‘Covid was unlike anything we’d ever dealt with before’

Despite our county’s breath-taking scenery and generally low crime rate, the local news agenda has sadly at times been dominated by crimes of unspeakable horror.

Child murders, a mass shooting, organised crime... all have at times been tackled by our police force.

One name that is likely to feature repeatedly in any future accounts of serious crime in Cumbria - because he helped bring so many criminals to justice - is Andy Slattery.

The county’s third most-senior police officer, the 53-year-old has led many of the county’s most serious criminal investigations – including that into mass-killer Derrick Bird, whose 2010 shooting spree left 12 people dead.

Yet the final phase of Slattery’s remarkable 30-year career has been dominated not by crime, but by an invisible killer: Covid 19.

After more than three years as Cumbria’s Assistant Chief Constable, Slattery is about to retire.

A sociology graduate, who once worked in outdoor pursuits shops and briefly considered a teaching career, Slattery spent years volunteering with Keswick Mountain Rescue Team, regularly helping people in need.

It was that experience — helping people in crisis on the fells — that led him to his career in policing.

He was 23 when he joined Cumbria police in 1991. Looking backover his career, he reflects on 30 years of service, witnessing both the best and the worst of humanity.

Yet nothing he worked on can compare to the pandemic.

Almost as soon as he became Assistant Chief Constable, Slattery became chairman of the county’s Local Resilience Forum (LRF), which brings together agencies whose task is to respond to major emergencies.

As the pandemic unfolded, the forum launched a Strategic Coordination Group, its task being to devise targeted responses to the emergency whenever needed and wherever needed.

“Pandemics were the number one risk on the National Risk Register,” he said.

“Flu was always the most-likely scenario. We don’t know the reasons, but Cumbria was one of the first places to have Covid cases – and we were one of the first counties to declare a major incident.”

“We did that on the day that the World Health Organisation declared it as a pandemic.

“It quickly became clear that Covid 19 wasn’t the flu. It was a much more serious disease — more transmissible and, unfortunately, more likely to lead to death.

“As it developed from a public health issue into a national emergency, it became apparent that if things continued as they were going in Italy and other parts of the world, our NHS would be overwhelmed.

"That changed it from being a public health response to an emergency response.”

That was the point – in March last year – when Slattery took over leading the county’s emergency response group, working alongside Cumbria’s public health chief, Colin Cox.

“We had a pandemic flu plan - but covid was much more serious, with much graver implications.”

All public servants faced a delicate balancing act: how to warn people generally about the serious danger Covid 19 but without causing mass panic.

Looking backon the early weeks of the crisis, Slattery pulls no punches. “The planning assumptions we had could easily foresee — in a reasonable worst-case scenario — between 4,000 to 6,000 people losing their lives [in Cumbria].

“Fortunately, many fewer have died during the pandemic — but there was a real responsibility on our group. It really was as serious as that. If we didn’t do the right things at the right time, more people could have lost their lives.

“It was an enormous responsibility.”

Lives depended on Slattery and his colleagues – in the NHS, local councils, and other public agencies – getting their response right as Covid 19 rampaged across the world.

Invisible, deadly, and insidious, the virus was spreading in those early days like an out-of-control forest fire. “It was a daunting task,” said Slattery. “We just didn’t know where the virus was.

"In those early weeks, we didn’t have the same Covid surveillance that we have today that lets us know where the cases are. We didn’t have that level of detail.

“The first we knew about cases was when people arrived at hospital, gravely ill, many of them passing away. We were almost blind to where the threat was.

“We were too far down the line: when you’re dealing with people who are already gravely ill in hospital, the virus is already spreading in the community.

"The test-and-trace system that we had was quickly overcome by the number of cases.

“We weren’t getting ahead of the virus in any way. We were simply dealing with the consequences.”

Ultimately, in the weeks before the vaccine rollout, the strategy was simple: save lives by ensuring the NHS could continue operating effectively. How close did Cumbria’s NHS come to being overwhelmed?

“It came very close,” is Slattery’s blunt reply.

