulary Sir Thomas Windsor has said that; “protecting the vulnerable, particularly children is perhaps the most important job that police officers and staff undertake.” Yet, the Metropolitan Police Service, the largest police service in England and Wales, has severely failed vulnerable children, it has come to light in a recent, damning, report.

On 31 October 2016, the Home Secretary Amber Rudd decided that there would not be any inquiry into the so called Battle of Orgreave. She said in a written statement that there would “be very few lessons for the policing system today to be learned from any review of the events and practices of three decades ago”, a surprising statement given that trust in the police is currently arguably at an all-time low.