2010 Northumbria Police manhunt

Raoul Thomas Moat (17 June 1973 – 10 July 2010) was a panel beater, bouncer, and tree surgeon from Newcastle upon Tyne, Tyne and Wear. His mother reportedly had bipolar disorder, and he and his half-brother Angus were mostly brought up by their grandmother as their mother spent much time in mental hospitals. Prior to the shootings, Moat had attempted to get psychiatric help. Between February and July 2010, Moat served an eighteen-week sentence in Durham Prison for assaulting a nine-year-old relative. A former bodybuilder, Moat was said to be (1.90 m) tall and approximately 17 st (108 kg or 238 lb), who was prone to "eruptions of anger". He had a young daughter with his ex-girlfriend, Samantha Stobbart, who was 22 at the time of the shootings, and two other children from a previous relationship. Although Moat had been arrested twelve times resulting in charges for seven separate offences, he only had one previous conviction for common assault. Moat apparently held a grudge against the police, whom he blamed for the collapse of his business, claiming that he had "lost everything". While in prison, Stobbart lied to him that her new partner was a police officer because she was frightened of him. Moat is known to have posted threats to police and others on social media shortly after being released from prison. He made further detailed threats in two subsequent letters and several phone calls to police stating he had no intention of harming the public but would continue to shoot police officers until he was dead. ==Events==

First shootings Moat was released from Durham Prison on 1 July and allegedly arrived in the early hours of 3 July 2010 at a house in Birtley where Stobbart and her new partner, 29-year-old karate instructor Chris Brown, were visiting. Brown had moved to the area from Windsor, Berkshire, around six months previously. According to Moat, he crouched under the open window of the living room for an hour and a half, listening to Stobbart and Brown mocking him. Police responded by saying they were taking him seriously and that Brown had no connection to the police. They urged him to hand himself in for the sake of his three children. Death of victim Just over 18 months after the shooting, David Rathband, who had struggled to come to terms with his blindness, was found hanged at his Blyth home on 29 February 2012, having died by suicide. His funeral service at Stafford Crematorium was attended by family and fellow police officers on 16 March 2012. In June, he had been due to carry the Olympic torch as part of the 2012 Summer Olympics torch relay. His daughter, Mia, who replaced him, chose to run blindfolded in tribute to her father. Rathband had spearheaded the Blue Lamp Foundation, which was started by him and his identical twin Darren whilst he was recovering from his injuries. The charity assists emergency staff injured in the line of duty. Police response The manhunt became one of the largest in the UK. A total of 160 armed officers were deployed to find Moat, which represented approximately 10% of those available in England and Wales at any one time. (Of the 6,780 authorised firearms officers in England and Wales at the time, a quarter would be available for duty at any one time due to shift patterns.) Under mutual aid arrangements, Northumbria Police is able to call on reinforcements from other forces by paying the donor force for the assistance given. Letter, sightings and appeals On 5 July, fearful of more shootings by Moat, police mounted a raid with armed officers, dogs and a helicopter on a house in North Kenton, and also detained a man from Sunderland, although neither action found Moat. Sam Stobbart's half-sister reported that Moat had updated his Facebook status with a "hit list" which included her and other family members. "He's said he will take out any police that get in his way". At a press conference on the evening of 5 July, police revealed that they believed Moat had kidnapped two men at the time of the shootings. They also requested this information be subject to a media blackout. In a press conference on the morning of 6 July, the police said they believed they had been dealing with a "complex, fast-moving hostage situation". Rothbury On the morning of 6 July, a house in Wrekenton was raided by police and a man was detained. Following an appeal for sightings of a black Lexus IS 200 SE saloon, bearing the registration V322 HKX, believed to have been used by Moat, the car was found near Rothbury. A , air exclusion zone and a ground exclusion zone was set up by police, and two men were found walking along a road and were initially thought to be the hostages, but were later arrested. Police also said that officers from six forces had been called into the area, a large number of armed response officers were in their ranks. Armed officers and dogs stormed buildings on a disused farm called Pike House after a tip-off from the landowners, who said that one of the boards on the windows of the derelict building had been removed, but no suspect was found. The police repeated an appeal to Moat to give himself up, and urged him not to leave his children with distressing memories of their father. Further appeals and reward In another press conference on the morning of 7 July, the police said they believed that Moat was still at large mostly likely hiding in the surrounding countryside in the Rothbury area. Within a tent thought to have been used by Moat at a secluded spot in Cartington, an eight-page letter to Sam Stobbart from Moat was found. In it, Moat continued to assert that Brown was connected to the police, again denied by Detective Chief Superintendent Adamson. The police called in TV survival expert Ray Mears to help track Moat's movements. At the later press conferences, the police confirmed the 5 July chip shop robbery was a positive sighting of Moat. Northumbria Police offered a £10,000 reward for information that would lead to Moat's arrest. The police announced on 8 July that two more men were arrested in Rothbury the previous day. It had been previously reported that Moat was targeting only the police, and not the public, after his initial note stating that he would not stop killing police until he was dead. Discovery and death On 9 July, a cordon was set up around the National Trust's Cragside estate in the parish of Cartington. News agencies reported that an individual resembling Moat had been surrounded by police, and was holding a gun to his head. With a cordon established on the north bank of the River Coquet, close to a rainwater culvert which runs under the village, police negotiated with the suspect, who was holding a sawn-off shotgun to his neck. Food and water were reportedly brought to Moat during the confrontation, and his best friend Tony Laidler was escorted to the scene by authorities in an attempt to persuade him to surrender. It was later revealed that Gascoigne had been under the influence of alcohol and drugs. It has been rumoured that Gascoigne also wanted to persuade Moat to "go fishing" with him, and that he had mistaken Moat for his "friend". At approximately 1:15 am on 10 July, news agencies reported that at least one shot had been fired in the vicinity of the stand-off. At 1:34 am, a police spokesman stated that "a shot or shots" had been fired and the suspect had a gunshot wound. It was reported by multiple sources that police jumped on the suspect, and that police and an ambulance were seen moving toward the site. A statement from Northumbria Police said that no shots were fired by police officers and that the suspect had shot himself; no officers were injured in the stand-off. ==Inquest==

