Officers refused to attend report of stabbing

An Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) investigation has found two Northamptonshire Police officers put others in danger by refusing to attend reports of a stabbing in which a woman was killed.

On January 18 last year, Louise Webster was stabbed to death at her home in Roade. Martin Ashby was convicted of her murder earlier this month.

Northamptonshire Police had received the emergency call in which screaming and shouting could be heard in the background and two minutes later it was confirmed that someone had been stabbed.

The two officers involved should have been working on an anti-prostitution operation in Northampton town centre. Just after midnight, the global positioning system (GPS) device in one of their radios placed them in the immediate vicinity of the stabbing incident.

The control room requested the officers attend the incident as they were closest. However, the officer who answered the request refused to do so, saying they were on an operation and their inspector would not want them to leave their assigned duties.

The IPCC investigation found that both officers had cases to answer for gross misconduct. These were subsequently proven at a full powers misconduct hearing, which also heard that on the night before Louise’s murder, one of the officers had been on the same anti-prostitution operation but travelled to Roade to look for houses for sale. Both officers received final written warnings.

The investigation established:
•The officers were not prohibited from responding to emergency calls, which they would have been aware of from operational briefings;
•The officers’ notebooks showed they had not dealt with any prostitution-related crime or other incidents during their six-hour duty.
•The officers claimed they had followed a suspicious vehicle to Roade but could not get its registration. There was no independent evidence to prove or disprove this.