Law and order: complex issues

By Richard North - January 27, 2024

“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?”, asks Camilla Tominey in the Telegraph.

Tominey’s question comes at a time when the Mail is reporting a year-on-year increase in knife crime, reversing a previous downward trend. Some 48,716 offences were recorded in the 12 months to September 2023, up 5 percent from 46,367 in the previous 12 months, although this national figure conceals a 22 percent rise in London.

By contrast, knife-enabled homicides – which combines murder and manslaughter – is effectively static, standing at 240 in the 12 months to September 2023, broadly unchanged on the 241 recorded in the previous year. However, numbers are never exactly comparable because constantly improving medical techniques are reducing the impact of attacks.

Despite this toll of human life and misery, the Guardian somewhat disingenuously asks, “Why is knife crime back in the news”, asserting that “tackling knife crime has become an urgent political debate after Valdo Calocane admitted to the manslaughter of three people in Nottingham”.

The paper ignores the fact that knife attacks are so common now – at over 130 a day, nationwide – that the national media has stopped reporting all but the most heinous of crimes, and then by no means all of them. Even as it laments the Calocane murders, this paper ignores another stabbing case tried in Nottingham, only yesterday.

The culprit this time is Junior Dietlin of whom – despite multiple local newspaper reports and a mention in the Mail – no clue is given as to his ethnicity nor origins, raising suspicions that Coulter’s Law is in force.

Over a four-day spree, only months before Calocane’s savagery, Dietlin ran amok in the streets of Nottingham and Mansfield, stabbing five strangers at random. And, like Calocane, he has retreated behind the defence of being a paranoid schizophrenic and has been committed to a secure hospital before final sentencing.

And while Calocane’s committal to a mental institution has shocked his victims’ families, and caused national outrage, it seems that the resort of knife-wielders to the “diminished responsibility” plea arising from schizophrenia, is remarkably common.

The Guardian, though, should not be surprised. It publicised research in November 2022 indicating that mental health may be the biggest factor in homicides.

Schizophenic attacks seem to occur in a variety of situations, such as the incident reported in December last year in Preston, when 36-year-old Khavar Najmi stabbed his mother Musaret and his sister Zanub in a row over cigarettes. Najmi was ordered to be detained under the Mental Health Act.

Then there was the tragic case, also reported in December last year where 30-year-old Birmingham resident Kadees Mohammed was accused of murdering his baby son Mohammed Ibrahim.

Mohammed believed he was the prophet Muhammad, believing himself to be on a “special mission” to save the world, and that his baby son was a “prophet of doom”. The case is still pending as the jury as unable to reach a verdict after Mohammed, described as suffering from a “textbook case” of schizophrenia, lodged a plea of “not guilty” on the grounds of insanity.

Reported in October, 29-year-old Mohammed Abbkr doused two elderly Muslim worshippers in petrol and set them on fire outside mosques in London and Birmingham in separate attacks.

After his arrest, Abbkr – who had come to the UK from Sudan in 2017 and had been granted asylum in 2019 – was diagnosed as suffering from paranoid schizophrenia involving persecutory and religious delusions. He was found guilty of attempted murder after the jury had rejected a plea of insanity, with the judge considering a hospital order.

In another Birmingham case, this one reported in July last year, Zephaniah McLeod ran amok in Birmingham city centre, killing one and injuring seven others, one gravely wounded.

McLeod, diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, had a long history of offending, starting in his teens, which included robberies, threats and carrying a knife. Five months before the attacks, he had been released from HMP Parc in Bridgend, Wales, after serving three years for drug and firearms offences. He had been released unsupervised to no fixed abode and the services “did not know where he had gone”.

The murder victim’s mother said a multi-agency review into McLeod’s treatment had showed a catalogue of “astonishing failings and incompetence”. McLeod was detained in a secure hospital “for at least 21 years” after pleading guilty to manslaughter, four counts of attempted murder and three counts of wounding.

Also reported in July 2023, Menelik Campbell, 22, living in Dalston in north London, fatally stabbed a 20-year-old man at his home.

Campbell was suffering from paranoid schizophrenia at the time of the killing and, having initially been charged with murder, pleaded guilty to manslaughter on 4 April, whence he was handed down an indefinite sentence under the Mental Health Act, in “the interest of public safety”.

In May 2023, the Mail reported on a paranoid schizophrenic Albanian woman who had slashed seven-year-old Emily Jones’s throat with a craft knife at random, killing her as she had been riding a scooter in a park in Bolton.

What marked this case out was that the murderer, Eltiona Skana, had entered the UK illegally in the back of a lorry in 2014, but had been allowed to stay in UK despite Home Office being told she’d lied about being trafficked on three occasions,

Ere, of some relevance to the Calocane case, she admitted manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility but was put on trial for murder. The trial collapsed and the prosecution offered no further evidence after hearing from the psychiatrist treating Skana at Rampton Hospital where she was being held under the Mental Health Act.

After a retrial, when she pleaded guilty to manslaughter, she was committed to a secure hospital on a hybrid order which would have her imprisoned if she was released from hospital, with a minimum term of 10 years and eight months.

Further south, in Dagenham, reported in April 2023, 28-year-old schizophrenic Nicolas Aina stabbed his mother, Caroline Adeyelu, to death at the family home. He too pleaded guilty to manslaughter, claiming “diminished responsibility”.

Aina had suffered delusions about witchcraft, electric voltage and being the “king of Africa”, and also admitted wounding his sister, Angel Adeyelu, 33, whom he stabbed seven times after claiming she was a “witch”. It emerged during his trial that he had previously been detained twice under the Mental Health Act.

In February, we then saw reported the case of Tedi Fanta, the Eritrean former child soldier who stabbed a stranger to death in a “ferocious” knife attack in London’s Oxford Street.

Fanta, who arrived in Britain in 2014, had convictions for criminal damage and assaulting a police officer and emergency worker and was on bail at the time of the killing. Suffering from schizophrenia, he was deemed unfit to stand trial and was ordered to be held in a secure psychiatric hospital indefinitely.

These are but a small sample of cases involving schizophrenia cases, and others are not difficult to find, some with additional factors. Their treatment in the courts is fairly consistent, with most charges resting on manslaughter followed by sentencing to secure hospitals.

As much as these cases are criminal issues involving the police, they also engage NHS mental health services which makes their handling more complex than normal. And, as with the Calocane case, mental health services have been found wanting on occasions.

Without having a full record, it is difficult to certain, but it does also seem to be the case that those of non-UK heritage are disproportionately represented in the incidents reported by the media, which might give pause for thought.

Overall, though, there should be no surprise that Calocane was treated by the court the way he was, despite concerns about the judgement and related issues.

If there is to be a public inquiry, as Barnaby Webber’s family want, it will need to focus as much on the provision of mental health services as it does policing issues, and, sensitive though the subject undoubtedly is, the ethnic contribution to this strand of misery might well need investigation.