Dalian Atkinson was a gifted Premier League footballer in his youth. But by the summer afternoon that he died, he was a vulnerable man in the middle of a breakdown, standing outside his father’s house in Telford, shouting about being the Messiah. Two police officers summoned by neighbours were “terrified”, a court heard. Atkinson was Tasered for far longer than guidelines allow, and when he finally hit the ground, PC Benjamin Monk kicked him hard enough in the head to leave bootlace imprints. It later turned out Monk, who was convicted of manslaughter in 2021, hadn’t disclosed criminal cautions for theft and drunkenness before joining the force.
A black sporting hero; a white officer with a history of dishonesty; a degree of violence that turns the stomach. Out of a dozen cases in 34 years involving police officers facing murder or manslaughter charges, Atkinson’s is still the only one to meet the bar juries seemingly set for convicting in morally troubling cases that often elicit little public sympathy. Jurors seem particularly willing to give officers the benefit of the doubt over split-second judgment calls few of us might want to make, with no on-duty officer in history convicted of shooting a suspect dead. This week a jury took only three hours to clear Met firearms officer Martyn Blake of murder over the shooting of Chris Kaba, an unarmed black man driving a car linked to a firearms incident the night before, who had tried to ram his way free from a police stop. (The jury wasn’t told that Kaba was a gang member also captured on CCTV shooting a man in a crowded nightclub the week before, because Blake didn’t know that either when he fired).
