West Midlands Police Officer Convicted of Assault

On the evening of June 16, 2024, four West Midlands Police officers arrived at a flat in Halesowen to respond to a domestic incident. A check revealed that a man at the address was wanted for failing to attend court. He was restrained and escorted into a communal stairwell. What followed next was not a breakdown in procedure at the margins — it was an act of violence committed by an officer against the very population policing is mandated to protect.

As the man was being removed, a woman approached Calum Brand, then 27 and a serving constable, from behind. Brand grabbed her by the hair, pinned her down by the neck, and elbowed her in the side of the head. She sustained facial injuries. She was arrested on suspicion of assaulting a police officer. She was later released without charge.

Brand’s account, offered in interview, was that the woman had struck his back and that he feared she might be carrying a weapon. He characterised his response as appropriate and proportionate. Nottingham Magistrates Court, having examined the evidence, disagreed. On July 15, Brand was found guilty of assault by beating — a charge he had contested. On September 7, he was handed a community order requiring 150 hours of unpaid work.

The Independent Office for Police Conduct opened a formal investigation following a mandatory conduct referral submitted by West Midlands Police on July 4, 2025. Investigators reviewed video footage, took statements from officers present, conducted a formal interview with Brand, and scrutinised the force’s own training materials, internal policies, and operational guidance. The scope of that review matters: it was not simply an assessment of one officer’s conduct in isolation, but an examination of whether institutional frameworks had failed to prevent or detect it.

IOPC Director of Engagement Derrick Campbell was precise in his conclusions. The situation, he acknowledged, was difficult: the man being detained was drunk, largely incoherent, and physically resistant. But those circumstances, Campbell stated, did not justify what Brand did. “The woman did not pose a genuine threat to PC Brand and, to that point, had not shown any aggression towards the officers,” Campbell said. “There was no justification for the level of force he used and no attempt to de-escalate the situation.” The framing is worth dwelling on: the woman had approached officers during a chaotic scene, possibly to intervene on behalf of someone she knew. She was met with a hair grab, a neck pin, and an elbow to the head.

Campbell’s statement carried an additional weight that should not be allowed to pass unremarked. “The woman suffered facial injuries at the hands of an officer who should have been there to help protect and safeguard her.” That sentence encapsulates the specific harm of police violence in domestic settings — not merely an assault, but a betrayal of the protective function that justifies the grant of coercive power in the first place. Officers responding to domestic incidents frequently encounter women who have already been subjected to violence. The state’s response to that violence is, in this instance, to add to it.

Following Brand’s criminal conviction, a misconduct hearing convened by West Midlands Police on September 2 found gross misconduct proven. The finding rested on the professional standards breach of discreditable conduct, grounded in the criminal conviction itself. The panel determined that Brand would have been dismissed without notice had he not already resigned from the force. He has been placed on the barred list, which permanently prohibits him from working in policing anywhere in England and Wales.

The barred list entry forecloses a return to the profession. The community order imposes a tangible, if modest, sanction. What neither instrument addresses is the structural question that cases of this kind consistently raise: how an officer capable of this response was deployed to a domestic violence call-out, what supervision existed in that stairwell, and whether the force’s own training and policy frameworks were adequate to the situation. The IOPC investigation reviewed those materials. Its published conclusions do not indicate that any institutional failing was identified — a silence that is itself a form of finding, and one that warrants scrutiny.

The woman at the centre of this case was not seriously hurt, in the clinical sense that her injuries did not require hospitalisation. But she was injured by a police officer during a call-out she did not summon, in a stairwell she did not choose, for an intervention that the courts and the IOPC both concluded was unjustified. The criminal justice system has recorded that fact. Whether the institution that employed Calum Brand has drawn the appropriate lessons from it remains, for now, an open question.