Police failed to execute a warrant to arrest a violent schizophrenic before he went on to kill three people in Nottingham, an inquiry has heard.
Valdo Calocane killed University of Nottingham students Barnaby Webber and Grace O’Malley-Kumar, both 19, as well as 65-year-old caretaker Ian Coates, and attempted to kill three more people in the June 2023 attacks.
The arrest warrant was issued more than nine months before the killings in September 2022, after Calocane did not attend a hearing at Nottingham Magistrates’ Court over accusations of assaulting an emergency worker.
He went on to assault two colleagues at a factory in Kegworth, Leicestershire, a month before the attacks, but was not arrested by Leicestershire Police at that time.
In an opening statement on behalf of the relatives of those killed in the attacks, Tim Moloney KC said any attempt by police to claim arresting Calocane would not have made a difference would be “cowardly, highly offensive and insulting”.
“If the police do say that executing a warrant for his arrest would have made no difference, then the people of Nottinghamshire and Leicestershire have a lot to worry about in relation to who is keeping them safe,” he added.
John Beggs KC, representing Nottinghamshire Police in the inquiry, said the force should have executed the warrant in a “timely manner” but “they failed to do so at all”.
Mr Beggs added: “The temporary deputy chief constable [Rob] Griffin described that failure in his statement as, I quote, a serious, systemic, operational failure on the part of Nottinghamshire Police.
“He recognised the seriousness of what happened, or rather, what didn’t happen, and the distress it caused. He offered, and we repeat, an unreserved apology to the families of the deceased and the survivors.”
Mr Beggs asked the chair of the inquiry to consider whether it is realistic Calocane would have been prosecuted, convicted and imprisoned at that time while he was suffering with mental illness.
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Mr Beggs said Nottinghamshire Police believe the force “did their reasonable best” to manage 10-11 incidents with Calocane before the killings, which were “mostly responding to relatively low-level complaints of antisocial behaviour”.
He said the incidents, one of which saw Calocane put a university flatmate into a headlock and caused a woman to jump out of her window, were not “in any way unusual or remarkable for the police to have to deal with”.
He said paranoid schizophrenia is not a condition police officers are trained to manage and added: “Society’s answers to these public safety risks, posed by some paranoid schizophrenics, lie principally not with the police, but with the NHS and other clinical services, where judicious use of the mental health legislation may be required.”
Hugh Davies KC, representing two Leicestershire Police officers who attended the incident at the warehouse weeks before the fatal stabbings, said an officer did not view records of Calocane’s previous encounters with police, but if she had done so “she would have been able to discover that VC [Valdo Calocane] had an outstanding warrant for his arrest”.
Mr Davies added: “The officers have accepted these shortcomings candidly. On behalf of Leicestershire Police, the chief constable apologises for these shortcomings.”
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Calocane admitted manslaughter by diminished responsibility and attempted murder and was sentenced to an indefinite hospital order in January 2024.
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The inquiry will hear evidence until June this year and the chair will produce a report and provide recommendations in 2027.
