Chris Kaba shot: No charges
Chris Kaba's family have three weeks to appeal after the IOPC ruled out further action against the officer who shot him.
Chris Kaba’s family have three weeks to appeal a decision that leaves the Metropolitan Police officer who shot him dead unlikely to face any further action, after the police watchdog closed the case on 8 July.
The Independent Office for Police Conduct’s ruling means the Chris Kaba shooting will end with no charges of any kind, criminal or disciplinary, against firearms officer Martyn Blake, who killed the 24-year-old in Streatham in September 2022. Blake was acquitted of murder at trial. The IOPC’s decision was the family’s last realistic route to any form of accountability.
Kept in the dark
Kaba’s family only learned this month that the Metropolitan Police had privately lobbied the IOPC in November 2025 to withdraw the disciplinary proceedings against Blake altogether. They were not told about the approach at the time it was made.
“It is deeply distressing to his family that they now face yet more waiting and uncertainty, and to learn that they were not made aware in real time of representations made last year by the Met to the IOPC that these proceedings should be withdrawn altogether,” said the family’s solicitors, Machover and Cornish of Hickman & Rose.
Deborah Coles of INQUEST, which has supported the family, put it more bluntly: “It is alarming that the police watchdog appears to have bowed to pressure from the Metropolitan Police, whilst Chris’ family were kept in the dark.”
The family’s wider warning is that the change will not stop with their case. Bereaved families elsewhere, they say, “will need to fight to persuade the IOPC to pursue disciplinary action against officers, even where a case to answer decision was made months or years ago.”
A law built around one case
The ground shifted under the family while the case was still live. The Crime and Policing Act 2026 wrote a presumption of anonymity for firearms officers into law, protection that now runs until the point of conviction in both magistrates’ and Crown Courts. The Home Office’s own factsheet names the Kaba shooting and the Blake trial as the direct reason for the change.
Blake had lost his anonymity on 1 March 2024, when Judge Mark Lucraft lifted the order protecting his identity ahead of trial. After he was charged that September, close to 300 Met firearms officers temporarily handed back their permits in protest. The law that followed was written for officers in Blake’s position.
“The rules have been changed mid-process to ensure that Martyn Blake will face no professional accountability,” the family’s lawyers said.
The case is not formally over. Kaba’s family have until the end of July to lodge an appeal against the IOPC’s decision. What is not in doubt is what changed while they waited: not the facts of what happened to their son, but the law standing between him and anyone answering for it.
