One autumn afternoon, Richard Chapman a happily married man, went for a 30-minute meander. So how did he die in police custody?

One afternoon in October 2004, Richard Chapman, 45, who ran a family florist in Hitchin, Hertfordshire, set out for a 30-minute walk. He ended up unconscious in a cell in Stevenage police station and never regained consciousness.

“Neither the inquest nor the investigation by the police has given us any answers,” says Sue Chapman, his sister. According to the police, Richard was arrested on a bright autumn day by a burning haystack, worse the wear for drink, having resisted arrest.

“Their version is the easiest one for them to explain and it gets them off the hook,” she says. The family say that the official account is completely at odds with the man they loved and is deeply offensive to his memory. “No one can make any sense of it,” his sister adds.

The Chapman family are angry about their treatment at the hands of the police complaints process and, in particular, the perceived failure of the Independent Police Complaints Commission.

The IPCC was set up four years ago this month to replace a discredited Police Complaints Authority. “Investigation of police officers by their own or another police service is widely regarded as unjust and does not inspire public confidence,” Sir William Macpherson wrote in his inquiry into the killing of Stephen Lawrence.

The IPCC has been under fire since the killing of Jean Charles de Menezes at Stockwell Tube station in July 2005. Criticism intensified this year when more than 100 members of the Police Action Lawyers’ Group (PALG) withdrew their backing and two representative members, Tony Murphy and Raju Bhatt, resigned from its advisory board. Murphy, of the London law firm Bhatt Murphy, argues that proper investigation of complaints against the police has “long been held as essential to our democracy. The leadership is failing to fulfil its responsibilities. Urgent action is needed if the IPCC is not to become another obstacle on the road to police accountability.”

Nick Hardwick, chairman of the IPCC, denies that the group is facing a crisis of confidence. He insists that it is business as usual and the group continues to deal with PALG members “on a day-to-day basis without any problems. Sometimes we agree, sometimes we do not,” he says. But a new report by the Legal Action Group in Legal Action this month shows that the PALG’s concerns are widely endorsed by lawyers, campaigners and families.

Helen Shaw, of Inquest, the pressure group that campaigns to provide legal representation at inquests over deaths in custody, also on the IPCC advisory board, shares “frustrations in trying to get the IPCC to listen to concerns from bereaved families over the quality of investigations and the way that the IPCC has approached families. Our experience has been until very recently that the IPCC has paid lip service to what we’ve been saying,” she says.

The first test came with the Jean Charles de Menezes killing. The decision by the IPCC (announced last December 21) not to recommend disciplinary action against four senior officers was described by his cousin Vivian Figuierdo as a scandal.

What, in the family’s view, did the IPCC do wrong? Yasmin Khan, a spokeswoman for the family, starts with its “reluctance or inability to stand up” to Sir Ian Blair, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner. Khan also raises “the failure to correct misinformation” in the press that led to a leak by IPCC staff in August 2005 revealing that de Menezes did not have a bulky jacket or a bag and that he did not run. Khan says: “Had that leak not been made public, we would presumably not known until over two years after the shooting that Jean did nothing wrong . . . It seems that the IPCC is just as capable of carrying out a whitewash as the discredited PCA.”

What happened to Richard Chapman on that autumn day in 2004 is unclear other than he lost consciousness, suffered cardiac arrest in the cell and was pronounced dead in hospital three days later. A police investigation reported in September 2005, deciding not to refer the case to the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS). “We were shocked. Richard had only gone out for a walk and he ended up dead in police custody,” says Sue. “He’d never been in trouble, was happily married with three children and ran a successful business. We couldn’t understand what had happened.”

The family instructed Stefano Ruis, at Fisher Meredith, the South London law firm, who claims to have encountered resistance from the IPCC from the start. “Rather than simply referring the matter to the CPS in accordance with its own protocol, I was told that it would take counsel’s advice,” he says, adding that a reference was “inevitably” made but only after a year’s delay. The case was with the CPS for a year before it decided not to prosecute.

There was an inquest last October that recorded a narrative verdict that death was caused by pneumonia after a heart attack. One police officer received “words of advice” as a result of the IPCC investigation; otherwise no action was taken. “How such a decision is supposed to give us confidence in the IPCC’s role in ensuring accountability and its claimed independence completely escapes me,” Ruis says.

The family believes that there was a serious and tragic breakdown in the care at the police station for a man otherwise fit, healthy and content — with no criminal record, no history of drink, drug or mental health problems — to end up dead.

The IPCC says not. Chapman drank a maximum four pints (the family say three), nowhere near enough to render a man of his size drunk. “To find that if an officer responsible for ensuring the welfare of those in his custody completely failed to carry out a risk assessment, failed to contact a doctor with sufficient urgency and failed to carry out constant observation — to simply decide that the case is only worthy of ‘words of advice’ where an innocent man lost his life is utterly inadequate,” Ruis says. “It amounts to a fundamental misunderstanding of the role of the IPCC.”

The author is director of communications and campaigns at the Legal Action Group

TIMESONLINE source