The Daily Telegraph - Saturday
Dangerous people are roaming the streets, and the authorities are doing nothing
Is there a better poster boy for broken Britain than Nottingham killer Valdo Calocane? The Attorney General may ask for a review of the paranoid schizophrenic’s sentence after the families of his victims attacked the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), claiming he “got away with murder”. It came after he was handed an indefinite order to be detained in a high-security hospital after pleading guilty to manslaughter on the basis of diminished responsibility.
Calocane took the lives of 19-year-old university students Barnaby Webber and Grace O’Malley-Kumar, and then went on to kill 65-year-old caretaker Ian Coates, in a series of horrific attacks on June 13 last year. While debate rages over whether Calocane should have been tried for murder rather than pleading guilty to manslaughter – there is one indisputable fact in this case. And that is that the victims and their families “have been let down by multiple agency failings and ineffectiveness”.
Those were the words of Barnaby Webber’s mother, Emma, speaking outside Nottingham Crown Court on Thursday. Mrs Webber revealed that the police had repeatedly told the families that Calocane was a “sofa surfer with no real abode” when he had a Nottingham address, registered in his name, for six months prior to his eviction two days before the killings.
Relatives only received confirmation, last Friday, that Calocane was subject to an outstanding warrant, issued in September 2022, for such a “vicious” assault on a police officer that he was tasered. Yet Nottinghamshire Police failed to track him down to seek to detain him under the Mental Health
Act.
So who can blame her for saying that Nottinghamshire Police’s assistant chief constable Rob Griffin has “blood on [his] hands”? She added: “If you had just done your jobs properly there’s a very good chance my beautiful boy would be alive today.” She’s right, isn’t she?
Sadly, the police weren’t the only organisation that failed the families. Shockingly, the CPS didn’t even meet with them until November – six months after the killings. It “rushed, hastened and railroaded” the families into accepting “fait accompli” manslaughter – rather than murder – charges, the families said.
Although Mrs Webber said they do not dispute that Calocane is mentally unwell, they argue that “the premeditated planning, the collection of lethal weapons, hiding in the shadows and the brutality of the attacks are of an individual who knew exactly what he was doing.”
Despite Calocane’s entire defence rested on diminished responsibility, Mrs Webber said there was no mentalhealth assessment during his time in custody, and no treatment until September – three months after the killings. She asked why the CPS instructed Dr Nigel Blackwood, a professor of forensic psychiatry, in August, but he didn’t assess Calocane until three months later, last November. He told the court that the killer had been out of contact with certain mentalhealth specialists for almost 12 months before he launched his brutal spree.
Which brings us to NHS Mental Health Services, also found wanting in this case. During a number of psychotic episodes from 2020, Calocane was in regular contact with mental-health services, and was detained in hospital on a number of occasions, only then to be released. The truth is that Calocane should have either been sectioned or least under arrest at the time of the killings – but neither happened.
The debate over whether he was bad, mad or both is tragically irrelevant since the victims and their families were failed whichever way you look at it. If, as they believe, Calocane “knew entirely that it was wrong but he did it anyway”, he committed cold-blooded, premeditated murder. Then why on earth was he allowed to plead guilty to manslaughter, rather than being tried for murder before a jury of 12 men and women “good and true”?
Alternatively, if, as Dr Blackwood claimed in court, the assaults “would not have occurred in the absence of his psychosis”, then why on earth was Calocane allowed to roam around when the authorities should have known he was repeatedly failing to take his antipsychotic medication? That is the opposite of care in the community.
How many killings do there need to be by people with psychiatric disorders to make our politicians realise that the current mental-health provision for those with conditions like paranoid schizophrenia is not fit for purpose?
I’m all too familiar with what used to be called “insane asylums”, because my late grandmother was treated in one. While no one wants to return to the sort of treatment seen in
the post-1970s policy of closing down mental hospitals has undoubtedly put the public at greater risk. It has also caused more harm to people with severe mental-health problems by allowing them to pick and choose whether they take their medication – with seemingly little or no monitoring when they don’t.
Here’s the other rub. We now learn that Calocane could become eligible for release after three years under the terms of the order imposed by the judge, which will see him detained in a high-security hospital. Most people took “indefinite” to mean just that, but section 37 of the Mental Health Act 1983 entitles an offender to a review of their mental health every three years, where they could become eligible for release if doctors assess that they have recovered and are of sound mind.
Admittedly, Calocane is also subject to a section 41 order, which gives the Justice Secretary or a first tier tribunal the power to block his release on the grounds that he is assessed to still be a
Barnaby Webber’s mother, Emma, speaking outside Nottingham Crown Court on Thursday
risk to the public. However, the judge did not impose a section 45a order. This would have meant that, even if
Calocane was judged safe to release, he would have to serve the rest of his sentence in jail.
So there is no guarantee this maniac won’t be back among us come 2027.
The irony here is that a day rarely goes by without someone in a position of authority banging on about the importance of mental health. Yet the figures simply don’t support the hang-wringing rhetoric. In 2001, there were 51,864 psychiatric care beds in the UK. In 2022, there were 23,782.
The police have been largely left to deal with mental-health patients when things get out of hand. But as this case proves – they can get it very badly wrong. Following lobbying by Metropolitan Police commissioner Sir Mark Rowley, the “Right Care Right Person” scheme was launched last year to raise the threshold for officers responding to mental health-related incidents. Forces implementing the policy will now only attend if there is a risk to life, a danger to the public, or a crime is believed to be taking place.
All three were true in the case of Calocane and still no one stepped in to stop him. Forget right care, right person – absolutely no care was taken here, resulting in three innocent people dying simply for being in the wrong place, at the wrong time.
“racism and offensive language” and “violence and death”, just in case anyone hadn’t realised the Bard wrote his plays nearly 500 years ago.
Meanwhile – and I can’t quite believe I am writing this – a play about the late Queen Mother, has been given a trigger warning because… shock, horror! It is set in the 1970s. The Duke of York’s Theatre in the West End has felt the need to caution that the production about the royal’s relationship with her closest aide, William Tallon, aka “Backstairs Billy” “reflects some of the attitudes, language, and conventions” of 1979.
Who is asking for this? The answer is surely nobody. Has anyone seriously ever gone to see a Shakespeare play and then complained afterwards that they hadn’t expected it to be “quite so Tudor”? Or genuinely needed to be warned in advance about such a harmless tale as the flunkey who mixed the Queen Mother’s gin and tonics?
Do you know what I find triggering? Institutions so captured by wokery that they cannot see how much this patronising nonsense “offends” their customers.