It has just been reported that, exactly a year ago, on 21August 2008, a physically fit man aged 40 was arrested, taken to the nearby police station, placed in a gage in the station yard, and died 20 minutes later. Some 30 persons, nearly all men, die in police custody every year, and in most cases there no doubts or misgivings about the cause of death. In a small number of cases however there are real grounds for suspicion about the reasons for death and real concerns both about the behaviour of the police and the procedures of the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC). The death last year of Sean Rigg, a musician from Brixton, is one such case. There are several suspicious elements, any one of which may later be satisfactorily explained, but which cumulatively do give considerable cause for concern. Nor is this just an examination of one man’s death; it is a system under scrutiny.

There are several worrying issues about this episode:
1 Rigg was physically fit and healthy on the day he was arrested, but 20 Minutes after being put in a metal cage in the police station yard, he stopped breathing, and on being taken to hospital was pronounced dead.
2 The IPCC initially told Rigg’s family that only CCTV footage seized from inside the station showed the cage where he died, and the cameras had limited views. Rigg’s family then demanded an audit of security cameras at the station. The IPCC then conceded there were more cameras overlooking the cage. But 2 weeks later they said they had tried to obtain the tapes, but found that the recorders had not been working for 3 months. However, the chief inspector in charge of the station was caught on tape saying CCTV was working and recordings had been seized.
3 An annual maintenance check of all CCTV at Brixton police station on 12 August, 9 days before Riggs died, found that there were no problems with the cameras which the Rigg family believed should have recorded his last moments alive.
4 It took 27 days for the IPCC to try to seize footage from outdoor cameras. Why did it take so long, and were the tapes destroyed in this 4 week period?
5 CCTV inside the station showed that inside the cage Rigg repeatedly collapsed and lost consciousness, but received no care. The family says the custody footage records conversations between officers saying that Rigg was feigning having fits and being unconscious.
6 The family were denied permission to see Rigg’s body for 2 days, but later discovered at the mortuary that he had 3 round wounds to the side of his face – on his eyebrow, cheek and temple, though the pathologist judged these injuries could not have killed him.
7 IPCC investigators waited 8 months to interview police officers who were involved with Rigg on that evening, and 9 months before speaking to the 999 call handlers.
8 The IPCC have repeatedly refused to consider the possibility that the police officers involved could have acted negligently or with malice, and have failed to treat this as a suspicious death, according to the Rigg Family’s lawyer. Astonishingly, IPCC investigators said they did not immediately interview all officers because there was nothing to suggest wrongdoing.
This is a very worrying dossier of evidence. Nor is it an isolated case. There is a steady trickle of cases where the coroner’s court brings in an “open verdict” which may suggest negligence, malice or excessive use of force on the part of the police. There is a larger stream of cases where the verdict is ‘misadventure’ or ‘accidental death’ where sometimes the facts seem to warrant further investigation. In such cases the coroner system needs major reform, with all documents and evidence being fully made available to the family of the deceased and with legal representation provided in contested cases. In addition, there has been too much recent evidence of IPCC partiality to retain confidence in its current operation, not just the Rigg case, but the manifest bias in favour of the police over the death of Iam Tomlinson in the G20 riots. But the question then arises, as so often: Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? (Who guards the guards themselves?). It is a question which the collapse of accountability in Britain today still requires to be answered.

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