Early in the aftermath of the Nottingham attacks in June 2023, we learned VC was ‘wanted on warrant’ after failing to appear at a Magistrate’s Court in response to a summons. He had been accused of assaulting a police officer in September 2021 when a warrant under s135(1) of the Mental Health Act 1983 was executed at his home address and he was summonsed to attend court in September 2022 to answer that charge.
The inquiry will hear today from Mr and Mrs Webber – Barney’s parents who have rightly made known their views about comments by Nottinghamshire Police about the warrant which was issued. We heard last week from (then) Assistant Chief Constable Rob Griffin of Nottinghamshire Police who personally reviewed the whole business of the outstanding warrant –
“In September 2021, we were requested to support a Section 135 warrant to section the suspect under the Mental Health Act.
“We transported the suspect to Highbury Hospital and during this encounter he assaulted one of our police officers. In August 2022, he was reported for summons and was due to attend court on 22 September 2022 for the assault on our officer. He failed to appear on that occasion and a warrant for his arrest was issued in September 2022. The defendant was never arrested for that warrant which was still outstanding at the point of his arrest in June 2023.
“I have personally reviewed this matter and we should have done more to arrest him. However, because of the circumstance prevailing, at the time of the alleged assault, in my opinion it is highly unlikely that he would have received a custodial sentence. Of course, an arrest might have triggered a route back into mental health services, but as we have seen from his previous encounters with those services, it seems unlikely that he would have engaged in this process.”
PUBLIC INQUIRY
On 20th March 2026, the (now former) Chief Constable of Nottinghamshire Police, Kay Meynell, gave evidence and under questioning from counsel to the inquiry and shared the same view as Mr Griffin. Execution of the warrant would have made little difference. However, when questioned by counsel for the bereaved, Tim Moloney KC asked –
“So to be clear are you, as the former chief constable of Nottinghamshire Police, saying to the chair that it would have made no difference?”
“I couldn’t be sure what difference it would have made.”
“Precisely.”
There is a near-constant undercurrent of reputation management and damage limitation in this whole affair, rather than the candour called for in particular, by families of the bereaved. It’s been rampant from the immediate aftermath of these terrible events and is still there to be seen at the inquiry, now been taking evidence for four weeks so far. We are yet to start hearing from mental health and other services, the initial weeks being taken up with police and police-related evidence.
FIRST IMPRESSIONS
There are things leaping very obviously at me, from the evidence I’ve managed to see so far.
- Far too many witnesses don’t know the law – we can’t necessarily blame frontline staff for that short-coming because the evidence shows they’ve not really been trained.
- This reality is something I already knew – Chief Constables promised in 2014 to deliver on the “Crisis Care Concordat” training I led on producing whilst at the College of Policing and they simply didn’t deliver it.
- They then ignored a recommendation from HMIC in 2018 to correct that fact.
- Within a year of failing to correct it, Nottinghamshire Police met VC for the first time – its almost as if a lack of training and how incidents are handled might be linked and it almost explains why the Government decided to publish a concordat and insist on improved national guidance and training!
- I’ve spent most of these first weeks hearing evidence and cynically thinking “If only someone had said … if only there had been training on this point”.
- There is an obsession with policy and process – instead of actually policing the incidents according to the law (a sworn duty) we’re seeing received wisdom, myth and folklore amongst the police and between the agencies.
- Again, this links to a lack of training, but it also links to a lack of leadership on mental health.
- If you look back over the last 10-15yrs, the leadership of policing has been fascinated and busy with shiny ideas with names which they seem to think will come in and fix problems for them, without the need for the kind of thought and professional curiosity we see in most other domains of policing, including public order and firearms (my other two specialist areas during my service.)
- Street triage – SIM – Liaison and Diversion; and most recently Right Care, Right Person – all of them unevaluated ideas which have brought problems which I would argue were both predictable and predicted.
- It should, quite frankly, be nose-bleedingly obvious why all of these programmes are problematic. As Professor John Seddon once said, “Don’t give it a name – because then the managers will want it to come in a box!”
- Those problems are the target of my PhD research on mental health related police contact deaths, and yes: the deaths of Barney, Grace and Ian are on my PhD spreadsheet as contact deaths because of the outstanding warrant which could and should have been actioned.
SPECULATION
It’s tempting when looking backwards at something with the benefit of hindsight to guess about whether the “missed opportunity” would have changed the outcome. It’s a fool’s game for a few reasons but the best of them is you just don’t know what the impact would have been because there is no way you can know.
You’re guessing.
Even if it really were knowable that arresting VC under the terms of the warrant at some point between September 2022 and June 2023 would have made no difference at all to the outcome, that doesn’t mean it’s OK to leave court warrants unactioned in an unmonitored email account. There was also a victim of that crime who was entitled to believe the man accused of attacking him for doing his job. It’s still wrong that a force has a system which no-one is overseeing and it points towards very senior leaders not satisfying themselves of the systems and processes they’re governing. But if we think about the language used by HM Coroners in inquest about the potential impact of a different or better response by the police or others, we often see them say things like, “It cannot be known that a faster response would have changed the outcome.”
But in terms of the logic of a statement, a different way to say EXACTLY the same thing is “A faster response might have changed the outcome.” This business isn’t really about probabilities but possibilities – that’s literally how certain aspects of our law work. Article 2 duties to protect life are engaged, for example, where the risk to someone’s is a 5-10% risk of death. But the biggest reason of all for not getting involved in the guessing game about whether it would have changed things is you just can’t know and you only make things worse by guessing.
It’s an insult to the families who lost loved ones and to the victims who will life the rest of their lives with the impact on their injuries and trauma.
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
Mental Health Cop 