Man wrongly Tasered by police gets £30k payout

BBC

A man who was seriously injured when he was wrongfully Tasered by police while celebrating his birthday has been given £30,000 in damages.

Dimitri Moses was Tasered while climbing over a gate in Nottingham on 10 July 2021 after running away from officers he thought were going to beat him up. It caused him to fall, lose consciousness and fracture his spine.

The use of the Taser was against official policing guidance, which states the devices should only be used “as a proportionate response to an identified threat“.

Nottinghamshire Police, which claimed an officer had been trying to detain Moses over a public order offence, said it hoped the settlement “will offer comfort to the complainant”.

Moses believes race was a factor in what happened to him. Home Office statistics for 2021-22 showed black people were approximately five times more likely than white people to have Tasers used against them.

Dimitri Moses

Moses said he was at a bar with two friends, celebrating his 34th birthday, when they were asked to leave because one of them was deemed to have been breaching social distancing rules by dancing away from their table.

Under Covid regulations at the time, bars were only allowed to open on the condition that customers ordered and consumed their drinks while sitting down.

According to Moses’s legal claim, one of the security staff told his friend “I’ll put a bullet in your head” as they were leaving, so the friend began speaking to three police officers who were outside.

The situation escalated and one of the officers – named in legal documents as PC Butler – pushed Moses across the street towards a shop window, which was captured on CCTV.

“He told me he was giving me to the count of 10 to leave the area, and he put his hand on my throat and pushed me back on the wall across the street,” said Moses.

His solicitor Iain Gould, who specialises in police misconduct cases, said Moses started counting to 10 which “provoked” Butler, who then “lunged towards” him – something Nottinghamshire Police has denied.

All three officers then surrounded Moses, according to the legal claim, and two of them grabbed him by his arms.

Moses, who lives in London, said he thought the officers were going to beat him up so, feeling scared, he decided to run away.

The officers chased after him and he headed towards Sneinton Market, where he started climbing over a metal gate.

Moses was then Tasered by an officer – named as PC McClintock in the documents – while he was approximately 6ft (1.8m) in the air, causing him to fall to the ground.

As a result, he fractured three vertebrae in his spine, and suffered other injuries to his chest, back, hands and right shoulder.

In its defence to the legal claim, Nottinghamshire Police stated McClintock “concluded it was necessary to discharge his Taser in order to prevent the claimant’s escape and safely detain him”.

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When Tasers, which use barbed darts to puncture the skin and deliver a high-voltage electric current, were first introduced in the UK in 2003, they could only be used by firearms officers.

However, they can now be used by any police officer who completes a three-day training course.

According to College of Policing guidance, a Taser “should only be used as a proportionate response to an identified threat“, and “should not be used to simply gain compliance with instructions or procedures where compliance is not linked to such a threat”.

Gould said Moses did not pose a threat in any way, and a Taser should therefore not have been used.

“There are going to be times when an officer should deploy a Taser but those are situations where there is a threat to the officer, a member of the public, or to the individual themselves,” the solicitor said.

“In this particular case, none of those situations applied.”

Nottinghamshire Police said Butler had been trying to detain Moses because he had decided to arrest him for a public order offence.

However, Moses maintains that Butler did not say he was arresting him at the time.

The officers did not have their bodyworn cameras switched on and the CCTV did not have any audio, so it was not possible to determine what had been said.

Moses was later arrested and charged with a public order offence and resisting arrest. However, the Crown Prosecution Service decided to discontinue the proceedings.

Moses’s solicitor brought a civil claim against Nottinghamshire Police, which eventually settled for £30,000 in damages.

In a statement, the force said: “Policing can be a fast-moving and challenging situation.

“It is vitally important that if we get things wrong, then we ensure that we put them right and we hope this settlement will offer some comfort to the complainant.

“The matter was investigated by Nottinghamshire Police professional standards, who found no evidence to suggest that any conduct was influenced by factors relating to race.”

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Nottinghamshire Police

HM Courts & Tribunals Service