The body-worn camera footage is difficult to watch. You see the officers arrive, professional and measured, responding to what looked like a routine neighbourhood disturbance in Winson Green, Birmingham. And then, in a moment that lasts only seconds, a 58-year-old man grabs a recently boiled kettle and empties it over a female officer.
Her screams say everything (scroll down for the BWC footage)
Officers from West Midlands Police were called to Talbot Street, Winson Green, after reports of a disturbance in a garden. When they arrived, they found John Davies had cornered another man against a fence. The situation, already volatile, was about to get far worse.
Officers separated the two men. Davies went back inside the property. Then the other man issued a warning: Davies was carrying a knife.
When challenged about the knife, Davies denied he had one. Within moments, he proved that words meant very little to him. He threw a hot drink into the face of the man he had been arguing with. As officers moved in to make an arrest, Davies punched one of them hard in the face.
What happened next left everyone who has since watched the footage struggling to find words.
Davies grabbed a recently boiled kettle. He emptied the scalding water directly over a female officer, drenching her shoulders, neck and back. The injury it caused was immediate and severe: severe blistering across large areas of her body. Months away from work. Injuries classified as life-changing.
Her screams were captured by the body-worn camera. West Midlands Police released the footage so that the public could see, in full, what their officers face.
Davies admitted maliciously wounding the officer with intent to resist arrest. He also admitted assaulting the officer he punched, and assaulting the man he had originally been arguing with in the garden.
On 26 June 2026, Birmingham Crown Court sentenced John Davies to 14 years and six months in prison. The judge also imposed an extended licence period of four years, meaning Davies will be supervised for a substantial period after his eventual release.
Detective Constable Manpreet Sidhu, from the Bournville neighbourhood crime team, spoke about the assault after sentencing.
“This was a horrendous attack on two officers going about their duties. You can see from the footage that Davies put up a struggle and it took many officers to restrain him so that he could be brought into custody. One of the officers involved suffered significant injuries and has only recently been able to return to work following this assault. No one should have to face this level of violence simply for doing their job and I hope the sentence delivered to Davies provides some justice for those involved. This will have a lasting impact on the officers but now Davies is where he firmly belongs: in prison.”
The injured officer required months of recovery before she was able to return to duty. Both officers have now returned to frontline work. That is testament to their resilience. The description of the injuries as life-changing is a reminder that the road back was long and painful.
Well done to West Midlands Police for releasing the body-worn camera footage. The public needs to see what officers face. Transparency of this kind matters.
The chair of the West Midlands Police Federation, Jess Davies, welcomed the sentence but was clear that one conviction, however significant, does not resolve a far larger problem.
“Sadly, we are seeing the number of violent attacks being levelled at our officers escalating. No one should be assaulted for doing their job and no police officer should go to work expecting to be attacked in this way, but it is becoming so common that officers are almost accepting it as part of their role. This cannot be allowed to continue. Police officers are not society’s punchbags. We are not talking about a minor tussle in a heated moment, we are talking about deliberate, sustained and horrendous attacks on police officers who are trying to serve and protect the public.”
The Federation’s warning about escalating attacks is not anecdote. Nationwide, 86 officers are assaulted every single day. That figure does not come from a particularly bad week or a particularly troubled force. It is the sustained, daily reality of policing in England and Wales.
The John Davies case is shocking because of what he did and how he did it. A kettle of boiling water. A calculated act of deliberate violence against someone whose only purpose was to protect the public. But Davies is not an isolated case. He is a data point in a national picture that is, by any honest measure, getting worse.
The full national picture: 31,368 officer assaults in a year, and why the numbers are rising
The Copped Enough crisis: officers 21% worse off in real terms since 2010, and a third struggling to afford food, rent or heating
The thin blue line gets thinner: why the Police Uplift Programme has not solved the recruitment and retention crisis
Mental health in policing: why this profession now carries the highest mental health sickness rates in the country
What needs to change, and what happens if it does not
Home Office data for the year ending March 2025 recorded 31,368 assaults on police officers in England and Wales alone. That is 86 every single day. One every 17 minutes, across every shift, in every force, in every corner of the country.
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.