In the Chris Kaba case, the police watchdog capitulated to the mob

It is virtually impossible to imagine what Metropolitan Police sergeant Martyn Blake and his loved ones have been through over the past four years.

On 5 September 2022, Blake, a firearms officer, shot dead 24-year-old Chris Kaba in Streatham, south London, after Kaba tried to ram past assembled police cars. The Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC), the body which oversees the police complaints system in England and Wales, launched an investigation, before referring the case to the Crown Prosecution Service in March 2023. In 2024, Blake was cleared of murder by an Old Bailey jury. During the trial, he had initially been known by the codename NX121, but the judge decided to lift the anonymity order after pressure was exerted by some media organisations. This would, no doubt, only have exacerbated Blake’s feeling that he’d been thrown to the wolves.

Any relief Blake might have felt after being acquitted of criminal charges was short-lived. In April 2025, the IOPC decided that it would also investigate Blake under police misconduct proceedings. If found guilty, he would have faced the ignominy of dismissal. Last week, the IOPC, having paused its investigation in January, finally decided to drop it entirely, citing changes to the law on police use of force. These changes did not apply retrospectively, but the IOPC decided to use its discretionary powers to finally clear Blake of wrongdoing.

This is a long-overdue admission that the system responded inadequately to a highly trained firearms officer’s split-second decision – a decision made while doing an unimaginably difficult job.

The facts around the Kaba case are important here. Kaba was certainly unarmed when he was shot, hence the understandable grief and anger felt by his family and supporters. But he was also a hardened, career criminal with a string of convictions for serious offences and a core member of a notorious south London gang. The jury during the criminal trial didn’t know this, yet it still acquitted Blake.

The reason Kaba’s car was stopped in the first place was that a vehicle with that number plate had been connected to recent violent offences. Couple that with the fact that Kaba was, effectively, trying to ram his way out of a police arrest and could have gone on to hit members of the public, and it’s easy to understand why a highly trained police firearms officer decided that potentially lethal force was necessary. Kaba may not have had a gun, but he was using a car as a weapon.

Enjoying spiked?

Why not make an instant, one-off donation?

We are funded by you. Thank you!

Enter your amount

£

Please wait...

Thank you!

These details and context don’t make Kaba’s death less tragic, nor remove the need for scrutiny when lethal force is used. But they do make it morally wrong to treat Blake as a criminal first and an officer responding to danger second. Armed policing exists because some threats cannot be safely contained by ‘ordinary’ policing. Officers in those moments have seconds, sometimes less, to decide whether their inaction might cost lives.

One of the most troubling features of this and similar cases is the extent to which the prosecuting bodies appear to be taking decisions in response to ‘community reaction’ to an incident. The CPS states in its Code for Crown Prosecutors that there is an increased likelihood of a charge if ‘the prevalence of an offence in a community may cause particular harm to that community, increasing the seriousness of the offending’. The IOPC itself states that ‘significant media attention, community interest and / or tension’ can be the basis for an investigation.

Accountability is essential, especially when a life has been taken. But here an individual was punished by the accountability process itself. Once a jury has acquitted an officer of murder after hearing the evidence, the IOPC had no need to prolong the officer’s agony, regardless of ‘community tensions’. Prosecutors and watchdogs shouldn’t be reacting to activist pressure or anger. They are there to apply the law with detachment.

That didn’t seem to happen in the Kaba case. The CPS described the prosecution as ‘complex and sensitive’ and said it was right that the case be put before a jury. And after finally clearing Blake, the IOPC said the investigation had been of ‘significant public interest’, particularly within black communities.

None of that proves either body pursued Blake in response to community tension. But the language matters. When institutions repeatedly emphasise public interest and the sensitivity of a case, they look as if they’re engaged in reputation management. The legal question should have remained narrow: what did Blake honestly believe in the moment and was his use of force lawful?

The contrast between the enormous length of time Blake has been on de facto trial and the speed with which the jury acquitted him in 2024 is stark. After hearing the evidence, jurors took just three hours to find him not guilty. Yet the institutions involved in the case took nearly four years in total to exonerate him. They plunged him into purgatory, turning his life into what must have seemed like an interminable trial. They turned the process into a punishment.

There is a legitimate place for investigation after a fatal police shooting. The public must know that evidence has been examined. But an investigation should be a route to truth, not a public-relations exercise. Once the evidence has been tested in court and an officer has been acquitted, the threshold for any further action should be extremely high.

The treatment of Blake sends a chilling signal to firearms officers. They are asked to confront violent danger, put themselves between armed criminals and ordinary citizens and make rapid decisions under pressure. Yet if they act lawfully, they may still face years of criminal, disciplinary, civil and inquest processes.

None of this means we should be indifferent to Kaba’s death or to his family’s grief. The human consequences undeniably deserve recognition. But grief can’t be allowed to turn lawful policing into moral wrongdoing.

Bodies like the IOPC, charged with holding the police to account, must protect the public from abuses of power. But in doing so, they must avoid punishing lawful acts of bravery. In Sergeant Blake’s case, a line was crossed.

A jury made up of Blake’s fellow citizens found clarity in hours. The criminal-justice system and the IOPC should not have taken years to accept what the evidence had always shown.

Paul Birch is a former police officer and counter-terrorism specialist. You can read his Substack here.