The British Police: getting away with murder since 1969
827 people have died during or following police contact since 2004. Families have struggled hard for justice, encountering multiple failures and police collusion from the IPCC. Why is police accountability failing in this most serious of issues?
● Christopher Alder, a trainee computer programmer and former British Army paratrooper who had served in the Falklands War and Northern Ireland, died face down, handcuffed, with his trousers around his ankles on the floor of a police station in Hull in April 1998. Alder, a 37-year-old black man, had been assaulted outside a night club and taken to a local hospital, where he was arrested by officers for an alleged breach of the peace following complaints about his behaviour from nursing staff.
● While fit enough to get into a police van by himself, CCTV footage shows that upon arrival at the police station, Alder was unconscious when dragged from the van and placed on the floor of the custody suite. Officers treated Alder like an animal, completely neglecting him while he lay dying on the floor. Officers calmly chatted among themselves, one of them suggesting he was faking illness. Eleven minutes later, when officers finally realised he had stopped breathing, attempts to resuscitate him came too late. It was later revealed that CCTV had captured the officers making monkey noises at the police station that night. Alder died on the scene.