Three years ago, Nottingham University students Grace O’Malley-Kumar and Barnaby Webber, along with caretaker Ian Coates, were murdered by Valdo Calocane in a psychotic rampage. These were preventable deaths. Calocane should have been detained long before he went on his killing spree. The fact that he wasn’t is the consequence of a decade of progressive ideology in the NHS and police, who turned a blind eye to Calocane’s psychosis in part because he was a black man.
By 2023, there could have been no doubt about his violent tendencies. In 2020, he was arrested after he attempted to force entry into his neighbour’s flat, believing (falsely) that his mother was being raped inside. Just 11 minutes after he was released on the same day, he attempted to force a woman’s door. To escape him, she leapt out of the window, breaking her spine.
There has been an effort to reduce the number of non-white people detained under the Mental Health Act
Calocane was never interviewed by the police, who were utterly incurious in their interactions with him. Due to his mental health issues, they chose not to pursue prosecution. Two months later he was given a formal diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia and over the next two years was sectioned four times under the Mental Health Act. He allegedly assaulted his flatmate and a police officer, yet he was never properly committed to a psychiatric hospital.
Calocane’s care coordinator told police that prosecution for his crimes could be ‘triggering for him’ because he feels ‘a lot of shame and embarrassment’. Doctors chose not to give him injections of antipsychotics because he disliked needles. But we know that those in charge of Calocane’s treatment were under no illusions about him. A risk assessment for his care team advised staff not to visit him at home due to his ‘history of violence and aggression’. His consultant psychiatrists even warned that he was likely to ‘end up killing someone’. Still no detention was ordered.
The facts surrounding Calocane’s case are not unusual. The majority of our most violent criminals are known to the police or authorities before they commit their worst crimes. Ten per cent of offenders are responsible for 50 per cent of all sentences. Recent mental health patients represent 11 per cent of people convicted of homicides.
Abdul Khan’s case is remarkably similar to Calocane’s. In 2023, Khan, in the grip of psychotic hallucinations, killed his neighbour with a sword, stabbing him 39 times. This was just months after he had been sectioned and released following another unprovoked attack. There are other examples too. Last year, Adejuwon Oyekan stabbed a man 44 times during a psychotic episode triggered by drug use, for which he had previous convictions. His sister phoned the police before the attack to warn that he had ‘lost his mind’, but to no avail. Also last year, a British Army officer was ‘viciously’ stabbed by Anthony Esan, who was being treated for psychosis and had been discharged from Medway Early Intervention Services just one month before the attack.
When the same violent person passes through custody over and over again without being detained properly, it is not always because of laziness or incompetence from a few rogue mental health professionals, and nor is it just because the services are on their knees. Sometimes ideology can play a part. For years there has been a concerted effort from progressive activists to reduce the number of non-white people detained under the Mental Health Act, out of concern that there were disparities in detention between different ethnic minority groups. Clinicians often second-guess themselves when they are considering whether to detain an ethnic minority patient. Rachel Langdale KC, counsel to the inquiry into the Nottingham killings, said that the professionals who decided to release Calocane did so in part because they were concerned that there was an ‘over-representation of young black males in detention’.
If the situation wasn’t already dire, Keir Starmer has made it worse. Labour’s 2024 manifesto promised a new version of the Mental Health Act because the old legislation ‘discriminates against black people, who are much more likely to be detained than others’. So the Care Quality Commission now emphasises the monitoring of ‘systemic inequalities relating to people’s ethnicity’ when looking at who receives community treatment orders. The new act also promises to ‘give patients greater choice’ but, unsurprisingly, when violent schizophrenic patients are offered choice, often they don’t choose to go into an institution or take medication. Instead, sometimes what ensues is they terrorise the public until the worst happens.
As for the supposed ‘systemic inequalities’, the uncomfortable truth, ignored by mental health professionals and politicians, is that in the UK, black Caribbean men are much more likely to develop schizophrenia than white British – nine times more, according to some studies. There are theories as to why that might be. It may be genetic predisposition (the greatest risk factor for the development of schizophrenia is having an affected family member). It may be a product of selective migration (some researchers think that people more vulnerable to schizophrenia may be more likely to migrate). Or it may be cannabis use (which is higher among the black Caribbean population).
Sometimes progressive policy looks like just a few irritating civil servants brandishing rainbow lanyards or annoying workplace training on ‘diversity and inclusion’. But it seems clear that the push for equal outcomes under the Mental Health Act will lead to an increase in the number of dangerous people on our streets. This brand of politics is not benign. An obsession with unconscious bias and racism within the criminal justice system leads to people being killed.
Think of the security guard who had a ‘bad feeling’ about the Manchester Arena suicide bomber but chose not to act for fear of being called racist. Or the coalition government’s decision to reduce the use of stop and search, which led to a provable increase in the volume of knife crime offences and an estimated 30 murders a year that could otherwise have been prevented. It is not racist to remove dangerous people from society.
Comments