It was always entirely necessary and appropriate for Craig Guildford to resign as Chief Constable of West Midlands Police following the Maccabi Tel Aviv debacle. But this thing stopped being about football weeks ago – it became about his honesty, and integrity as well as the operational competence of his police service and it was found badly wanting, for reasons which should be very concerning but are little spoken about – that city needs to discuss race, religion, sectarianism and claims of social and political privilege which embroil the police.
It has needed to do so since at least 2007.
It was announced an hour ago Guildford has, at last, resigned – I realise the Police and Crime Commissioner Simon Foster is insisting he “retired” and the word resignation was not used, but the reality is Craig Guildford retired from West Midlands Police in November 2024, banked his lump sum and one pension payment before being re-employed (and pension paused). That p*ssed off a lot of officers, let me tell you – because he denied that privilege to plenty of others and made himself look inconsistent, to put it at its mildest.
This is not a mental health related matter, so you might wonder why I feel compelled to produce a post on it? – fair enough. We’ll get to that now –
The clues about Mr Guildford’s leadership were there to be seen before anybody knew one of Tel Aviv’s football team were called “Maccabi” and had something of a reputation. Those earlier clues to me were absolutely mental health related and there’s my “in” to all of this. But before I go there and despite acknowledging I never “warmed” to the guy so I am having to try hard to be balanced, he did some good things for the force. WMP could barely answer a telephone or investigate a crime when he arrived in 2022 and one of his first actions was to reduce discretion in certain important areas, to drive more arrests for things like knife crime and I would argue that was absolutely necessary.
It also has been said in recent media coverage the force was put in to “special measures” under his leadership, which is true. What they didn’t tell you, though, is it wasn’t due to Guildford. Special measures announced in 2023 under his tenure was due to performance and inspection data from 2022 under his predecessor. Guildford only began his job mid-December 2022 and he argued quite correctly, the force had already shown improvement in areas of performance HMIC were concerned about so they should delay special measures so it didn’t affect public confidence in an improving force under new leadership.
I thought that was fair but they didn’t but that police force was out of special measures again in record-breaking time, quite literally – it’s certainly true he did some good things.
But when somebody tells you who they are, believe them:
ROADSHOWS
Two months after Mr Guildford took the helm of one of the largest police forces in the country, he held a series of “roadshows” where people could hear him talk about his plans and ask questions – I attended one of them and threw him an easy question about aspects of his inheritance from his predecessor.
Was he aware, when taking on his new job, the force had no joint protocols with its statutory partners about how the Mental Health Act should operate, as is required by the Code of Practice to the Act; and that HM Coroners issued more than one PFD to the force about how the lack of such arrangements did and may again give rise to deaths?! Incidentally, the force still didn’t have those arrangements at the point I left it, five years later and almost two years after I asked Mr Guildford the question. He didn’t grip that problem and WMP have had more mental health PFD notices since then which arguably come down to that and a failure of leadership on the topic.
Obviously, the answer is either “Yes” or “No” – he either was or he was not aware of that inheritance and either way, a reaction to my question could just have been “right – thanks for raising it, we’re going to sort that out because it’s clearly not acceptable we expose our officers and the public to such risk.” His staff officer – who was in the room at the time – could have been told to get the MH lead to sort that out ASAP and report back on it: job done.
Instead he told me that what he was going to do was contact Humberside police and get all their policies, legal advice and training for Right Care, Right Person (RCRP) and do that in the West Midlands as well.
FIXING THE PROBLEM
Of course, RCRP is not a solution at all to that particular problem about joint protocols – there is very limited overlap between RCRP and the five protocol topics (on s136 handovers and on conveyance of patients detained under the MHA) but most of the issues requiring a protocol are entirely unaffected by RCRP. So I was left wondering whether he understood the question and / or whether he reached for an response which appears convincing as long as no-one understands the topic they’re asking about. In fairness to him, it’s not the only example of a police body reaching for the “RCRP reassurance” – that everything will just get better because of it – when being asked about things that are nothing whatsoever to do with it.
And this appears to have gone under the radar: the Home Affairs Select Committee was not the first parliamentary committee where Guildford showed he’s not in charge of the detail and where showed himself willing to provide inaccurate answers, arguably because it suited the purpose to exaggerate how often the police are using powers under the Mental Health Act 1983. On 19th September 2023, he appeared with others at the Health Affairs Select Committee, to talk about RCRP. In his answer to a question, he told the committee his force were using s136 MHA 2,000 times a year in Birmingham alone. If he says they’re using it almost twice as much as they are, the case for RCRP is improved, isn’t it?!
They weren’t – the force at that time weren’t even using that power 2,000 times a year across the force as a whole and Guildford’s explanation for the “over-use” was incoherent. (I’d actually argue WMP under-use s136, but there we go.) When I was involved in that work for WMP, Birmingham always used to account for half or just over half of the 136 demand force-wide and when he made the claim, the most up-to-date number we have is they were using the power 1,888 times a year force-wide (see link, above) – Birmingham was probably somewhere around 1,000 mark, assuming his reported 1,888 number was correctly counted (and we do know some forces stuffed up their data)!
BELIEVE THEM
In the final years of my service, the new Chief Constable he was happy to fire confident responses at me which simply didn’t answer the question and suggested he didn’t understand the topic at all – not the only Chief Constable to suffer that, to be fair. But as he spoke his answer I remember thinking “You haven’t grasped the question and you’re now making things up which don’t answer it”. He also showed he was happy to appear before a parliamentary committee without knowing his published 136 numbers and talk confidently about them (which I suspect he’d just accepted as fact from something a senior mental health professional might have told him).
I’ve followed this Maccabi Tel Aviv business very closely and it’s been intriguing, because all its aspects touch on various parts of my service. In my career, I spent a lot of hours and days policing football matches, including as a public order and bronze commander. I was posted in my service as an intelligence manager and when I later worked as a firearms commander, there was minute-by-minute working with intelligence officers to help make big decisions about risk when managing firearms incidents so all of this is touching on worlds I used to be in relatively recently.
Nothing we’ve learned in the recent report from Chief Inspector of Constabulary, Sir Andy Cooke QPM DL tells me anything I wouldn’t have expected about intelligence management, football planning or how it was presented and whilst the departure of Guildford is right because of the problems he caused himself in Parliament by misleading a committee at least twice, it leaves a number of questions for and about all those who put the Chief in the position in the first place but his resignation can’t be about the football decision – not least because he didn’t take or influence it.
It’s about his lack of attention to detail, his willingness to throw confident answers at people when they don’t actually answer the question and he doesn’t always understand it and then finding that you’ve misled people because you were too casual in your approach. My sense of his misleading is it probably was unintentional – but that hardly matters when the stakes are so high and you’re before parliament and on national television.
From the point he did that in two HASC meetings, he was toast.
If only we cared as much about mental health police contact deaths as we do about games of football, eh?!
When people show you who they are, believe them.
Awarded the President’s Medal, by
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, 2026
I am not a police officer.
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
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