£22,000 for man arrested after watching stop-and-search
Kiran Randhawa
14.10.09 A black youth worker today criticised the police for damaging race relations after he was handcuffed and detained for watching a stop-and-search.

Ken Hinds is set to receive an apology and £22,000 in compensation from the British Transport Police after being charged and spending four hours in a police cell after witnessing a black teenager being arrested.

The 50-year-old, who regularly liaises with police in his work for a charity tackling gang violence, will receive the payout under an agreement to be finalised this week.

Mr Hinds, from Edmonton, said: "I am disappointed and so angry at the way they treated me. It just shows that 30 years on, relations with the police and the black community have not improved. The black community treats the police with suspicion and incidents like this add fuel to that."

He brought a claim for false imprisonment and malicious prosecution in the High Court after two failed attempts to take his complaint to the Independent Police Complaints Commission.

Mr Hinds, who sits on the Metropolitan Police's Black Independent Advisory Committee and is chairman of the monitoring group for stop-and-search in Haringey, was arrested when he stopped to observe a group of police officers who were searching a black youth at Seven Sisters train station in May 2004.

He said: "There were seven or eight officers tugging at this teenager. It caught my attention because the youth looked scared and alarmed. I wanted to watch to make sure he had a witness in case he was hurt.

"But an officer spotted me and told me to f*** off. When I told him I knew my rights, he said to his colleague, 'I'm going to nick him'. They then put me in tight handcuffs which was very painful."

A charge of threatening and abusive behaviour was dropped after magistrates decided one of the Pcs was "not a credible witness". In settling, the BTP did not admit liability but agreed to apologise.

For pictura also see  http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/standard/article-23756340-pound-22000-for-man-arrested-after-watching-stop-and-search-police.do

ANALYSIS

This is some reassurance and possible incentive for more people to observe police actions but what will it do to change what police do? The offending officers will go on telling their seniors their side of the story and those seniors would rather take that as read so that their fellow gangmembers can go on fending off observers in this way with impunity, after all what do they care about £22,000 of public money?

And then what can police commissioners and politicians do about it even if they were so motivated? How many times are they going to say to chief policemen "roll heads or we'll have no confidence in you", officers all the way up the chain of command have their jobs safe under employment law.