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Refugees: Tightening the Screw 131
Group 4 guard Caryn Mitchell-Hill said she had been alone in a corridor
when a defendant took her by the shoulders and said ‘Where are you going
white bitch?’; ‘I put my knee up, aiming for the groin area. In all honesty, I
don’t know whether I made contact.’ Shown a video of herself at the same
time in a different area with two other guards, she refused to identify herself
though she identified the other two, surmised that she might have been
another guard, finally admitted it must have been her but then suggested it
must have been another day; ‘at no point did I end up in the dining room
area’, she insisted. Various stories were told by different guards about Chris
Barry, a 20-stone guard who collapsed in a corridor. He was said to have
had a plastic bottle full of a chemical substance thrown at him, or been hit
on the head by it, or not to have been hit at all, or to have fallen as he was
being dragged through a door by a colleague. Barry himself said his shirt was
soaked by a chemical and torn, that he was repeatedly hit and punched, and
that he was ‘concussed’. Videos showed him a few minutes later walking
along in a clean and dry shirt, and then on a roof. Tim Allen, filmed on the
roof with him, nevertheless continued to deny strenuously that Chris Barry
had been on the roof.
Group 4 admitted to doing some damage themselves. Two of them, Mo
Stone (stand-in supervisor) and Paul Bean (now a prison officer) admitted
they had hit detainees with their batons on the head (although they had
aimed for their arms as they were trained to do). Stone said he had not sought
to discover who he had hit or whether the person was seriously hurt, had
not made a report, and that: ‘I don’t regret doing it, but I regret that it
happened.’ Bean said he had drawn his baton because he had been hit by a
dumb-bell and was ‘scared’. In his police statement he had said that he drew
his baton before he was struck. John Allen, supervisor, was questioned about
the ‘control and restraint’ techniques used in the removal. Asked whether
the detainee was held by the neck, he said ‘No.’ The defence then produced
a video of the removal which showed the detainee being held by the neck.
John Allen said: ‘Like everybody who passes their driving test, they don’t do
it perfectly every time. ... It was not text book.’
Group 4 did some material damage too. Mo Stone was asked by David
Bright whether he personally had smashed a telephone in the Ladies’ Day
Room. ‘I did not.’ Asked whether if witnesses gave evidence that he had done
so, he would call them liars, he said: ‘I will openly admit that I did take one
of the phones apart. I was worried that detainees would communicate with
the outside world. ... Some of them might have got back into the building,
they could be used as a means of communication.’ He did not tell the police
he had done this. Told he had not dismantled the phone, but smashed it,
using his baton, he said he used the baton ‘to pull the cable out of its socket’.
Four of them were ‘trying to do it’. Later Terry Morley admitted he had
‘smashed the handset off the telephone’ because detainees were using it.
Asked why there was no reference to this incident in his police statement,
he shrugged. Asked why he thought photographs were taken of the damage,