The lawyer representing Chris Kaba’s family has criticised a Home Office review into armed policing claiming it will give officers “carte blanche to behave as they like”.
Daniel Machover says the probe ordered after scores of Metropolitan Police officers stood down from firearms duties when a colleague was charged with Mr Kaba’s murder looked like a “decisive step” in the wrong direction.
Mr Kaba, 24, died when he was shot through an Audi car windscreen in Streatham Hill on September 6, 2022.
The marksman, known only as NX121, will be publicly named on January 30 ahead of an Old Bailey trial potentially starting on September 9 next year.
Former Home Secretary Suella Braverman announced the review would examine existing legislation underpinning use of force and whether it provides sufficient protection for police acting in the line of duty, particularly firearms officers.
The Home Office said it would also consider whether the law currently offers “sufficient protections for police driving”.
But Mr Machover, head of civil litigation at Hickman & Rose, said: “This review appears to be a decisive step in the wrong direction.
“At this time of justified public concern about police accountability, what the public need is the reassurance that police officers will be held to account for all wrongdoing, particularly in their use of force.
“Instead, this review looks like an attempt by the Government to remove proper accountability for police officers who fall short of the standards we rightly expect of them.
“Raising the threshold required to trigger a misconduct investigation and making it harder to sack rogue officers or prosecute them would significantly weaken the UK’s police misconduct system and bring the criminal law as applied to police officers into disrepute.”
Mr Machover added following cases such as PC Benjamin Monk, jailed for unlawfully killing former footballer Dalian Atkinson, and Sarah Everard’s killer Wayne Couzens who worked in the same armed Met unit as serial rapist David Carrick, it “cannot be right to introduce reforms designed to reduce the number of investigations into dangerous police officers; and reduce the chances of them being taken off the streets”.
He said: “In particular, the proposed reforms will effectively give armed police officers a carte blanche to behave as they like.
“Instead of wasting time on unnecessary and unhelpful reforms that would damage public confidence we should focus on common ground to make existing systems more efficient and better resourced, so that cases are concluded and lessons learned much faster.”
The review will also consider whether legal tests on the use of force in self-defence should be “clarified or changed” in misconduct proceedings and inquests, while it will also review if the “criminal standard of proof for a finding of unlawful killing should be used for inquests and relevant inquiries”.
Whether the current system provides “sufficient rights” for members of the public is to be considered.
Other areas to be covered by the review include investigations and post-incident processes, as well as their timeliness and clarity of communication.
Met Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley welcomed the publication of the review’s terms of reference.
In a statement, Sir Mark said: “The breadth of this review captures the reality officers face when pursuing and catching criminals.
“A system that discourages our brave officers from chasing down criminals lets down victims. We must address imbalances in this area of law which is long overdue for reform and build a system which lets the police, police.”
