A PIECE COPIED FROM PRIVATE EYE MAGAZINE
http://www.private-eye.co.uk Number
1224 28th Nov 2008
Mark Camm and the laughing policemen
POLICE officers threatened to beat animal lover Mark Camm's "mangy little dog" with a bat, in order to provoke and force him to speak, after he was arrested for being drunk and disorderly.
In fact Mr Camrn was far fron being drunk. He was suffering a brain haemorrhage from a ruptured aneurism, which rendered him unable to talk. And while officers made sick jokes about what they perceived to be 43-year-old Mr Camm's learning difficulties and pretended to lick his cell window, with one officer calling him "obnoxious", his life was slowly slipping away.
As one medical expert told his inquest, during the 25 long hours that police held Mr Camm in a cell at Wood Street, Wakefield, they actually treated his dog better. The terrier was given water; Mr Camm was not. And the resulting dehydration contributed to his fatal deterioration.
Until he was finally taken to hospital, he may have heard every ghastly word the officers uttered. As his condition deteriorated, his right side becoming weaker and his gait unsteady, one officer commented: "You have to pay for entertainment like this." Since his evidently unlawful detention in June 2004, some of those officers have been promoted.
The disturbing scenes were caught on CCTV and audio footage played to an inquest jury, which recorded a seven-page verdict damning not only the police and medical staff who examined him at the police station, but also those in the Accident & Emergency department of Pinderfields Hospital. He remained in A&E for a staggering 13 hours on a trolley before being moved to a medical ward and finally being diagnosed with a life-threatening brain bleed. He was transferred to Leeds General Infirmary, but by then it was too late. He died 11 days later.
Ruth Bundey, the solicitor acting for Mr Camm's two sisters, says his treatment was "deplorable and indefensible". According to Deborah Coles of Inquest, the organisation that campaigns for those who die in custody, it was "one of the most shameful cases of callous neglect we have seen".
Mr Camm was arrested, along with his dog, in an off-licence at midday on 17 June after he refused to leave. He was hardly able to speak and was unsteady on his feet. On his arrival at the police station, officers thought he was drunk and staging some kind of protest, refusing to speak. Even though a nurse noted that he did not smell of alcohol, no alarm was raised.
Although he was supposed to have been checked and roused every half-hour, officers did not bother, instead fabricating entries into the custody record. Of the 18 visits recorded to Mr Camm's cell during the night shift of 18 June, only five took place and not one was a proper check (His weren't the only falsified records - of 96 recorded checks on prisoners that night, 67 were not done at all.)
During Mr Camon's detention, he was seen by two police doctors. One took only 97 seconds to examine him and decided he had mental health problems and should be seen by a psychiatrist the following day. The second doctor, who failed to pick up on his right-sided partial paralysis and weakness, thought his condition might have been triggered by drugs as well as drink.
Concerns that Mr Canum was not "sobering up" as one would expect of a drunk were lost in "the banter". Another officer pointed out that Mr Camm could not be charged with being drunk and disorderly because he was far from disorderly. But they decided to detain him because he wasn't safe to be left on his own, rather than take him to a hospital.
When the 24-hour deadline for detention without charge approached, they took medical advice to take him to hospital for a blood test and found him curled in a ball on the floor of his cell, soaked in his own urine. Even then they bundled him into the cage at the back of a van, where he was left unobserved, instead of summoning an ambulance. No proper note was sent with Mr Camm, nor was a phone call made to alert the hospital to his recent history, and he effectively "got lost” in the system at Pinderfields. He didn't pass through the usual triage system; his reception card was lost. There were only baseline observations and although they showed an alarmingly high pulse rate, no further observation was done while he was on the trolley.
"The wholly inadequate assessment at A&E to diagnose a neurological condition also contributed to his death," the jury decided.
No one knows whether Mr Camm would have survived such a serious brain condition. But what is clear from the jury's findings is that not only was he denied the chance of survival, his last hours of consciousness were spent helpless in the face of cruel torment and neglect.
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