When police investigations go wrong
Closed thinking and failure to understand probabilities can send police inquiries spiralling into shocking failure or wrongful arrests…
I recently watched the shocking BBC documentary A Killing in Tiger Bay (UK only).
It tells of the miscarriage of justice in which five men were imprisoned for the murder of Lynette White in the Cardiff docks area in 1988. Despite police getting a report of a white man covered in blood standing near the street door of her flat, when the investigation seemed to be going nowhere officers arrested five other men for the crime. No forensic evidence linked them to the crime scene.
The wrongly charged and imprisoned men (three got prison terms, two were acquitted) were eventually released following a campaign by their families and supporters. Thanks to DNA, the bloody man outside Lynne’s flat was caught years later.
What was interesting was that during the documentary it was stated that the detectives who had conducted the case did not want to interviewed for the programme.
Which was frustrating. The one question screaming out at the viewer is: how did this happen? How would those officers explain their determination to go after the wrong men?
Presumably, the officers responsible joined the force because they wanted to put bad guys away.
So, how does this kind of travesty occur?
Stephen Port case
And news last week that five Metropolitan Police officers and three former officers are being investigated for misconduct over the failings in the Stephen Port serial killer case is an example of another type of investigative disaster.
Four men – Anthony Walgate, 23, Gabriel Kovari, 22, Daniel Whitworth, 21, and Jack Taylor, 25 – were overdosed with a date-rate drug by Port, who left their bodies near his flat in Barking, London.
Despite Port leaving one of the victims outside the door of his block of flats and being questioned by police about this, officers failed to focus on his potential as a suspect. Jurors at inquests in 2021 concluded that police neglect ‘probably’ contributed to the deaths of the final three victims.
Again we’re left wondering how this happened. Campaigners and the local MP, Dame Margaret Hodge, questioned whether the police were homophobic (the victims and killer were gay). Campaigners said the police were homophobic and unprofessional.
The Independent Office for Police Conduct may provide some answers in this case, but the history of investigations gone badly wrong is appallingly long and varied.
Prosecuting and jailing innocent people is the ultimate failure of justice. Allowing criminals to go free is another terrible consequence of badly run investigations.
Dr Kim Rossmo
I was lucky to get to interview Dr Kim Rossmo for one of my books. He is a former Vancouver detective who moved to the academic study of crime, and geographic profiling in particular.
He edited a 2009 publication called Criminal Investigative Failures. This is a fascinating read and goes some way to delineate patterns of defective investigative practices that occur again and again in the UK and elsewhere.
The book highlights three factors contributing to investigative mistakes: cognitive biases, organisation traps and probability errors.
Rossmo is unusual in that he was a cop who is a good mathematician and has moved into research and development. When I spoke to him about the Hammersmith Nude Murders, I was struck by how uninterested he was in any aspect of a case that was not verifiable or testable. The clarity of his approach was extraordinary.
In Criminal Investigative Failures, when dealing with biases that can divert an investigation, he is critical of gut instinct and tunnel vision. The latter, he writes, ‘can result in the elimination of other suspects who should be investigated. Equally, events that could lead to other suspects are eliminated from the officer’s thinking.’
The flawed investigation into Peter Sutcliffe’s murders certainly suffered from these blunders, as the ‘I’m Jack’ fake letters and cassette were given priority and sent detectives to seek the killer in the wrong city.
The hunt for Rachel Nickell’s killer
Rossmo speaks of ‘satisficing’, or latching onto the first identified alternative that appears good enough. Here he cites the case of Rachel Nickell, horrifically stabbed to death on Wimbledon Common in 1992.
Police got a tip about a local man Colin Stagg. For the next year he was the focus of the inquiry.
This led to a disastrous covert op in which a policewoman ‘befriended’ Stagg to gain incriminating information. When the case went to court, the judge kicked out most of the prosecution evidence and criticised the efforts to snare Stagg.
A detective later commented: ‘Maybe the team got an idée fixe. Maybe they got stuck thinking it had to be Stagg. No one dared to challenge that thinking until it got to the judge. But it’s a terrible mess.’
Regarding organisational traps, Rossmo writes, ‘Law enforcement agencies are conservative by nature. They often suffer from bureaucratic inertia – a lethargy or unwillingness to change, evolve or act.’
Confirmation bias is given as an example. This sees officers giving more weight to a theory or suspect based on their own preference for them, and downplaying those that contradict their ideas. A mass of evidence implicating a suspect can be outweighed by one piece of data throwing doubt on that suspect.
In the Stephen Port case, detectives latched onto the idea that the victims died accidentally, seeing them simply as gay men overdosing on drugs. This appears to have closed off the possibility that Port, who was interviewed after a victim was found at the entrance to his block of flats, may have been involved.
Cutbacks in policing
Skilled detectives will think a lot of this is stating the bleeding obvious. And, indeed, huge advances were made after the failures of the Peter Sutcliffe investigation of the late 1970s.
Senior investigating officers, for example, are more accountable for the decisions they make these days. They must fill out diaries detailing what decisions they have made and why. Investigations are also subject to constant review.
Such measures were an attempt to ensure an entire investigation would not disappear down a rabbit hole thanks to the ‘confirmation bias’ of the top detective. George Oldfield’s decision to believe the tape and letters from a Geordie hoaxer disastrously diverted the huge hunt for Sutcliffe on a wild goose chase for months.
However, mistakes and wrongful convictions still occur, so the need for unbiased clarity and an understanding of probabilities still needs to be emphasised.
Campaigners often accuse the police of homophobia, racism or misogyny when scandals occur, and there may be some truth in those feelings. But political attacks on the police in the form of cutbacks no doubt compound the difficulties officers face.
Jeff Pope, senior producer of Four Lives, the BBC drama about Stephen Port, said that when researching the series he was struck by a ‘shoddy investigation… due to ineptitude, poor systems and underfunding’.
Between 2010/11 to 2015/16, for example, government funding for the police was hacked by 18 per cent, according to the National Audit Office. Police stations, certainly in London, have been closed in huge numbers.
Police officers in the UK were cut by 20,600 between 2010 and 2019. Anecdotally, some ex-officers put a fall in standards partly down to the loss of experienced officers in middle-ranking positions, particularly sergeants.
Misfiring investigations and miscarriages of justice are shocking. But so is the negligence shown by politicians in using the police service for doctrinaire grandstanding.
Jeff Pope, the Four Lives producer mentioned above, is currently working on the dramatisation of another infamous case. Production has recently started in London on Suspect: The Shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes for Disney+. De Menezes was mistaken by Met police for a terrorist suspect and shot and killed in error at Stockwell tube station in London in 2005. De Menezes’ parents and other relatives are reported to be among the consultants for the series.
Following my last two posts about the new information I heard on the Hammersmith Nude Murders, I’ll be having coffee with a former Scotland Yard detective to discuss the case again next month. I worked with this officer on the BBC documentary Dark Son about the unsolved serial killer case from the 1960s. The officer was intrigued enough by the new information I reported to suggest we meet.
Having watched Under the Banner of Heaven on Disney+ (Star), with an excellent performance by Andrew Garfield as the conflicted Mormon detective, I decided to read Jon Krakauer’s book, which inspired it. The series, about the horrific murder of Latter-day Saint Brenda Lafferty and her baby by her brothers-in law, was criticised for the way it switched between the Mormon origin story of church founder Joseph Smith and events leading up to the killings in 1984. The book also flits between the history and the murder case. It is a bit garbled to follow at times, but still a well-researched book exploring the psychology of people who believe they have been told to kill by God. Chilling and dismaying.