Tonight – Monday 12th August – BBC Panorama will be airing a special episode on the 2023 tragedies in Nottingham, involving Valdo Calocane who was sentenced earlier this year to a restricted hospital order, from which he may never be released. There are a number of ongoing inquiries and reviews subsequent to the disasters which unfolded last year, including a review in to the mental health care received by Mr Calocane from Nottinghamshire Healthcare Trust.
The timing of the broadcast is significant in that it comes the day before the publication of one review in to his mental health care, ordered by a Secretary of State during the last government. We will learn the detail of that tomorrow, but some of it has been trailed by the BBC, after documents which have been supplied to Mr Calocane’s family were shared by them with the Panorama.
We now know the specifics of some of Mr Calocane’s earlier offending were more serious than when first summarised by the media who covered his sentencing during the criminal process and this is worth thinking about.
PREVIOUS OFFENDING
I covered the Nottingham matters in some detail – not only was it concerning and interesting from the point of view of a blogger given the topics I cover, but this tragedy unfolded as my own son was busy finishing his A-Levels with the hopes and dreams of getting in to the University of Nottingham and he’s currently enjoying the summer break between his first and second years, something which I can’t stop thinking were denied to Grace and to Barnaby. So this one hit home a little more than most, to be quite honest with you.
When the criminal sentencing took place over a three day period, there was considerable coverage of the judge’s published sentence remarks which we can all still read. It stated, for example, Mr Calocane was first arrested in May 2020 for causing damage to the rooms of his flatmates at university. What I didn’t see mentioned – bearing in mind I did a post detailing what was being made known about his contact history, and can’t find reference to it having looked again whilst writing this post – was he attacked one of the doors and damaged it whereupon an occupant of the room was so concerned about what he’d do if he got in they jumped from the window and suffered serious injury. The two arrests were characterised as criminal damage offences but it is worth bearing in mind that damagin a door in order to enter the building or a part of a builgin with the intention of causing GBH is a more serious offence of attempted burglary – and it’s more concerning if you start to think about risk. Now we know someone inside was so concerned about what would happen they decided to risk serious injury by jumping from a window which I’ll assume was not on the ground floor, given the outcome.
Of course, none of this necessarily means anything different should have happened after that arrest but something I always found interesting and which is, as yet, unexplained by reviews and inquiries so I’m keeping an eye out for it: why the police chose not to prosecute Mr Calocane for this first arrest of criminal damage? We know he was assessed under the Mental Health Act in police custody and that he was not ‘sectioned’ on that occasion, so why was he not prosecuted? – normally, if someone does such a thin and is not ‘sectionable’, they’re given a criminal justice outcome so it will be interesting to learn why he didn’t receive one.
And there could be answers to this: it could have been because vital witnesses refused to give statements of evidence to enable prosecution and there could be other factors, but it remained a curious point for me and regardless of the answer, we know that within a short period of being returned to the flat, he was arrested again for similar behaviours and he was assessed again under the Mental Health Act 1983 and then ‘sectioned’. It’s perfectly fair comment to wonder how someone can go from ‘not sectionable’ to ‘sectionable’ within a couple of hours – that’s not normally how psychosis and mental health works, people don’t usually become ill in such a short period of time.
MENTAL HEALTH CARE
The Care Quality Commission report about healthcare will be fully published tomorrow and I will do a separate post about that. What we know from the papers shared with Panorama are that he was detained in hospital under section 2 MHA on the first admission and detained for a few weeks; he was detained under section 3 MHA on this second admission and detained for longer because the second admission followed a warrant being executed at his home address wherein he is alleged to have assaulted a police officer by puonching them three times, something for which he was subsequently prosecuted. When admitted to hospital he was first held in seclusion (isolation) before spending time on a psychiatric intensive care unit. All of this points towards a patient exhibiting disturbed, aggressive behaviours whilst seriously ill.
After he was discharged back to his community mental health team (CMHT), we know he disengaged from contact with them, something made known in his criminal sentencing. Having done so, he was not followed up by community mental health services but further discharged back to his GP. This is a debate we’ve seen before: should someone who declines to engage with a CMHT be discharged because we are all entitled to take our own healthcare decisions or should people be followed up in case the disengagement is a sign of deterioration and risk?
The answer should be obvious and it concerned me to read after sentencing that Nottinghamshire Healthcare released a statement saying patients with capacity to make decisions are free disengage from care, which is legally correct, of course. But how do you know this patient on this occasions did have capacity to make that decision if you haven’t seen him in weeks and where his previous admissions were to psychiatric intensive care unit where a doctor wrote down something very rare in medical records “Perhaps Valdo will end up killing someone”.
A WAY TO GO
There is still so much to know about this and given it touches upon many agencies, the families’ call for a public inquiry looks more reasonable all the time. The questions for the mental health trust are not entirely divorced from the issues around arrest and non-prosecution for offences. Prosecution decision are not unconnected to how the Mental Health Act is applied by professionals and used as a proxy by the police for the (legally irrelevant) question of ‘capacity’ for prosecution.
Then we have the questions about the investigation. The parents of Grace O’Malley-Kumar are both doctors and her father spent time working as a force medical examiner (in police custody) for the Metropolitan Police. This would involved considerable experience of assessing people arrested by officers for criminal offences, within the first few hours in the police station. He stated after criminal sentencing and during a television interviews in the weeks which followed that there was no “contemporaneous” assessment of mental health after Mr Calocane was arrested.
I struggled with this one: as the contact timeline makes clear, every contact Nottinghamshire Police had prior to his arrest for the 2023 tragedies, involved the Mental Health Act 1983. He was either arrested and assessed MHA or there was police contact to support NHS services with their activities with a warrant under the MHA or it involved police contact without arrest that led to assessment and admission under the MHA. And then there was a triple homicide with three further attempts to kill and apparently, no assessment under the MHA.
Panorama is on BBC1 at 8pm, 12th August 2024 – now available on iPlayer.
NB: this is the latest in post about the terrible events in Nottingham, June 2023. You can find all the others collated on a specific Nottingham resources page along with other materials, inc reports and legal documents.
Winner of the President’s Medal, the Royal College of Psychiatrists.
Winner of the Mind Digital Media Award
All opinions expressed are my own – they do not represent the views of any organisation. (c) Michael Brown, 2024
I try to keep this blog up to date, but inevitably over time, amendments to the law as well as court rulings and other findings from inquests and complaints processes mean it is difficult to ensure all the articles and pages remain current. Please ensure you check all legal issues in particular and take appropriate professional advice where necessary.
Government legislation website – www.legislation.gov.uk
Mental Health Cop 