Opinion

Newton Emerson: Claiming compensation from crime victims reflects badly on PSNI

Newton Emerson

Newton Emerson

Newton Emerson writes a twice-weekly column for The Irish News and is a regular commentator on current affairs on radio and television.

There is no situation so dismal that a policeman cannot make it worse, to quote Brendan Behan - and those situations now include having your house broken into and your car stolen.

Tracey Mackin’s Nissan Juke was taken from her west Belfast home last October. The PSNI slowed the vehicle using a stinger device, then it collided with a police car.

Mackin, a single mother of two who depends on a car to get to work, has now received a solicitor’s letter from one of the officers involved, asking if she is prepared to “admit liability” and pay injury compensation.

This has left her understandably distressed and of course it will not help with her insurance premiums, which have already tripled.

Facing a wave of media and political criticism, the PSNI has washed its hands of responsibility on two grounds. First, it says an officer is as entitled as any private citizen to pursue civil damages. Second, it says that claims in cases of vehicle theft are made not against the victim but against the Motor Insurers Bureau (MIB), an official industry scheme for incidents involving uninsured drivers.

These are the lines the PSNI always trots out when this practice hits the headlines. In 2013, two officers claimed against a Belfast woman whose car was stolen, following a burglary while her family was at home.

SDLP justice spokesman Alban Maginness raised the case at Stormont’s justice committee and with the Policing Board but reported “no satisfaction” as the PSNI stonewalled with its two excuses.

Now it is doing so again - yet neither excuse will wash.

The PSNI, like all employers in Northern Ireland, is required by law to have comprehensive employers’ liability insurance that will compensate staff for injury, accident and illness “while working and during the course of their employment.”

Cover must be a minimum of £5 million.

This is what officers should be claiming against for on-duty incidents.

More importantly, they should not be claiming twice for the same incident - against the PSNI and the victim of a crime.

Claiming twice is known as ‘double recovery’. Preventing double recovery is an important principle in common law, taken seriously by other parts of government. For example, all compensation payments must be reported to an official database so that social security benefits can be offset against them.

By contrast, the PSNI says it keeps no record of private claims by officers injured while on duty, nor are officers required to inform it of their intention to pursue a claim.

Where a settlement is “full and final”, claiming again for the same incident is fraud. It is not fraud to launch multiple claims simultaneously or to pursue different damages under different insurers. However, it must be asked why officers consider this necessary when the PSNI is meant to provide them with full employee cover.

It is equally questionable to cite MIB, which requires claimants to first establish if there is an insurance company willing to pay out. In the case of a stolen car, that usually falls to the owner’s policy. Hence a letter like that received by Tracey Mackin is technically the first step and invariably the last step before even contacting MIB - which is just as well, because a police officer making a claim through MIB would be at risk of a conflict of interest.

MIB’s procedure is to contact the uninsured driver - the suspect in a theft - to obtain their account of the incident and their “permission to intervene”.

MIB also states: “As part of our enquiries, we sometimes need to obtain the police report relating to the accident. It can take some time to obtain a police report, as the police cannot release the report until any criminal prosecutions are concluded.”

This would clearly be unacceptable where the claimant was the investigating officer.

The PSNI needs to understand that the issue with a compensation culture in the ranks is not just the distress it causes to victims of crime, bad as that is, but also the serious prospect of bringing policing into disrepute. It is not good enough to brush this away.

As with so many policing problems in Northern Ireland, it seems the PSNI will not change its stance until it picks on the wrong victim. Fortunately, that could happen at any moment. Motorists often have extra legal cover with their insurance entitling them to a solicitor they can instruct as they wish. Sooner or later, somebody is going to fight back.

newton@irishnews.com