Gate death locks police into £30,000 fine

Prosecutions and Claims |
12.08.2007

A bypassed safety system that led to a St Patrick's Day accident in which a fleeing man was crushed by police station gates has landed the Office of the Chief Constable of Northern Ireland with a £30,000 fine.

Kieran Connolly, a 28-year-old joiner, died after heavy mechanical security gates at Strabane police station closed on him on 17 March 2003 as he tried to get out of the station grounds.

The accident happened in the early hours when a civilian security guard saw a crowd chasing a man along the street. To try to protect the man, the guard opened the gates and a reserve constable pulled him through the opening. As several of the pursuers followed into the grounds, the guard operated the control button to close the gates.

Connolly, who was one of the pursuers, saw a gap of about two feet and tried to move sideways through the gap back towards the street. Unfortunately, he became trapped between the leading edges of the gates as they closed.

Omagh Crown Court heard that the sliding security vehicle gates had fixed rubber safety edges (with wired safety sensors) on the leading edges of each side, which should have stopped the gates if anyone struck them. A Health and Safety Executive of Northern Ireland (HSENI) investigation later found that someone had tampered with the wiring, bypassing the safety device.

Although a subcontractor had discovered the problem as far back as August 2002, for some reason no one had fixed it. A few months later, the closing gates hit a reserve constable, who suffered bruised ribs. A work form wrongly recorded the fault as a safety button failure.

Again, on 13 January 2003, an engineer commented on the disabled sensors and a police representative contacted the relevant contractor. But when the workman arrived, he fixed a leak from hydraulic piping instead of looking at the bypassed safety strips.

The Office of the Chief Constable pleaded guilty to failing to take reasonable care of visitors to the workplace, breaching Article 5 of the Health and Safety at Work (Northern Ireland) Order 1978.

Sentencing on 15 June, Judge Hart acknowledged that the police service had taken steps to address the faulty gates, but said that "it should have carried out more rigorous investigations to ensure that subcontractors had remedied the problem".