Supervising the police IPCC/Polizei-Aufsichtsbehörde

Essex police moved in mysterious ways when they dealt with the case of Lee Balkwell, who died in an unfortunate accident in a concrete mixer - see Observer article: The emergency crews called to the concrete firm on a farm in Essex in the early hours of a summer morning met a scene that has stayed with them to this day. Mangled between the drum and chassis of a concrete-mixer lorry was the torso of a man, his legs twisted and resting on a pile of dried cement. One paramedic wrote "?foul play" in his pocketbook. Another said she thought she was looking at a suspicious death, and a third said he was reluctant to touch the body in case he damaged evidence. One of the early contradictions of the inquiry was when detectives said they had treated the death of Mr Balkwell as suspicious for 35 days. Yet the day after he was found, his clothing was destroyed, without being examined by a forensic scientist, on the orders of a senior officer, and within 48 hours of the death, the police had told the family of the 33-year-old haulage driver that he had been killed in a freak accident while cleaning the drum of the lorry at 1am. The Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) has arranged for an enquiry. On the beck blog, Professor Dr. Henning Ernst Müller asks whether Germany does not also need such a body. The IPCC was founded in 2004 after human rights organizations had called for it for years; amnesty international first suggested such a body for Germany five years ago. Nach den monatelangen inzw…