Steerpike
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Who is Sir Stephen, you ask? Well House was the first head of Police Scotland upon its 2012 merger until, that is, his career was brought to an abrupt halt in 2015 after a series of controversies and failures. Among them include his decision to place armed officers on routine street patrols and the move to stop and search tens of thousands of people who were not suspected of a crime. But what really did for House was his poor response to the M9 tragedy which killed two people in July 2015.
The driver John Yuill is believed to have died within half an hour of the accident but his girlfriend, Lamara Bell was seriously hurt and trapped in the wreckage for three days after a farmer first reported a car that had left the road. Bell was eventually found on 8 July 2015, and died in hospital four days later. The subsequent inquiry in September 2021 was told that Bell would probably have survived if police had arrived sooner. The Office of the Chief Constable of Police Scotland was fined £100,000, having admitted the call handling failures that contributed to her death.
House’s career was subsequently revived in 2018 when he was appointed as first an Assistant Commissioner and then Deputy Commissioner of the Met. Since his appointment, his record has been patchy at best. There’s no sign yet that he intends to be more transparent than Dick, having refused in March 2021 to be cross-examined by the Investigatory Powers Tribunal on his evidence about an undercover officer. That same month he defended the Met’s decision to break up the Sarah Everard vigil and joined Dick in rejecting the findings of the Daniel Morgan inquiry in June 2021.
If this is the best person London has to replace Cressida Dick, Mr S wonders if the Met’s problems run deeper than one individual.
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