Three years after Valdo Calocane’s rampage through the streets of Nottingham, which left three people dead, we have just learned why he was roaming the streets at all and not sectioned.
The answer, shockingly, is because he’s black. Rachel Langdale, KC, counsel to an inquiry into that murderous night, said a doctor had been ‘’leaning towards’’ committing Calocane, but the medical team decided against it after taking into account ‘’research evidence’’ which showed ‘’over-representation of young black males in detention.’’
Why did they need to take into account any evidence except the appalling state of his mental stability?
That decision left the streets of Nottingham covered in blood. And all because the doctors didn’t want to be accused of being racist. Their decision-making was so poor I’m surprised they didn’t get charged with manslaughter – after all, if Calocane was in a high security psychiatric unit, he couldn’t murder, could he?
I thought that Michael Deacon, the Telegraph columnist, made an excellent point when he said that the next time the psychiatric professionals want to ensure the approved demographic balance, they should pop down to the local bingo hall and round up a dozen old white ladies and lock them away in a mental hospital, too.
There have been too many bad decisions based on people in authority being terrified of being called racist. Take the Manchester Arena bombing in 2017.
A security guard told the inquiry he had a ‘’bad feeling’’ about the bomber Salman Abedi but chose not to approach him because he didn’t want people to think he was ‘’stereotyping him’’ scared that if he was wrong, he would be branded a racist.
His gut feeling was right, and 22 people died, and 1,017 were injured. They could have been saved if there hadn’t been such a dreadful cloud of racism that hangs over debate.
The appalling torture and murder in 2023 of 10-year-old schoolgirl Sara Sharif, by her father and stepmother, could have been revealed had the neighbours reported ‘’concerns about what they had heard.’’
But they didn’t, not because they are good people, but because they too ‘’feared being branded racist". The most notorious example concerned the child rape gangs where Labour MP Sarah Champion said: ‘’People are more afraid to be called racist than they are afraid to be wrong about calling out child abuse.’’
We fail our nation by ignoring what links the murders in Southport and Nottingham - Kelvin MacKenzie
|Getty Images
When Axel Rudakubana was at school, his headmistress recognised he was ‘’very high risk’’ yet mental health workers ‘’shut her up’’ accusing her of ‘’racially profiling him’’.
It’s easy to be critical, but if you’re white and work in the public sector where there’s a much higher percentage of minorities, it can be made to feel uneasy if you raise a disciplinary issue concerning a person of colour.
You can be absolutely sure that you will be accused of racism. And if that person is cleared by a disciplinary inquiry, there will be a note on your record. Shocking but true. And even if they are disciplined or sacked, you can’t be sure that in some strange way you will be blamed.
In a good piece of digging, Michael Deacon found this quote from the inquiry into the murder of Victoria Climbie in 2001, who was killed by her great aunt and her great aunt’s partner. ‘’Fear of being accused of racism can stop people from acting when otherwise they would.’’
There are too many white people facing the price because too many other white people aren’t doing the right thing for fear of being called ‘’racist’’.
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