The death of Henry Hicks on a north London street just before Christmas 2014 left a family devastated and a community bewildered and angry.
The 18-year-old had been riding his moped when he was spotted by officers in two unmarked police cars who, thinking his behaviour was suspicious, switched on their sirens and drove after him in an attempt to pull him over. After a short high-speed chase through traffic, the teenager lost control of the bike a few streets away from his Islington family home and suffered severe head injuries from which he never recovered consciousness.
To the teenager’s family and many in his community, the police were clearly to blame for his death – a conviction that, to some, was so intense that the four officers in the police vehicles, a driver and operator in each, gave evidence to the inquest anonymously and behind screens after threats to their safety on social media.
That was partly because of what had happened before the incident. In the three years before he died, his family revealed, Hicks had been stopped again and again by officers – the Independent Police Complaints Commission counted 89 instances of stop and search or stop and account for which there were records – but never charged with any offence.
Nearly 27,000 people signed an online petition calling for justice and 50,000 joined a campaign group on Facebook, an appeal backed by a number of local celebrities. Four months after the teenager died, hundreds gathered outside Islington police station brandishing placards and demanding answers.
Not everything which emerged during the inquest will have been comfortable for his family to hear. To them, Henry was the adored baby of the family, a cherub-faced “son, brother and friend to all” who had loved Arsenal and swimming, and trained as a carpenter after leaving school. The young man described to the inquest jury by his sister Claudia was the “family’s glue”; since his death, she said, it had been like “living in a world without colour”. “I could fill a stadium of people whose lives had been made better by my brother.”
This was not the only side of the teenager to emerge during the inquest, however. The police officer driving the first unmarked car, who made the initial decision to follow Hicks’s moped, told the jury he had done so because the way it was driving – stopping briefly outside a pub, having very quick interactions with people before driving away – looked suspiciously like drug dealing.
When Hicks’s bloodied clothes were searched after he died, investigators found seven bags of skunk cannabis worth between £70 and £140, £230 in cash and three mobile phones, bearing scores of text messages saying he had skunk available – referred to as “banging lemon”. It was clear, the officer who searched his possessions told the jury, “that Mr Hicks was, in essence, a drug dealer”.
The moped the young man was driving, though registered to his address, was found to be stolen; it was also what the police called a “ringer”, having had its engine replaced to make it a much more powerful vehicle than it appeared. When he died, Hicks was on bail pending a trial for affray.
But the young man had no criminal record and despite the repeated stop and searches, one of the four officers told the jury, he was not regarded as a priority offender by the local police. “I had never known him to be involved in anything,” said the witness known to the jury as Officer B, who said he had known him relatively well. In any event, coroner Mary Hassell told the jury, it was not the role of the inquest “to try Henry after his death. That is not why we are here.”
The issue in question, instead, was what had made the moped crash, and whether the police vehicles had contributed to it. The police officers told the jury that after the driver of the first unmarked car spotted Hicks outside the pub, the teenager had quickly driven off, and the two vehicles then turned to follow. They spotted him again a few minutes later, again apparently selling drugs, they told the jury, and put on their “blues and twos” – blue lights and two-tone sirens – to follow.
In snatches of CCTV footage, the three vehicles’ progress was traced along Caledonian Road. It is a 20mph zone, and Hicks’s moped was travelling at more than twice that, overtaking cars and buses, at times on the wrong side of the road. The police vehicles could be seen attempting to follow, between 15 and 30 seconds behind.
But despite their blaring sirens and lights, the police driver and his colleagues had insisted Hicks had not been aware they were following him. “My common sense and my belief is he didn’t know I was there,” Officer A, the driver of the first chasing vehicle, told the jury. As such, that officer and his operator colleague insisted, their high-speed chase was not a formal “pursuit” because it did not meet the police guidance, which says officers must believe the person they are following knows they want them to stop.
That matters because in a formal pursuit, police officers must immediately get authorisation to continue from their control centre, and the two unmarked cars did not - and it is that assertion that the jury explicitly rejected. Hicks did know he was being followed, and it was a formal pursuit - a finding with which the Independent Police Complaints Commission agreed, it emerged after the verdict.
Hicks died in Wheelwright Street, which runs alongside Pentonville prison, when he lost control of his scooter and clipped the back tyre of a stationary taxi, his own vehicle then flipping over and striking him on the head. Despite wearing a helmet, he suffered a fatal head injuries.
There is no question that it was, as the two officers in the first pursuing car said, “a very hysterical and traumatic scene”. But the family’s lawyers’ questioned that that explained why, as an emotional Officer A told the jury, the initial statement he gave a colleague had been “littered with errors”. In that account, for example, he had said Hicks had ridden off “as soon as I put my blue lights on”, suggesting the rider had been fully aware of the two vehicles following him. That was not true, he told the jury - he’d made a mistake thanks to being in “severe shock”.
The other officer in the first chasing car had also changed his story in later statements, telling the jury that his initial assessment, given at the scene, that Hicks had been “six to 12 feet” ahead of them at one stage in the chase, was wrong, and it was more like 45 feet. Officer B, too, said shock was the reason for the discrepancy.
All four officers will now face gross misconduct hearings.