On 13 July an inquest was opened and adjourned into Moat's death in Newcastle upon Tyne. A Home Office spokesman said the XREP Tasers were "currently subject to testing by the Home Office Scientific Development Branch". In September 2010, it was found that Pro-Tect Systems, the company that had supplied the Tasers, had breached its licence by supplying the "experimental" weapons directly to the police. The Home Secretary, Theresa May, subsequently revoked the firm's licence after confirming that the Tasers were never officially approved for use. On 1 October 2010, former policeman Peter Boatman, a director of Pro-Tect systems, was found dead at his home. The incident was treated by police as a presumed suicide; they referred the matter to the coroner. In September 2011 an inquest jury returned a verdict of suicide. The IPCC then issued a report clearing the police of wrongdoing in firing a Taser at Moat. ==Associated arrests==

A number of arrests were made both during the hunt for Moat, and after his death, as part of police attempts to capture anyone who had any involvement in Moat's offences. The first arrest was of a man from Sunderland, who was arrested in North Kenton on 5 July but later released without charge, At around 6pm on 7 July, police arrested two further suspects in the case, "in the vicinity of Rothbury on suspicion of assisting an offender". Police said the following day, "Both men are currently in custody and we are pursuing a range of inquiries in relation to this matter." They were later released on bail. Following Moat's death, three more people were arrested on 13 July for allegedly assisting him, with three men detained at two addresses in Newcastle upon Tyne and one in Gateshead. This brought the number of arrests in relation to the manhunt to ten, with police unable to rule out further arrests in future. On 14 July, another three men were arrested during the day on suspicion of helping Moat; it brought the number of arrests to 13. The following day, police arrested two men aged 28 and 36 in the Newcastle area on suspicion of assisting Moat, later releasing them on bail. This brought the total number of arrests to 15, with two charged, and eight released on bail. Convictions Karl Ness, 26, was given three concurrent life sentences totalling a minimum tariff of 40 years for the murder of Christopher Brown, conspiracy to murder and the attempted murder of PC David Rathband. His friend Qhuram Awan received two concurrent life sentences for conspiracy to murder and the attempted murder of PC David Rathband and will serve at least 20 years in jail. Both men were also sentenced to seven years for robbery and Ness was given five years for a firearms offence. Ness, from Dudley in North Tyneside, was with Moat on the night he shot his ex-girlfriend Samantha Stobbart and killed her new boyfriend Chris Brown whom Ness had believed at the time was a policeman. ==Media coverage==

