A report says police failed to properly investigate Valdo Calocane before he killed three people in Nottingham.
Calocane punched someone and pushed a woman in May 2023 at a warehouse in Kegworth. Officer A, who handled the case, did not check Calocane’s record. A police computer check would have shown an arrest warrant, violence, and mental health issues. She said she would have arrested him.
The victims were Romanian. The officer used Google Translate and did not know she could call an interpreter. CCTV footage was not saved and disappeared from police systems forever. Officer A was new to the job, and Officer B, her tutor, had a backlog of cases. He did not check Officer A’s work but should have ensured checks were done, and apologized for the mistake.
Sergeant C supervised the case but said his review was not good enough, citing being overworked, but not lazy. The IOPC found failures but no lessons to learn, leaving the victims’ families very upset. They felt excluded from the meeting and believe the police and IOPC failed them.
The families signed an agreement not to share all the details and are deeply unhappy with the report, believing it is poor quality. They told the police their concerns but the police did not address them and they will only see the meeting remotely. The officers’ names are hidden, and the families asked why they were excluded again. A public inquiry will happen, hopefully revealing the truth as they do not trust the police or the watchdog.
Officer A knows she did not do checks and did not know she had to. The police computer had info on Calocane, including an arrest warrant from 2022 and an assault on an emergency worker in 2021. The computer also showed incidents of stalking a roommate in 2022, assaulting someone in student housing in 2022, punching and headbutting a police officer when he was sectioned, and assaulting a roommate in 2021. He was also detained under the Mental Health Act in 2020 and a woman jumped from a window because he kicked her door. He was sectioned, so no action was taken.
Officer A knows she made a mistake and the CCTV footage was not saved, though it was on a body-worn video. The report says she could have done more, such as contacting victims and witnesses and saving the CCTV footage. She stated she was very sorry.
A witness called 999 to report the assaults and said Calocane reached for a knife, which someone kicked away. Officer A recalls a knife was mentioned but was not told Calocane tried to grab it. She said she was new, made mistakes, did not mean to do anything wrong, and had no idea what to do.
Officer B said they discussed which cases to prioritize and Calocane’s case was not a priority. He thinks the CCTV issue was human error and he could have checked it. He said they did not do checks fast enough and could have tried harder to arrest him.
The IOPC said they finished their investigation and three officers will meet for misconduct. They shared the report with the families and sympathize with them. The IOPC will publish the report later and cannot comment more right now.