Just over a week ago we got a letter addressed to my stepson. This happens occasionally, though he's long since moved out. We bin the obvious junk and keep the other stuff for when he comes home on a visit.
But this time my partner decided to invoke a mum's privilege to poke her nose into her offspring's business. The letter was from a company called Estate Research, “a firm of genealogists who specialise in tracing missing beneficiaries.” It was a form letter with his name inserted in another font at the top.
Intriguing! Our kid was in line for a windfall. At least that was the hint. Except the thing is, none of his or mine or his mum's family has died recently. The older generation have long since gone, with the exception of my partner's dad, still golfing his brains out well into his eighties.
At a bit of a loss and with an uneasy feeling that there was something we should know about, my partner went to our hometown newspaper website and searched under the family surname.
That was how we found out that her ex husband and my stepson's biological father had died in early April. Not only that, we were the first of any members of the wider family to find out.
My partner spent the rest of the evening on the phone: to our kid and to his uncle, who still lives near Stoke.
This wasn't the first time the deaceased made the papers. He was a long-term and sporadically violent paranoid schizophrenic whose various escapades and rampages had provided occasional entertainment for readers of the Evening Sentinel over the years. He was very well known indeed to the NHS, to the police and in the court system. He had been found dead at his flat some three weeks earlier. And the family only found out because a slightly dodgy looking genealogy company got my stepson's address wrong. Bear in mind as well that the approach this company took to telling my stepson his father had died was through hinting that he was going to be quids in.
We didn't bother contacting the company, but my stepson got straight in touch with the coroner, who said that they couldn't find a phone with contact addresses and so they had turned to the genealogists. These turned out to be a firm of lawyers who track down relatives of the unclaimed dead by arrangement in the hope of getting chargeable probate work. Apparently they and Stoke coroners office have some sort of arrangement.
It was true that he never had a phone. Phones tended to accentuate his paranoia. It's not true that he was some kind of lost soul, completely out of touch with family. His mother and father looked after himn while they were alive, to the extent that someone in his state could be looked after. His brother visited regularly, though a lot of the time he wouldn't open the door. His brother saw him about once every month.
And as I say, even the most cursory search of the relevant databases would have turned up contact details. Not that it was necessary to search. His brother went to his flat next day and found a piece of paper with his own address on it within three minutes of opening the door. It seems that the cops had just routinely turned over the job of finding next of kin to the hearse-chasers.
So why would that be? I suspect the reasons can be found in this HMIC report on Staffordshire Police and the “Funding Challenge” as the inspectorate chose to call it. Over the past five years, Staffordshire police have lost more than 20% of their cops, 17% of their PCSOs and 16% of their civilian support staff.
There's lots of upbeat, managerial jargonese stuff in that report about 'maintaining a strong presence on the frontline' and so on. But my guess is that the frontline has narrowed to the point where it doesn't include contacting next of kin of the deceased, at least if this involves any actual looking for them.
People think about austerity as removing discrete services. Something specific used to be available that has now been withdrawn. But austerity is also about eroding services to the point where the wider, social content of the job disappears. The service provided dwindles to a series of datapoints that can be used to make a 'business case'. One would expect the police to trace and contact relatives out of basic human decency. But there's no budget heading for that, at least not in a time of “funding challenges.”
Fantastic post. That last graph is killer.
Posted by: Barry Freed | May 01, 2015 at 05:32 PM
God how utterly grim. Take care of yourselves.
Posted by: dsquared | May 02, 2015 at 03:05 AM
What a terrible story. Condolences to the three of you, your stepson especially.
Posted by: Phil | May 03, 2015 at 08:35 PM
You should follow this up, Jamie, if you can bear it.
If this is in any way profitable on the police side of things then it's an outright scandal, the kind for which heads end up rolling. And even if no money is changing hands, it remains a terrible breach of public duty. The police handing over information they hold on private individuals, the basis of the transaction being the information's value as marketing leads ... it beggars belief, particularly given the sensitive and painful nature of the information involved.
