On Friday 25 November 2016 Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary (HMIC) released a damning report into the Metropolitan police’s treatment of children. Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Constabulary, Sir Thomas Winsor, said:
“Protecting the vulnerable, particularly children, is perhaps the most important job that police officers and staff undertake ... we found inexcusably poor practice at every stage of a child’s interaction with the police and across the parts of the force we inspected.”
Since 2012 Just for Kids Law has been working to change the way that children are treated by the police. We launched our ‘still a child at seventeen’ campaign that year but it wasn’t until 2013 that the High Court ruled that it was inconsistent with children’s rights to treat 17 year olds as if they were adults and not children when detained at the police station. The fact that we had to fight the Home Office and the police in a contested court case, until the Court ruled, is perhaps an indication of how low of a priority this was at that time.
