Hierarchitis

Recently I listened to two BBC podcasts in the Crime Next Door strand. One was about the kidnapping of Lesley Whittle, the teenage daughter of a local bus company boss, in the mid 1970s by a notorious serial armed robber and killer named Donald Neilson and was found hanged in a storm drain under a public park; the other (Death on the Farm) was about a brother and sister, Griff and Patti Thomas (right), murdered in a farmhouse in west Wales around the same time, a death ruled a murder-suicide by the police, the coroner and the chapel pastor who refused them a church funeral, a verdict believed by none of her family and friends. In both cases, a senior detective was in charge who had the reputation for “always getting his man”; in the first, he had solved a number of murders but was new to investigating kidnappings for ransom (as, admittedly, was the whole profession), while in the second, it appears that he did not want to ruin a winning streak by being unable to solve a high-profile murder, so he jumped to the conclusion that it was a murder-suicide because there was no evidence of forced entry. These two stories reminded me of two more recent cases of a killer left to carry on killing or not apprehended as soon as he could have been because of a senior detective sold on a pet theory: the Yorkshire ripper case in the early 1980s, where the lead detective believed the killer was from another part of the country on the basis of a hoax and ignored (and aggressively rebuffed) leads that suggested a local culprit, and the White House Farm murders in which Jeremy Bamber murdered five members of his adoptive family and then tried to frame his adopted sister; the senior detective believed his story, and would only accept that he was wrong when other detectives proved to him that it was physically impossible for the sister to have killed herself with the rifle.

Last week Sue Marsh, a disability activist I came to know while campaigning against the Tory austerity programme of the early 2010s, published an article on her Substack about the culture she found while a patient at Addenbrookes hospital in Cambridge in the 90s and 2000s with Crohn’s disease, an obstructive bowel disorder. While the hospital carried out some pioneering research and some of its doctors were brilliant, there were also consultants who were sold on unscientific and irrational beliefs and treated patients cruelly on the basis of them, and because of the status of Addenbrookes and of Cambridge, what those consultants said and did became common practice. Ultimately the hospital was put in special measures because of botched operations and mistakes known as “never events” (i.e. they should never happen, such as the wrong part of someone’s body being operated on or removed or an instrument left inside them), and the health watchdog Monitor kept them under observation for 18 months, during which surgeries could not go ahead without them present. Even after this, however, doctors trained there at that time were appointed as consultants elsewhere, and good practice was replaced with bad (and cruel) practice learned at Addenbrooke’s. They were spreading like a hospital-acquired infection.

And Sue’s story about how the hierarchies in the health sector undermined good care reminded me of the tragedies and scandals in policing caused by the obsession with hierarchy at the expense of justice, human life or getting the job done (especially when that job was justice or saving lives). People are unable, or face punishment for, raising concerns; they are expected to address a superior officer meekly and always acknowledging their superiority; the superior rank is taken as proof of their being more experienced or better at their job, and though they may have experience, their rank may have had as much to do with impressing the right people at the right time or being in the right social clubs, or discrimination against a competitor because of their race or sex, or something else. Certain people, because of who they are, are assumed to know best, or they are assumed to be right because they were right in the past. In the case of the Pembrokeshire farm murders, the senior detective (DCS Pat Molloy) came from out of area, was a hero from having solved a triple murder in Staffordshire but knew nothing about the local culture and did not speak Welsh, but drew conclusions based on assumptions that anyone familiar with it could have put right, had he listened. All of these situations in policing happened in the 1970s and 80s; no doubt someone will say that this was years ago and the culture of CID has been reformed since and the Ripper disaster could not happen again, though the ongoing scandals about misogyny, domestic abuse by officers going unpunished and sex offences by police officers going unpunished until they kill someone suggests otherwise, at least in some forces.

Hierarchitis affects other institutions as well. For much of the 20th century, co-pilots on civilian airliners could not dissent from their captain, even when the captain was plainly wrong, and planes crashed and whole planeloads of people were lost as a result, because the captain’s mistake could not be challenged. In the book Longitude, Dava Sobel told the story of a naval officer who believed that the ship he was on was a long way from where his superior officer thought, and when he raised his concerns, he was shot for mutiny. The ship then wrecked, as he had said it would, and the surviving crew robbed, and the superior officer murdered. Hierarchies and chains of command are, of course, sometimes necessary and maintaining them in normal times conditions people to act on them when discipline is vital, as during war or a life-and-death situation such as the arrest of a dangerous, wanted criminal or the extinguishing of a big fire. Hierarchitis occurs where they result in bullying, the shouting-down of valid dissenting opinions, the wrong people being promoted and then assumed to be always right because of that promotion, with unjust or lethal consequences for junior staff, patients or the general public.