THE public inquiry into the death of Sheku Bayoh – the Scots-Sierra Leonean man who died in Kirkcaldy aged 31 in May 2015 after having been restrained by police officers – reconvened in Edinburgh on Tuesday following a five-month recess.
As it was with the inquiry in May, the re-opening of the hearings was an emotional affair.
Before the day’s business, supporters of Mr Bayoh’s family – including members of various trade unions and activists from the campaign group Stand Up to Racism – congregated outside the inquiry venue, Capital House on Festival Square.
Notably, Roz Foyer, general secretary of the Scottish Trades Union Congress (which had laid on a coach for people wishing to travel through to the lobby from Glasgow) was also in attendance.
Chants of “from Minnesota to Kirkcaldy, Black Lives Matter” in a reference to George Floyd. As in the past, the protesters took the knee.
The Bayoh family’s lawyer, Aamer Anwar, addressed the crowd, telling them that, contrary to police statements implying that Sheku was a large man of immense strength, he was, in fact, 5ft 10ins tall, and weighed 12st 1lbs (less than 80 kilos), and that the combined weight of the six officers engaged in his restraint was 636kg. As the lawyer outlined these statistics, Adama Jalloh, one of Sheku’s sisters, was overcome and broke down in tears.
One could only imagine what Ms Jalloh and her siblings were going through. Not only were they facing the resumption of an inquiry that will consider in detail the circumstances of their loved one’s death, the family had, in recent days and weeks, been subjected to vile, racist abuse online.
Indeed, so serious has that abuse been that inquiry chair Lord Bracadale, made a pre-hearing not only condemning the abuse but suggesting that some of the comments “may amount to a hate crime”. One can only hope that the senior police officers sitting in the public gallery took note and have ordered investigations to attempt to identify the perpetrators.
Understandably, it was the statement and the lobby of the inquiry by supporters of the family that made the headlines. But what of the day’s hearing itself?
The first session was given over to evidence from Inspector James Young, a senior manager at Police Scotland and a former national co-ordinator for operational safety training (OST) for the force. Under questioning from the senior counsel to the inquiry, Angela Grahame KC, Young painted a picture of safety training within Police Scotland that was woefully inadequate prior to his ushering in a new system in 2016.
When he undertook a review of Police Scotland’s training materials in December 2014, Young said he found “disparities” between different parts of the country.
This was despite the creation of the single force in 2013.
Young told the inquiry that, prior to his 2016 overhaul (including a new training manual and 28 recommended changes to safety procedures) there was insufficient emphasis on “soft” policing techniques. For example, he said, the primary emphasis was on the physical skills required to restrain a subject, rather than on de-escalation techniques, including “standing off”, whereby officers stay at a short distance from a subject rather than employing physical force.
Prior to 2016, Young said, emphasis was placed on “distraction techniques”, which, students at the police training centre at Tulliallan were taught, consisted primarily of a “strike” to the body to distract a “resistant subject”.
The restraint of Mr Bayoh involved him being handcuffed, put in leg and ankle restraints, being sprayed with CS gas and PAVA spray and receiving at least two baton strikes to the head.
Young’s emphasis made a strong and repeated distinction between operational safety training before 2016 and since then. He repeatedly used the term “back then” to refer to the period before the changes he introduced.
You don’t have to be Hercule Poirot to notice that the “back then” that Young spoke of includes the year in which Mr Bayoh died. Nor do you have to be a great detective to note the implication that, if anything did go wrong in the police’s use of force against Mr Bayoh, such an event wouldn’t happen now.
Yet while these comments imply his death happened during a totally different era in Scottish policing, it was, in fact, only seven years ago.
Narratives such as this – in which the authority concerned (be it a police force, the management of a health trust or a national government) claims that current methods are vastly superior to the past practice that is under scrutiny – are commonplace at public inquiries.
However, the purpose of the inquiry is not to establish whether or not Police Scotland has changed its practices with regard to safety training since 2015.
Rather, it is to establish the facts of Sheku’s death and whether or not race played any part in the actions of officers both during the incident that preceded his death and subsequent to it.
