The police’s response to the Ashya King case is deeply troubling
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Version 0 of 1. When news broke that five-year-old Ashya King had been taken by his parents from Southampton hospital, a media frenzy erupted. Terms such as “snatched” were used alongside mugshot-type photographs of the parents. Soon, Ashya’s mother and father were being implicitly portrayed as fugitives and the urgent tone of the reporting tipped from measured concern to manhunt. The horrifying idea evoked by the initial coverage was that batteries for vital feeding equipment for Ashya would run out and he would starve. It will be interesting to find out, when the dust settles on this deeply troubling affair, whether this scenario was indeed likely, or whether young Ashya was in fact coping positively with the journey and responding to being with his parents out of the hospital environment. As the story developed, the parents’ side of the story was established: they had, they said, withdrawn him from the hospital in a desperate, but many would say logical, attempt to provide him with treatment that was difficult to obtain in the UK. Finally, on Saturday, the combined forces of Hampshire and Malaga police located the family in the Spanish resort and placed Ashya’s parents in custody, removing the boy from them. The device used by the police was a European arrest warrant and Hampshire police somewhat enigmatically referred to the warrant being “based around neglect”, whatever that means. The assistant chief constable of Hampshire, Chris Shead, said this did not necessarily mean that the parents would be charged with any offence relating to neglect. Despite my requests to know the basis on which the arrest warrant was issued, the Crown Prosecution Service, which must have considered the law on the matter, has refused to clarify its analysis. The Spanish police have now publicly stated that the investigation of the parents centres upon “child cruelty” allegations. All rather interesting if a little ad hoc, but none of it is sufficient as a matter of law for a European arrest warrant, which clearly requires ongoing criminal proceedings, to be issued. So what proceedings were ongoing? No doubt this is a question the parents may ask in the future and they consider whether the police lawfully deprived them of their liberty. Emotions run high in cases that involve children, especially at a time when our society is rightly challenging itself about how we protect them. But Ashya’s care raises other troubling issues, principally the role and duty of the police. There is no doubt that Hampshire police were put under significant pressure from Southampton hospital to effect the return of this child. Exactly what the hospital told the police regarding the imperatives of his return maybe revealed as time goes on, but they clearly interpreted their duty to act expeditiously as an enforcement arm of medical opinion. This is not their role. Time pressures granted, the swift adoption of medical instructions and the setting in train of a series of actions, press releases and media comment placed the family in the position of wanted criminals, their faces and that of Ashya posted internationally for millions to see. The police are there to protect citizens and the easy transition to uncritical enforcers of other powerful interest groups is troubling. We should remind ourselves that this was a case of two adults who had parental control, who lawfully took their child from a hospital and by all accounts cared for his welfare in an attempt to give him a chance at life. Such motives could have been ascertained by the police from friends and family of the parents. As the CPS considers whether to extradite, charge, prosecute and separate this family from their five-year-old, events have served to highlight the danger that all police forces face, echoing back to the years of Margaret Thatcher and their deployment in the miners’ strike – the perception that they are enforcers for the state against the citizen, the most dangerous perception of all. |