Improving Disaster Management

The complexities of victim identification received renewed attention after the tsunami in the Far East, requiring teams of officers from the UK to be involved and the July 7 London bombings confirmed a need for national experts in mass fatality identification.

One of the lessons from the London atrocity was that not one force, no matter how big, can deal with the requirements of recovering and identifying large numbers of bodies accurately in fast turnaround without external assistance.

The event also created the impetus to further define the responsibilities of the Senior Identification Manager (SIM) and from this to identify the training to meet these responsibilities.

Detective Inspector Simon Fox, Coordinator for the recently formed ACPO National DVI team and former team leader on the July 7 body recovery operation, said: “There were a lot of questions raised about how we recovered the bodies, not least from relatives, such as ‘why did my relative remain in the train for so long when she had obvious identification on her?’

“If we had got one identification wrong, it would have raised massive concerns about the whole investigation. This is not easy to explain to a relative. The processes to ensure we make the right identification and satisfy the needs of relatives and investigators have to be in place.”

Other major inquiries, including the 2001 judicial review into the handling of the Marchioness sinking on the Thames in 1989 were highly critical of the way bodies of 51 victims were dealt with. The main failings included the removal of hands, wrong bodies released, severed hands not returned and later disposed of discreetly, sample pots found in Westminster Mortuary many years later and relatives dealt with unsympathetically in not being allowed to view the bodies.

Charles Haddon-Cave QC, representing the Marchioness Action Group told the inquiry: “The care with which our dead are treated is a mark of how civilised a society we are. Much goes on for understandable reasons behind closed doors.

“For this reason there is a special responsibility placed upon those entrusted with this work and the authorities who supervise it to ensure that the bodies of the dead are treated with the utmost care and respect.

“That is what the bereaved and loved ones are entitled to expect and what society at large demands.”

Recommendation 10 made by Lord Justice Clarke in 2001 said “In particular, I support the proposal to appoint a Senior Identification Manager (SIM), namely a senior police officer to have overall responsibility for the identification process.”

The national DVI team is expected to provide the response to any future major disaster in providing a pool of resources, trained and assessed to a new standard, instead of the usual request for a team to be formed with usually one force bearing the burden, such as seen with the deployment where forces supplied teams in rotation.

Given the response to the identification task in Thailand following the tsunami, a number of forces supplied teams in rotation. Deployed as teams, there was one week of travelling and induction, three weeks of effective working followed by another week of changeover to the next team. In the UK, one force would lose valuable members of staff during that deployment.

In the future, should a major disaster involving UK citizens occur abroad, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office will ask a DVI co-ordinator to visit and assess any DVI requirements, such as odontologist, DNA experts etc.

Any call on the service would be shared among the 43 forces of England and Wales with individuals travelling to the area on a rolling programme avoiding the ‘downtime’ caused by team changeovers.

Within the UK, forces have a variety of capabilities. For instance, West Yorkshire has considerable experience and has developed its skills accordingly. Whereas, other forces have less capability and one or two, such as Durham, have decided to contract out t