Agree entirely with the sympathy expressed above - what a vile thing to have inflicted on you.
All the best.
Posted by: bert | May 04, 2015 at 06:21 PM
That is a really awful story, for all the reasons you say. I'm very sorry for you and your partner and hope things are okay.
Also, one hesitates to say it in the circumstances, that's a superbly written account. I think you'd be doing a public service if you got a slightly longer version in one of the papers or in one of the political magazines. Certainly I've read very few things as well written, and nothing better, this year.
Posted by: Dan Hardie | May 04, 2015 at 07:12 PM
Thanks all. I wrote this to get it off my chest. I don't want to take it any further unless the family want to, which is a possibility. Right now, stepson and the deceased's brother are arranging the funeral and waiting for the coroner's office to release the body. After that's all over with, we'll see, I guess.
Posted by: jamie | May 05, 2015 at 03:23 PM
A horrible story - but an insightful one too. Good wishes to you all.
Posted by: Larry T | May 05, 2015 at 08:02 PM
That's a crap place to be in Jamie. My sympathies. If you take it further, I suspect that the office of the Chief Coroner is the first place to go, rather than Staffs police, HMIC or IPCC: the coronial system is highly autonomous (as well as having massive regional variation) and uses (or not) its own officers rather than police for many investigative tasks. It's not accountable to the police, or indeed to anyone much, aside from the relatively new Chief Coroner and the common law.
Sometimes this state of affairs leads to good outcomes, such as Middleton (2004) which set up narrative verdicts for Article 2 inquests. Other times, as here, not so much.
Posted by: chris williams | May 06, 2015 at 01:30 AM
Hmmm- I am not sure I understand Chris W's point. Surely there was a responsibility on the part of the cops who went to the scene of death, and their immediate superiors, to make sure that there was a search for the details of next of kin- either a physical search of the flat or a look through the relevant databases, or both. From what Jamie says, it seems almost certain that either kind of search would have yielded next of kin details.
Once the details had been found, the police would have a pretty clear responsibility to locate the next of kin (again, not hard in this case, since they hadn't moved from their addresses or become homeless) and then inform them, face-to-face. The coroner would need to be informed of all this, but surely it wouldn't be the responsibility of the coroner's office to make the first attempt to trace and inform relatives of the deceased.
NB that this is an attempt to understand something that I don't, at the moment, fully understand at all, not an attempt to pick a fight with anyone online. Chris is an academic studying criminal justice and it's quite likely that he's making an important point that I haven't understood.
Posted by: Dan Hardie | May 06, 2015 at 05:22 PM
Or- just trying to clarify things a little more- yes, it looks like it was the coroner's service that gave the job to the hearse-chasers. But before they did that, there must have been a decision, surely, at a high level of Staffordshire Police, that the police don't look for next-of-kin in cases of non-suspicious death. That is something that needs to be taken up with the police- and, since they are likely to be extremely uncooperative, with MPs and the Home Office. I wonder how many other parts of the country there are where this kind of thing is going on?
Posted by: Dan Hardie | May 06, 2015 at 05:37 PM
Yes, what Dan said: Staffs police didn't do the next of kin job, which I think is a pretty definite sin of omission. The involvement of the hearse-chasers, the sin of commission seems like it's down to the coroners' service.
Point of info: I discovered late last year, owing to the sudden and untimely death of a friend's father, that Essex police do the proper job of quickly finding the next of kin of people who die suddenly but not suspiciously in their patch.
Posted by: chris williams | May 08, 2015 at 02:13 AM
Cheers, Chris- that's useful to know about Essex. If Staffs police, or any other constabulary, start pleading that they're only doing this because of the effects of austerity, I'd be strongly inclined to say that they were talking rubbish. You've got an organisation whose members are trained to search houses and persons, and which is set up to trace people, and they are outsourcing those jobs...? I really understand Jamie not wanting to take this further right now, but I hope someone at some point puts these questions to Chief Constable (temporary) Jane Sawyers.
Posted by: Dan Hardie | May 14, 2015 at 12:19 PM