“It was the government announcing the lockdown that stopped the health system being overwhelmed. Had a lockdown not come in, we would certainly have seen many, many more deaths, across Cumbria and the rest of the country.”

Slattery and his colleagues worked long days – at times up to 16 hours – as they battled to keep supplies of PPE (personal protective equipment) and oxygen pouring into hospitals and care homes.

He feels Cumbria’s past-experience of responding to disasters — such as the variousfloods and thefoot and mouth outbreak — helped prepare our county for the pandemic.

“We’re used to dealing with emergencies, but the breadth and depth of this was beyond anything any of us had ever before dealt with.”

Understandably, he is proud of how Cumbria coped. “It was a real team effort and I think we’ve worked really effectively, both locally and nationally with our national partners,” he said.

Though Slattery’s career as a senior detective often put him in charge of investigating all mann of horrific crimes, he says the cases that most disturbed him involved children.

They included the shocking murder of Carlisle teenager Jordan Watson.

Helped by two pals, the 14-year-old’s killer — obsessed with Jordan’s girlfriend and intensely jealous — stabbed him to death in a graveyard. Slattery is staggered that every-day squabbles can trigger such extreme violence.

Perhaps the most complex case he worked, he says, was the gangland-related killing in 2003 of Londoner John Harvey - a 59-year-old former market trader, shot through the head, set on fire and dumped in a field near the Killington Lake Services area next to the M6 in south Cumbria.

The murder had resulted from the souring of a Spanish property deal. “I didn’t join the police to arrest criminals,” observes Slattery.

“I just wanted to help people in need; and for a police officer, there can be no greater privilege than to lead a major investigation - such as a murder inquiry - and to get justice for people who have suffered in the most horrible way.

“The families want justice; they want answers - to know why that terrible thing happened to their family member.

"People need that to be able to move on with their lives and get beyond a tragedy like that. They need to know how and why their love one was taken from them.

"It’s a big responsibility to lead a murder investigation, but not like on TV and you don’t do it on your own; you’re literally coordinating and managing a huge machine.

"You make the policy and decide what lines of investigation you’ll follow and where you’ll put your resources.

“It gives people comfort to know somebody has been held accountable.”  As for the future, Slattery — a keen fell-runner with a liking for "ultra distance" events — hopes to do more of that.

It's a hobby that has helped him unwind and forget the pressures of the job. He will also start a new job as a security chief at BAE Systems in Barrow.

Looking over the current state of policing, Slattery speaks with feeling about the recent trend for slating modern police forces for events that happened decades ago - and yet continue to somehow taint the reputations of forces that have changed.

“Terrible things have happened in the past but today’s officers weren’t born when some of these events happened," he says.

"Today's officers can't be made responsible for things that happened before they were born; and there’s a confusion between fact and fiction: what I see in the TV drama Line of Duty bears no resemblance to policing today.

“Today’s police officers are bright young people who are here to serve the community. There’s institutional humanity and institutional bravery in policing.

"That’s a fact; that’s today’s policing.”

Of his own policing life, he adds: “I’m going to really miss it.

"It’s a difficult job to leave, but it’s time to hand it on to the next generation of police officers. I’ve had a fantastic career: varied, interesting, at times traumatic and stressful, but also rewarding. I wouldn’t have changed it all.”

Chief Constable Michelle Skeer described Slattery as "an outstanding" public servant.

She said: “Cumbria Constabulary has been very fortunate to count Andy amongst its ranks for the past three decades and, as he retires, the loss of an officer of such experience, professionalism and integrity will be hugely felt.

“He has successfully led some of the more challenging criminal investigations within the Constabulary as he has been a Senior Investigating Officer and worked within criminal investigation for the majority of his career.

“However, it’s been his most recent service as a chief officer and, in particular, his service to the people of Cumbria over the last 18 months, during which time he led the county’s multi-agency Coronavirus effort, which cannot be overstated.

“His dedication and professionalism during the pandemic have been of the highest quality.

“Andy has been an outstanding public servant, colleague and friend. I congratulate him on his retirement and wish him well for the future.”