Chris Kaba shooting: officer faces no misconduct hearing under new Home Office rules

The Met officer who fatally shot Chris Kaba in 2022 is unlikely to face misconduct proceedings after new Home Office rules lowered the burden of proof. The Kaba family have three weeks to challenge the decision.

Misconduct case against Chris Kaba's killer dropped under changed burden-of-proof rules

The Metropolitan Police firearms officer who shot dead Chris Kaba in south London in 2022 is unlikely to face gross misconduct proceedings, Sky News reports, following a change to the rules governing police disciplinary hearings introduced by the Home Office.

Firearms officer Martyn Blake — also identified during court proceedings as NX121 — shot Kaba, 24, in Streatham after Kaba used his car to ram through a police stop. A jury at the Old Bailey cleared Blake of murder. The Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC) had initially said he would still face a gross misconduct hearing, but the watchdog has now announced the case will be dropped.

The Kaba family have been given three weeks to challenge that decision.

The IOPC says the change stems from new Home Office regulations applied to misconduct hearings, which reduce the burden of proof for the defendant, bringing disciplinary proceedings into line with criminal cases. The key shift concerns the "honestly held belief" defence — a fundamental legal protection available to anyone who killed or harmed another person in a moment when they judged there was a threat to life. Blake relied on this defence at his criminal trial.

For several years, misconduct hearings had applied a stricter test: the honest belief had also to be "reasonable". That standard derived from a Supreme Court ruling in July 2023, in which judges determined that the civil test was the correct one in gross misconduct cases. The court concluded that disciplinary proceedings were partly about assessing the "reasonableness of mistakes", and that "citizens should not feel that unreasonable mistakes by the police are left unchecked".

Campaigners have characterised the "honestly held belief" standard as a "get off free card".

Temi Mwale, who represents the Kaba family, told Sky News: "We already have very little accountability, and they are going to make it so we have close to no chance of ever holding any officer accountable for any action ever again. If, for example, there are just a few bad apples, which they love to tell us, surely you would want to have very robust processes to get those people out."

The Home Office has taken a different position, arguing that officers operating under intense pressure should be permitted to make "genuine mistakes". Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley offered the example of a suspect reaching beneath their arm when they are known to carry a firearm and have been ordered to raise their hands — and where the suspect turns out to be unarmed. By aligning the standard of proof in criminal and misconduct cases, the government says it removes the need for two separate processes for the same incident.

Andrew Johnson, the IOPC's director of strategy and police, said: "We carefully considered the law change and its stated intent to address the perceived unfairness and lack of proportionality of the civil law test. We believe this position provides consistency across impacted cases and it is fair to officers who are facing potential dismissal for misconduct, which if it occurred now, would not amount to misconduct under the law."

The announcement is expected to be welcomed by firearms officers, while frustrating those who argue that police accountability mechanisms are already weighted against complainants.

Sky News has spent several months embedded with the Met's specialist firearms unit, MO19, for a documentary titled Firing Point, due to air later this year. Officers interviewed for the film, backed by Sir Mark Rowley, argued that decisions on when to open fire are made in split seconds, often on the basis of intelligence indicating a subject is dangerous, yet the subsequent scrutiny of those decisions can stretch over years.

Reporting from high-pressure MO19 callouts, Sky News observed the unpredictability of the unit's working environment and the frequency with which officers were called upon to administer first aid rather than discharge their weapons. Officers also described the risk posed by identification during a trial: criminal associates of a person they have shot could use their identity to locate them and their families. Legislation governing the identification of firearms officers is also being amended, so that names would only be made public upon conviction.

Blake's own case has remained unresolved for nearly four years. A separate firearms officer case took a decade to reach a conclusion. Sir Mark described such timescales as "inhumane", leaving both officers and victims' families in a prolonged state of uncertainty.

The Kaba family are widely expected to mount a legal challenge to the IOPC's decision within the three-week window they have been granted.

Source: Sky News