Woman who lay dead in London flat for 2 years | Hacker News Reader

Woman who lay dead in London flat for 2 years

theguardian.com

20 pointsnigerian198118 comments

> despite repeated attempts by neighbours to persuade the police to break down her door and check on her welfare

The matter would've been resolved within minutes if they claimed there were drugs within the flat.

I too found that the most distressing part was that the police pretended to have talked to her in October 2020 after her death but that the Directorate of Professional Standards ruled there was no need for further inquiry into what the police did. Then again the English public has only itself to blame. It has always been the Tory playbook to make public services as inefficient as possible before defunding them. You get what you vote for.

This is in London so I assume Met police, which PCC is effectively the Mayor. So if you want to bring party politics into it, the Mayor has been Labour since 2016.

While this is factual, the majority of Met police's funding comes from the Home office, which the Tory controls, and they've been in power since 2010.

Issues of standards are not really depending on funding but on organisation and leadership.

The issue mentioned above, and many others that have made the news, are down to the Met police management and leadership, which is not supposed to be political. The Mayor is effectively the Police and Crime Commisioner so he has a direct involvement, and again is currently Labour if we want to assign political 'blame'.

My point is that immediately blaming the Tories for everything and anyhting because "that's what you get when you vote Tory" is a knee jerk reaction.

> Issues of standards are not really depending on funding

This is clearly not true, otherwise we could just cut all the funding and maintain the standards as they are.

We're discussing standards or professional conduct.

Funding gets you more police officers but their conduct depends on management and leadership, not on extra funding (at least as long as funding allows for decent salaries).

In this case, and again others that have hit the news, funding is quite irrelevant, the issue is organisational.

That's simply not true. Being very involved with Neighbourhood Watch and a CBV for the Met myself, I can tell you how many times residents reported drug dealings (with legitimate proofs and intel) vs the number of time the police actually did anything.

There are 4 PCSOs, 1 PS and 1 PO covering over 17,000 household where I live. Effective policing is simply not possible, drug related or not.

Great idea, tell the cops that the building you live is a drug den. I'm sure they'll just pop the lock open and be on their merry way, never to bother residents again.

I thought this would be about a different woman in the UK, who also died alone and wasn't found for 2 years.

Very similar stories, except the woman in this earlier case was discovered in 2006, and was only 40. Her rent was apparently paid via automatic deposit, and the landlord only had the police come by when after 2 years, her payments failed due to insufficient balance.

Incredibly tragic story.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2006/apr/14/audreygillan.ukne...

> Their investigations reveal that the last certain evidence that Sheila was alive was in August 2019, when she paid her rent by debit card to Peabody for the last time.

How in the world did this individual remain deceased in their flat for two years when rent had gone unpaid for the entire duration? Baffling!

If you're *that* worried about your neighbour and can't get the housing association or the police to break down the door, why don't you just break down the door?

Because then you’re probably charged with trespassing or some crap that’s not worth the trouble. And if you didn’t get charged with something, someone else would break into a place knocking down a door saying they thought their neighbor was dead

That's a very unlikely scenario, to be honest. If you'd found a dead person in their house, the police are not really going to care that you kicked the door in.

In my experience, police rarely go by “common sense” and rather follow whatever flowchart of rules they have to follow and bend them just enough so they don’t run into a problem down the line. All I’m saying is that this very concern I as an individual have, could be a reason of why someone wouldn’t knock down a door. If they are asking the police to do it they obviously don’t want to do it themselves.

In my experience, I'd have had that door open at the first hint of a decomposing body smell, but I guess I live in a safer country or something.

I'd put up with the smell potentially but these people reported having to clear their flats of maggots (!!!)

Baffling case

The article mentions that this block of buildings had many immigrant families, who likely don't want any trouble with the cops. As the Nigerian man quoted in the article says:

“She would always greet my children, but I didn’t know her name and I never went inside her flat. In this country, you don’t communicate with your neighbours.”

Reply on news.ycombinator.com