For those of you who have already had enough tidings of comfort and joy this season, please welcome an extended and particularly bleak episode of 24 Hours in Police Custody – Block Under Siege. Settle in for a resoundingly depressing 90 minutes with the Bedfordshire police, two hostage takers, a plethora of weapons – including that seasonal staple, an air rifle modified to give it lethal force – and a battery of mental health issues to aggravate the situation.
The 14-hour armed standoff on the eighth floor of a Bedford tower block began after 37-year-old Nathan Turner and his 45-year-old friend Paul Burton took exception to how long a delivery driver had kept them waiting for their food order, which they also found to be incorrect when it arrived. “He stole my salad and the heat from my takeaway,” said Turner during a livestream of his activities to Facebook. So they trapped him in the block’s lift for two hours and started threatening neighbours with a weapon. “It was not really proportionate,” says Supt Steve Ashdown, who oversaw what was about to become a daylong siege as Turner and Burton barricaded themselves inside the former’s flat. Which is one very police officer-y way of putting it.
When the report from a neighbour about the possibility of two armed men holed up in the flat comes in, the machinery kicks into gear. The floors above and beneath are evacuated. “Can’t you just kick the door in and sort it out?” asks a bystander. Unfortunately not, because one of the men has made it very clear that “I will kill you coppers in a heartbeat” if any of them tries to do so. Armed officers position themselves within and without the block. Others are directed to surround the ground floor. A drone is sent up to get footage of the flat’s balcony, where Turner and occasionally Burton appear. A negotiator gets to work, talking to Turner through the door and then on his phone about his difficulties. They include the recent end of a relationship, losing contact with his daughter, and the apparent precipitation of a mental health crisis. He has been diagnosed, he says, with bipolar disorder.
Emotions and risk levels rise and fall. Then the rifle is fired from the balcony and hits the windscreen of the car officer PC Jack Davis is sitting in. The glass holds and protects him from what could have been a fatal shot. You wouldn’t know it from PC Davis. “I’ve been shot at,” he says twice into his radio, very clearly, very calmly. They reconfigure the officers and the snipers and carry on talking to Turner.
While the police on-site deal with the unfolding situation, others behind the scenes interview the delivery driver about his ordeal and gather information about the two men, their past arrests and an earlier call-out by a self-confessed paranoid Turner who was convinced people were trying to burgle his home. The police review the officers’ bodycam footage and are pleased – and, though it is never said, doubtless immensely relieved – to find that they are doing everything by the book with this clearly unstable and unhappy man, including making referrals to mental health services. “He’s not sectionable here,” the reviewing officer says with a sigh.
As the siege resolves and Turner and Burton are taken into custody, the final part of the programme concerns itself as much with the question of mental health and the resources – or lack thereof – for helping people with chronic or acute problems as it does with the painstaking gathering of evidence, construction of timelines and interviewing of the suspects. When the police scroll through Turner’s phone, they are struck by how much healthier and happier he looked even a month ago. In a previous call to the police, he told them “I’m not doing very well” while crying. “There’s no one can help me.” An appointment with support services has been cancelled for lack of staff. “That’s how we’ve ended in this state,” says DC Jessica Benham from CID. “The more other services struggle, the more we struggle and the more people are put in danger,” says Ashdown.
24 Hours walks a fine and fair line between acknowledging the increased vulnerability of people without access to the help they need and their enduring responsibility for their own actions. Bad mental health, even crisis, is not an automatic defence to awful actions. The terrified delivery driver and PC Davis have been harmed by the men’s decision and their actions. Other people in the tower block have been long affected by their volatile neighbours’ behaviour.
In the coda that customarily tells us who was charged and sentenced with what, we are also told that it is estimated that a third of police time is spent dealing with mental health-related incidents. Bleak indeed.
24 Hours in Police Custody is on Channel 4. The episode above was shown on 3 December 2023.
