All week, the tributes have poured in. Those whose lives were touched by PC Lorne Castle haven’t hesitated to come forward. One woman’s account of how her son’s life was saved by his ‘kindness and humanity’ and willingness to ‘go beyond what is expected of a police officer’ is particularly moving.
She wrote about how the troubled teenager lost his way in life and became known to police, who were forever having to bring him home. It was PC Castle, himself a father of three, who ended up talking her boy down from the ledge, in a metaphorical sense as well as a literal one.
Not only did he make the teenager see that he had a future, he helped him carve one out by arranging work experience, even though this was not his job. ‘We need more officers like PC Castle, not fewer,’ this grateful mother concluded.
‘That one made me well up,’ says Lorne, 46, who is sitting in his living room in a quiet residential street in Bournemouth, sifting through the thousands of messages he has received this week – some from strangers, but others from those he directly helped.
He seems quite overwhelmed and a little teary (very uncharacteristic, ‘or it was before all this’, according to his wife Denise), by all the nice things people have been saying about him.
‘It’s blown me away, to be honest,’ he says. ‘To have people come back to stand up for me. I’m not used to this, but it’s really touching.’ He reads on, on the verge of tears: ‘If I’d died, you couldn’t have got nicer tributes.’
And in a way he has died, because, as he points out: ‘I’m not dead but the police officer I was is dead. PC 1399 is dead.’
Who killed PC Castle? Well, according to his bosses at Dorset Police, the fatal wound was entirely self-inflicted. Last week, he was fired – ‘in a way that was brutal. Alan Sugar fires people in a nicer way,’ he says – after being found guilty of gross misconduct.
‘I’m not dead but the police officer I was is dead. PC 1399 is dead,’ says Castle
His crime? One that was deemed so serious that it wiped out ten years of unblemished service including citations for bravery.
He arrested a teenage suspect – later discovered to have been in possession of a knife – without displaying adequate ‘courtesy or respect’. While grappling on the ground with the 15-year-old, who was resisting arrest in January last year, PC Castle shouted, swore and pointed his finger at the suspect, who was professing his innocence.
In the cold light of day, safe in his own home, having just waved his youngest daughter off to bed, Lorne, newly unemployed, still can’t quite believe that finger-pointing helped lose him his entire career.
He raises the offending finger today and waggles it in front of his own nose. ‘I need to holster this,’ he says, despairingly. Nor can he accept some of the questions he had to answer during a ‘devastating and humiliating’ three-day gross misconduct hearing.
‘For a police officer, the idea of gross misconduct is just the worst, but one of the things I was asked was if I hadn’t heard the suspect say that he hadn’t done anything. Did I not look at him and think he might be telling the truth?’ He throws both hands up.
‘Were they seriously asking me why I didn’t fall for the old, ‘it wasn’t me, guv’ line. Most suspects resisting arrest say they haven’t done anything. I mean a child knows that.
‘Let’s put this into context. We were investigating an assault. I’ve detained him. He has resisted. I’m struggling on the ground with him. There is a crowd gathering. I’m trying to contain this situation but my priority is to make this arrest and keep everyone safe.
‘So when he says he hasn’t done anything, I’m seriously supposed to stop and say, ‘Oh, you didn’t do it? Dreadfully sorry, young Sir. Let me help you up! Tally ho! My mistake!’ This is a suspect who did have a knife.’
Denise, who says she ‘was so proud to be the wife of a police officer’, attended every day of her husband’s disciplinary hearing and has been there to pick up the pieces as his life fell apart
The shock and bewilderment in his living room is palpable. As is the sheer disbelief. ‘I mean, the audacity of even asking me that. But I knew even before the gross misconduct hearing started that I was walking to the gallows. And they hung me out to dry.’
He adds: ‘Even if I win my appeal, even if I got my job back, I wouldn’t be able to do it.
‘How could I walk down the street with members of the public thinking I’m a bully and a thug – all the things I went into the police force to challenge.
‘My career is gone. I’m never going to get another job, because who would give me one. My life is ruined. They’ve broken me.’
Denise, who tells me she ‘was so proud to be the wife of a police officer’, attended every day of her husband’s disciplinary hearing and has been there to pick up the pieces as his life fell apart.
The couple, who have daughters aged 27, 18 and eight, tell me that on the day Lorne was told he was facing gross misconduct charges, he didn’t go home – ‘because how could I tell my wife?’ – but walked along Bournemouth beach until 3am. He was too shocked to think of walking into the sea and says he hasn’t seriously contemplated suicide ‘but can understand people who do, in this sort of situation, because the nature of this job isolates you from people who aren’t police, so when the rug is pulled from under you… you feel so alone’.
