Event: Valdo Calocane

The Valdo Calocane case shows how much ‘care in the community’ has failed. ‘Perhaps [he] will end up killing someone.’ These were the prescient words of one psychiatrist involved in the treatment of Valdo Calocane, a paranoid schizophrenic who went on to murder Ian Coates, Grace O’Malley-Kumar and Barnaby Webber in an unprovoked attack in Nottingham on 13 June 2023. As the ongoing inquiry into these tragic events has revealed, the psychiatrist in question had good reason to make such a grave prediction. In the years leading up to the Nottingham incident, Calocane is alleged to have assaulted a police officer, attacked an emergency worker, assaulted two colleagues at a factory and frightened a neighbour so badly that she jumped from a first-floor window, seriously injuring her back. Press coverage of the inquiry this week has focussed on revelations that Calocane was not sectioned under mental-health legislation because health staff were worried about the ‘over-representation of young black men in custody’. In other words, clinical professionals were more concerned about protecting themselves from allegations of racism than protecting the public from serious violence. This extraordinary disclosure is but the latest chapter in an ongoing saga of ‘protected-characteristic exceptionalism’. It is the same attitude that left grooming-gang victims ignored, allowed male rapists into women’s prisons and permitted adult male migrants to claim they are children. Yet Valdo Calocane’s skin colour was not the primary reason that he was allowed to remain at large. Calocane was free to kill because Britain’s political and medical establishments have made the deliberate choice to allow dangerous psychiatric patients to live unsupervised. In the past, individuals with psychiatric disorders were detained, often indefinitely. Asylums were built from the Victorian era onwards, and by the 1950s there were around 150,000 secure mental-health beds across the country. Many…