Nottinghamshire police was ordered to review its management of offenders a year before a wanted man with paranoid schizophrenia stabbed three people to death.
A report by the official policing inspectorate in April 2022 said the force should “immediately review” their approach to managing low-risk offenders to ensure risk was “effectively monitored and managed”.
The report said the force must make sure that “dynamic risk factors” – which include mental ill health – were fully assessed to ensure the public was protected from harm. It also warned the force to make sure their intelligence gathering was “comprehensive and not reliant on information held on police systems alone”.
The recommendations are understood to have been made after an inspection focused on sex offenders but included broader suggestions about the handling of cases. The force overall “requires improvement”, according to the report’s rating.
Just over a year after the report, Valdo Calocane stabbed students Barnaby Webber and Grace O’Malley-Kumar, both 19, and 65-year-old school caretaker Ian Coates to death and attempted to kill three others in Nottingham city centre.
Last week, prosecutors accepted Calocane’s plea of guilty to three counts of manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility due to paranoid schizophrenia and three counts of attempted murder. He was sentenced to a hospital order and will most likely remain in a high-security facility for the rest of his life.
It has since emerged Calocane, 32, had a history of violent outbursts, was detained four times under mental health laws and was wanted by police at the time of the June 2023 attacks. Nottinghamshire police have admitted they did not do enough to arrest Calocane. Rob Griffin, assistant chief constable, said: “I have personally reviewed this matter and we should have done more to arrest him.”
The victims’ families accused police of having “blood on your hands”. Outside the court, Barnaby Webber’s mother, Emma Webber, said: “If you had just done your job properly, there’s a very good chance my beautiful boy would be alive today.”
The previous inspection report will raise questions for Nottinghamshire police over whether they properly heeded warnings to ensure their management of offenders and suspects was robust. The force said the failings in the 2022 report related to their monitoring of “Mappa [multi-agency public protection arrangements]-categorised” people (violent and sexual offenders subject to public protection arrangements), with a particular focus on sexual offenders, which Calocane was not.
They denied the findings were relevant to their overall monitoring of suspects and offenders and said they had “fully addressed” the problems at the time. But questions around the force’s broader management of people who could pose a public risk are likely to be central to any examination of whether there were missed opportunities to prevent Calocane’s killing spree.
At the time of the attacks, Calocane had not been convicted of any crime, so was not formally an “offender”, but had been arrested multiple times and had long been on the force’s radar.
Previous incidents included arrests for criminal damage and an alleged assault on his flatmate.
In September 2021, he was arrested for assaulting a police officer. When he did not attend court, an arrest warrant was issued in September 2022, which was outstanding at the time of the killings. He is alleged to have assaulted two colleagues at a warehouse a month before the stabbings.
Caroline Henry, the Conservative police and crime commissioner for Nottinghamshire, said she was now seeking reassurances from senior officers “over the situation with outstanding warrants … to ensure wanted individuals appear before the courts as quickly as possible”.
Other police forces have also been warned over their management of offenders and suspects.
Last month, West Midlands Police was rated inadequate at managing offenders and suspects. The policing inspectorate said the force understood the threat posed by outstanding suspects but “wasn’t always taking effective action”, adding that some suspects wanted for serious offences had “gone on to commit more offences”.
An inspection of Thames Valley Police in December also identified failings.
Former HM inspector of constabulary Zoë Billingham said all police forces should now review their outstanding arrest warrants. Billingham, who oversaw inspections of forces in England and Wales for 12 years, until 2021, said it had been a “longstanding concern” that many were failing to arrest dangerous suspects because they were overstretched.
She said officers were routinely diverted to urgent calls while efforts to apprehend wanted people slipped to “the bottom of the priority list”.
She added: “It shouldn’t, because it’s inherently risky and inherently presenting a risk to the public if you know the suspect and know they’re dangerous enough to have an arrest warrant, but you don’t respond.
“What that means for the general public is there are dangerous people known to the police out on our streets. All police forces now need to look at the basics. This isn’t about getting the risk right. It’s the basic fact that there is already an arrest warrant and that the person needs to be brought in.”
The Nottingham stabbings also raise questions for NHS mental health services. Calocane was repeatedly detained under mental health laws before being discharged, even though there were persistent concerns he was evading contact with professionals and not taking his medication.
A court heard he been experiencing psychotic delusions in which he believed agencies such as MI5 were controlling his thoughts and actions.
Nottinghamshire Healthcare NHS foundation trust said it had “robustly” reviewed its interactions with the killer. It said that when people were not engaging with its services and did not meet the criteria to be detained under mental health laws, they were discharged to the care of their GP. NHS England is planning a major investigation into the case.
The families of the victims are calling for a public inquiry. The call has been backed by Labour leader Keir Starmer. Downing Street said it intended to let the relevant agencies review the case first.