Denise says she has seen him ‘shrink, become someone who just isn’t Lorne’.
‘My husband is an outgoing, bubbly, glass-half-full person, who is a natural leader and motivator,’ she explains. ‘He’s the most moralistic person I know – our children will back me up on that. And he’s the sort of man who never called in sick even when he was ill.
‘Since all this, I’ve just seen him change. He breaks down now. He doubts himself. It has been devastating to watch. Even the children say, ‘he isn’t Dad’.’
Their hero father, publicly lauded after plunging into the freezing River Avon to save an elderly woman, is now making headlines for all the wrong reasons.
When the first murmurings started, suggesting this once-admired officer had been unfairly treated by ‘woke’ bosses who were far removed from the reality of policing at street level, Dorset Police moved quickly to defend their position, releasing damning video footage, taken from a colleague’s body cam, which does indeed show PC Castle in a not-too-flattering light.
He’s recorded telling the suspect to ‘stop screaming like a little b**ch’ and warning him: ‘I’m gonna smash you’.
This footage, Lorne claims, was presented out of context, cherry-picked to ‘not tell the full story’.
‘It was devastating that Dorset Police could do this to me, that they could want to… destroy me,’ he says. ‘What that selective footage didn’t show was the aftermath – when this suspect continued to resist arrest.
‘It took four officers to get him in handcuffs. That footage doesn’t show the crowd around us, whom I could see in my peripheral vision.
‘There was only one 999 call made about what was happening there and it came from a member of the public who was concerned about me. They called to say that there was an officer struggling, who looked as if he needed back up.’
Lorne adds: ‘Dorset Police didn’t even think it was necessary to call that person as a witness in my disciplinary hearing. I had to insist on it. It paints a very different picture to what happened and I thank goodness that witness was there, because otherwise I’d think I was going mad.’
This is an incredibly troubling – and divisive – case. There is no question that Lorne made judgment errors in his handling of that arrest on January 27, 2024.
He admitted as much during the misconduct hearing and repeats that sentiment today. ‘I should not have used the language I did. I’m embarrassed and saddened that I did that, and that it’s out there for everyone to see. But the essence of what happened was, unfortunately necessary. That was an arrest that needed to be made and I made a judgment call.
‘Could I have done it differently? Of course, but ultimately I took a knife off the streets. Another police force has this motto, ‘Take a knife; Save a Life’. My force said, ‘Take a knife; Get your P45′.’
Did he deserve to lose his career? ‘I don’t think that’s one for me to answer,’ he says, but his wife has no qualms. ‘No, he did not,’ Denise says firmly.
‘They went out to string him up. Once they decided that they were going for gross misconduct, they went looking for things to support that. I sat there and couldn’t believe what they were doing.
‘They have destroyed a good man and taken a good police officer off the streets. I still can’t believe this. This whole thing feels like such a violation.’
There has been outrage about Lorne’s dismissal, notably from those who were once in the ranks of Dorset Police.
Former Dorset Police and Crime Commissioner (PCC) Martyn Underhill told Radio Solent this week: ‘This officer overreacted, used bad language – that’s about it. We’re becoming too woke. I think Dorset Police have got this massively wrong. Do I think he deserved to lose his job? Absolutely not.’
It is particularly devastating for Lorne that it was colleagues who first complained about his handling of that arrest. He won’t comment on their involvement, but it is understood that the two junior officers who witnessed it had only been in the job for six months.
It is also understood that while, initially, it did not look as if misconduct charges were likely, the decision was taken to instigate them. Lorne was informed of this by Superintendent Ricky Dhanda, head of Professional Standards.
In an extraordinary twist, Mr Dhanda has himself been placed on restricted duties while he is investigated over sexual misconduct allegations. ‘Maybe me and him have different decision-making processes,’ is all Lorne will say. So who is Lorne Castle – and how will history judge him?
His route into the police force was a little unusual. He grew up in Torquay but moved to nearby Bournemouth to go to university, where he studied law.
A keen sportsman and martial arts expert, he met Denise – who would go on to be a world champion Muay Thai fighter – and they set up a sports academy together.
It was his work with young people that brought him into contact with the man who would become his mentor – former Chief Inspector Chris Amey, who had a long career with both the Met and Dorset Police.