Copycat killings Moat may have been inspired by the events in the Cumbria shootings which occurred one month before his rampage, when taxi driver Derrick Bird killed 12 people and injured 11 others in a day-long shooting spree. The "saturation-level news coverage" of the Cumbria shootings may have triggered Moat given the timing of his killings. Research by American forensic psychiatrist Park Dietz has demonstrated that, in a country the size of the United States, such coverage "causes, on average, one more mass murder in the next two weeks". News organisations were accused of being more concerned with revenue than the harm their headlines might cause. Sensationalism The media was also accused of glamorising Moat with descriptions of him such as "having a hulking physique" and being "a notorious hard man", while providing less coverage about his victims. Belfast Telegraph observed that by 8 July the manhunt was continuing to receive "saturation coverage on radio and television". The Guardian also wrote that, to the news media, Moat had become "a valuable commodity, his actions tracked by millions". Following Moat's death, his estranged older brother Angus described the media coverage as "the whipping up to what could be a public execution in modern Britain". In The Daily Telegraph, Theodore Dalrymple wrote: The late Mr Moat was a brutal sentimentalist. He used the extremity of his behaviour to persuade himself that he felt something – supposedly love – very deeply, and that this was the motive and justification of his behaviour. Surely, if he was prepared to kill not only his ex-girlfriend Samantha Stobbart, but also her new lover and anyone who looked like him, he must have loved her very much? He also persuaded himself that he was the victim of this terrible episode. "They took it all from me", he said, "kids, freedom, house, then Sam and Chanel [his daughter]. Where could I go from there?" It was only natural that he, an innocent, or at least a man not seriously at fault ("I've never punched her but have slapped her"), should have taken a gun and killed one and injured two: any man treated in this way would have done the same. What is alarming is that substantial numbers of people take this self-serving sentimental nonsense seriously, at least if the thousands of postings on the Moat Facebook tribute page, which was deleted on Thursday, were anything to go by. The logic seems to be as follows: Mr Moat called himself a victim; victims are heroes; therefore Mr Moat was a hero. The demand for coverage resulted in the news desk at AOL mistaking a satirical article about the manhunt's media coverage for a genuine news report, posting: As officers and dogs move in, citizens from around the isle are anticipating a swift and gruesome conclusion to the national drama. Some are even clamouring for it, calling it the best live entertainment they’ve seen in some time ... Families have been collecting children from schools and nurseries throughout the day so they could watch together, as expectations reached fever pitch that a violent firearms confrontation was imminent. Over 800 schools have closed across the country as a result. The original author of the spoof article, Robin Brown, commented: "Maybe it's just a sign that, in these information-saturated days, even the news is beyond satire?" Press blackout request On 8 July the police requested a news blackout, under the terms of a voluntary agreement between the Association of Chief Police Officers and the media, about Moat's personal life as they believed such coverage would provoke him to kill more people. This followed the discovery of a dictaphone in Moat's tent near Wagtail Farm, which contained a four-hour-long message to the police. In it Moat revealed that he had been following the media coverage in newspapers and had been "upset" by some of the negative articles written about him. Detective Chief Superintendent Neil Adamson told reporters: "We recovered a Dictaphone with four hours of ramblings from somebody. We don't think it is a decoy, but we're not absolutely sure. We are sure it has been made within one or two days of the shootings and the print coverage has really made him upset. There is talk of people who are being spoken to not being right and it's winding him up." Cameron later said he would be making an official complaint to Facebook. The page was deleted by its creator on 15 July. ==IPCC investigation==

Aspects of the operation were investigated by the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC), the independent body for handling complaints made against police forces in England and Wales. Some findings of the IPCC investigation formed part of the official inquest convened by the coroner to determine Moat's cause of death. One IPCC report was published at the conclusion of the inquest and a draft of the second was leaked in April 2012. During the course of the manhunt, Northumbria Police had announced that they had been warned by Durham Prison in the afternoon of Friday, 2 July, that Moat intended to seriously harm his girlfriend, with the Birtley shootings occurring in the early hours of Saturday, the next day. As a result, Temporary Chief Constable Sue Sim announced Northumbria Police would be voluntarily referring the case to the IPCC for investigation. ==ITV drama series==

On 21 April 2022, ITV announced that filming had started on the 3 episode drama series The Hunt for Raoul Moat. It was produced by ITV Studios owned World Productions for ITV1 It was broadcast over three consecutive nights, the first being 16 April 2023 and is currently available on ITVx. ==See also==