17 December (Part 3) - Crime and no punishment
Just when you thought that the corruption and mismanagement at Bexleyheath
police station could not get any worse along comes another installment of their
attempt to pervert the course of justice to cover up a crime investigation because one
of their friends and associates was involved. Then they ‘fix’ things so that he is beyond the
reach of the law.
The father continues his alarming story…
We
have seen how Bexley Police investigated a serious assault, when family of
the investigating officer PC1 shared close friends with the assailant’s family –
an inadequate victim interview was conducted, CCTV footage was ignored, and
witness statements either weren’t taken, went missing or were altered. It was
now time to submit this ‘evidence’ to the Crown Prosecution Service.
The CPS has an office located inside Bexleyheath Police station, where it shares
files with Police. However, PC1 did not share this particular file with the
prosecutors in his own building, but called CPS London Direct and instead gave
his personal view of the case to a duty prosecutor over the phone. Of the
statements given by six student witnesses and the attacker himself, the duty
prosecutor noted that he had only “carefully considered” the three statements
that PC1 had rewritten. A quote from one of the witness statements was worded
significantly differently from the statement itself. The duty prosecutor noted
that he based his view of the case on what PC1 had “reliably informed” him, and
accordingly made a decision to take “no further action” against the attacker.
PC1’s supervisor DS1 proposed that the decision should be appealed, but PC1 told
him that an unidentified officer had already made this impossible by quickly
informing the attacker’s solicitor of the CPS’s decision (even though there was
no record of this in the crime report), which under the law now prevented the
attacker from being prosecuted, whether he was guilty or not. In any case, DI1
(Bexley’s lead officer on violent crime, and the officer previously in charge of
the obscene blog investigation) had “reviewed” the investigation and found the
outcome satisfactory, so there was no need for Police to do any more work on the matter.
The day after the attacker had been informed, however, PC1 did take the trouble
to phone to tell us that the official report identified the attacker’s version
of events as “clear” and “credible”, and our son as being to blame for the
attack upon himself. We asked if we could see what had been written about our
son, but despite having just read the report to us, PC1 claimed that he did not
have a copy of it, had no reference number for it, did not know who had written
it, could only tell us things over the phone and could not give us anything in
writing. We asked if we could contact his manager, but he said that all requests
had to go through him.
When
we informed PC1 that we would try to obtain the information from the CPS
instead, his manager DI1 got in touch to tell us that the Police did not have to
give us any information due to “legal privilege” (contrary to official CPS legal
advice), and warned us not to bother contacting the CPS about the matter (the
CPS later sent us the documents that DI1 claimed we would not be able to have).
DI1 then wrote a note in the crime report claiming that he had advised us that
we could obtain information on this case through the FOI office, although he
must have spoken very softly in giving us this advice, as neither of us has ever
heard him advise any such thing. DC1 also made a note that he had “reviewed” the
case for a second time (finding once again that it had all been dealt with
“correctly”), and that the assault was “clear self defence, with the victim
being the aggressor” (comments that the judge ruled were “wholly inaccurate” and “completely wrong”).
DI1 was subsequently promoted to the position of Bexley CID’s Acting Detective
Chief Inspector. However, at that time, Bexley CID was headed by a different
Detective Chief Inspector DCI1, to whom we sent two requests under the Data
Protection Act for copies of the records about our son. DCI1 did not reply to
either request.
DCI1 did respond later, however, when the case was taken up by concerned local
MP David Evennett; and she handed over the case for further review to one of her
most senior detective inspectors – DI2 (Bexley’s lead officer on crime
management, and the officer who threatened to bring a criminal prosecution
against the owner of this website for “harassing” Bexley councillors). You can
probably guess what action these two officers took … (to be continued)
Do Boris Johnson and James Cleverly know what goes on behind their backs?
It sounds like widespread corruption to me. Teresa O’Neill, also pictured, must
be well aware of it of course having exploited it occasionally.
The complete story so far.