The killing of Chris Kaba in September 2022 will now face no further formal scrutiny of the officer responsible. That is the operative consequence of a decision announced by the Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC), confirming it will not pursue disciplinary proceedings against Metropolitan Police firearms officer Martyn Blake — a conclusion made possible not by new evidence, but by a deliberate change in the law.
A sequence engineered toward impunity
The facts of the shooting are not in serious dispute. On the night of 5 September 2022, Kaba — an unarmed 24-year-old, weeks away from becoming a father — was driving a vehicle that police had connected to a prior shooting in Brixton. Officers boxed in his car near Streatham, south London. He attempted to reverse and then to move forward. Sergeant Blake, positioned outside the vehicle, fired a single round through the windscreen, striking Kaba in the forehead. He died at the scene.
Blake was charged with murder and tried at the Old Bailey in 2024. The jury acquitted him, accepting his account that he believed a fellow officer faced imminent lethal danger. Two other firearms officers testified that they had been on the verge of firing themselves. That acquittal, while legally significant, did not by itself preclude disciplinary proceedings — a distinction that matters, because criminal and professional accountability standards are not identical, and were not identical by design.
What foreclosed the disciplinary route was a subsequent regulatory intervention. Following Blake’s acquittal, then-Home Secretary Yvette Cooper announced changes to the legal framework governing police use of force. The IOPC’s threshold for initiating misconduct proceedings was raised to match the standard applied in criminal prosecutions. The effect was immediate and specific: the disciplinary case against Blake, already paused pending the criminal trial, could no longer meet the newly elevated bar. The IOPC confirmed as much, stating that it had considered both its revised policy and representations from Kaba’s family and from Blake before withdrawing proceedings.
Accountability reframed as persecution
The institutional response to this outcome reveals how thoroughly the terms of the debate have shifted. Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley described the IOPC’s decision as “a milestone moment to reset a police accountability system that is out of balance,” adding that he worried the scrutiny of officers was crushing “the spirit of good officers” and thereby harming the public. Paula Dodds, chairwoman of the Metropolitan Police Federation, welcomed the decision as one that would be celebrated “by all police officers across London,” and expressed relief that Blake could “continue to serve the public without this hanging over him.”
These statements are worth examining carefully, not for their sincerity, which is not in question, but for what they normalise. The framing positions four years of legal process — a criminal trial and the prospect of a professional conduct hearing — as an ordeal inflicted upon Blake rather than as the minimum procedural response to a killing. Kaba’s family, by contrast, receives acknowledgment only in the register of grief: the IOPC’s director of engagement Amanda Rowe noted that “our thoughts remain with Chris Kaba’s family,” a formulation that is sympathetic in tone and empty in consequence.
The asymmetry is not incidental. It reflects a structural tendency within British policing and its oversight architecture to treat accountability mechanisms as threats to institutional function rather than as guarantees of public trust. When the Commissioner argues that the accountability system is “out of balance,” he is making a claim about whose interests the system should prioritise — and the answer, implicit in everything that followed Kaba’s death, is not those of the people most exposed to the consequences of armed policing.
The coroner’s inquest as the last remaining avenue
With disciplinary proceedings formally withdrawn, a coroner must now determine whether to hold an inquest into Kaba’s death. That process, if it proceeds, would at minimum establish a public record of the circumstances. It would not, however, carry the power to impose professional sanctions or to revisit the question of whether Blake’s conduct met the standards expected of an armed officer operating under rules of engagement that exist precisely because lethal force demands the most exacting justification.
What the Kaba case ultimately demonstrates is not that any single institution failed catastrophically, but that the architecture of accountability was reshaped, in real time and in response to a specific case, to produce a particular outcome. A regulatory change announced after an acquittal, calibrated to eliminate the remaining avenue of professional scrutiny, is not a neutral reform. It is a policy choice — one that signals, with considerable clarity, which lives the system is organised to protect.