He met Lorne in 2013 and was impressed by his drive and dedication on a youth project. He convinced him to join the police – first as a community support officer, then as a PC. Denise agreed that he had ‘found his place’ in the police.
Undoubtedly, it was a career at which Lorne excelled. In 2021, he was named community officer of the year, after having been twice awarded commendations.
In 2017, he saved someone in a medical emergency then, in 2023, he plunged into the Avon, ripping off his stab vest to enter the water, eventually holding an elderly woman aloft.
He says it did occur to him that he was, technically, breaking all the rules and ‘could face manslaughter charges’ if his attempts to get the woman to cling to a life ring went wrong.
‘It did go through my mind that professional standards could tell me I wasn’t supposed to go in, that I was trying to be a hero. That is the world we operate in.’
But his desire to do the right thing won out and he received an award from the Humane Society for that rescue.
Fellow officers ‘who had held the ropes as I went in’ were also commended but, bizarrely, when it came to the invitations for the ceremony, Lorne didn’t receive one.
‘I’d been put on restricted duties by then [after the incident with the teenager] and told my superiors were going to ‘hold onto’ mine until after the misconduct proceedings.’ He was furious, and deeply hurt. ‘The other officers weren’t going to go without me and I did eventually go, but it felt very much like being the child at the party you weren’t invited to.’
On the night of the contentious arrest, Lorne was at the end of an 11-hour shift when a call came in about a violent masked offender, last seen driving an e-scooter, who was suspected of assaulting an elderly man and a teenage boy.
Staff at a local McDonald’s had been scared enough to close their doors before calling for help. Earlier that day, police officers had been warned that there had been a large gang fight and potential suspects were still at large.
There was no reason for Lorne to take that call – the oncoming shift could have handled it – but he says he volunteered, ‘because that’s what you do’.
The suspect was quickly found and when he resisted arrest, Lorne ‘took him down to the ground’.
This part is not contentious. The misconduct hearing found no fault with the force used to take the suspect to the floor. It was the tussle that followed that was deemed problematic.
Did PC Castle lose control? He stresses how fraught that situation was. ‘As a police officer, you go into the unknown and there is a fear there.’ He points out that his bosses released a damning statement which repeatedly referred to the suspect as a 15-year-old boy.
‘The narrative was that he was scared of me. But he never made a complaint. I would argue that he was scared of getting caught.
‘And I did not know he was 15 – to ride an e-scooter you have to be 16. Even if I had known, should I have held back because of his age? That is doing a disservice to every family who have lost someone because they were stabbed by a teenager. No, I did not know that he had a knife, but it was my job to do a risk assessment and I have to say my assessment was spot on.’
The knife that fell from the suspect’s waistband was small but potentially deadly, particularly at close quarters, he points out.
‘Do you know how much space you need for a machete to be deadly? Quite a lot, because it requires a swing. A knife like this? With a tiny movement you can be talking about a severed artery.’
He shakes his head. ‘I can keep saying sorry for swearing. But I made that arrest. I took a knife off the streets. There was no injury. No complaint from the suspect.’
Did he go off that shift thinking that it had been a disaster?
‘Quite the opposite. I remember thinking about the knife and going: ‘Jeez, that was close. That could have gone badly’.’
He won’t criticise the junior officers who raised the complaint, other than to refer me to that witness who called 999. ‘He thought I was on my own there.’
But the feeling that he has been let down by his superiors is clear. ‘I thought we were all working towards the same thing, which is keeping our community safe. That’s all I have ever tried to do and I have been publicly destroyed for it.’ Lorne describes having to hand over his badge as ‘the worst moment in my life’.
He says he is almost afraid to walk the streets he once patrolled now. ‘Dorset Police have put a target on my head. I don’t even know if we can stay here, as a family, which is heartbreaking because this is our community.’
The only upside is the swell of support from those who think he has been wronged. A GoFundMe account, set up by Chris Amey, the man who encouraged him to join the police, was last night standing at £95,000. ‘I’m just humbled, but so grateful. It means I can pay the mortgage, for now anyway.’
He returns to those messages again. One sent on Facebook comes from another mother, Sarah Robinson, who lost her son Cameron Hamilton in 2023. The
18-year-old was stabbed to death by another teenager in Bournemouth. ‘As the mum of Cameron Hamilton, who was killed by someone using a knife, I thank you for doing your job,’ she wrote. ‘I am saddened that the police force has lost such a good officer.’
This makes Lorne want to cry – for himself and his family, yes, but also for those people he promised to serve.
‘I did my job,’ he repeats. ‘And I have been crucified for it.’
