9 January - Chief Inspector Tony Gowen investigates
Visitor
numbers since the New Year have risen noticeably and my suspicion is that crooked policemen
have a wider appeal than crooked Bexley councillors. Today I am in danger of confusing new
readers by including Chief Inspector Tony Gowen and malpractice in the same paragraph
but not in the Peter Craske/obscene blog context. The reason being that the latter is not
an isolated instance of very dodgy dealing.
For
today forget about Acting Superintendent
Tony Gowen trying to fix the Craske
situation at an unjustifiable meeting with Will Tuckley and transfer your attention to Chief
Inspector Tony Gowen reinvestigating a crime where once again the principal object appears to be
protecting one of their mates from the consequences of their actions.
The last blog on that subject ended with the words
"God help us” at the thought of Gowen investigating the errors of his colleagues.
Tony Gowen is the officer who couldn’t find the Detective Inspector
who issued John Kerlen and me with
a Harassment warning and
refused to have it
withdrawn on the grounds that Will Tuckley had reported us for the Pitchforks
and Flaming Torches comment we didn’t make and his word must prevail over us
plebs. Fortunately the IPCC saw things differently.
A quick prequel of today’s blog is ‘teenage boy receives life changing injuries due to
an attack from behind made under the gaze of a CCTV camera and half a dozen
witnesses. Police back track on the investigation when they realise the attacker
is the son of a police friend. Evidence turned on its head and statements
rewritten so that the victim becomes the attacker thereby ensuring that the
Criminal Injuries Compensation Board is not interested. It requires a judge to
expose the dishonesty which has become the hallmark of Bexleyheath police’. The full story is
available here
and it features not only Tony Gowen, but his then
boss Dave Stringer (pictured), the former CID chief Alison Funnell, famed for contaminating
evidence in the Stephen Lawrence case, and numerous CID officers including Steve
Underwood mentioned only yesterday
for his confusing message about the CPS.
The schoolboy’s father continues his report…
Bexley Police had “messed up” their first investigation of
a serious assault, according to Chief Inspector CI1 and the incident would now
be “reinvestigated from scratch by a different team”. This different team ended
up being the same Inspector DI2 who had been “satisfied” with the first
investigation and made false claims about our son ‘striking the first blow’, the
Detective Sergeant DS2 who until recently was supervising the obscene blog
investigation and regular Constable PC2 (a personal friend of the officer PC1
who “messed up” the first investigation and whose family shared close friends
with the attacker’s family).
On meeting us, CI1 quickly promised that he would
be “pushing for prosecution”. We were uncomfortable with this apparently
premature judgment, as CI1 seemed to know little about the case and to be
unaware of the existence of much of the evidence, but perhaps that’s how Bexley
Police usually operates.
We gave CI1 a list of our main concerns about the first
investigation (see below), but it later appeared that Police did not address
these concerns at all in their reinvestigation:
• In the first investigation, our son’s statement was taken in dubious
circumstances (see previous posts), and
we were concerned that it might be inaccurate. The reinvestigation team
re-interviewed our son and he gave them further important information; but
although Police took new statements from every other witness, they made no
record at all of our son’s re-interview in their reports. DI2 had previously
confirmed what was noted in the crime report - that a further victim statement
was required as a “priority action” - but now CI1 and PC2 informed us that they
did not want our son to make a new statement at all. We were alarmed when CI1
then told us that our son’s original statement was the same as the attacker’s
statement, and we gave him a list of several vital differences between our son’s
account and the attacker’s statement. We were told that DS2 would phone us back
about our concerns, but he never did. We asked if our son could see his
statement to check whether it was accurate, but CI1 told us that this was not
legally possible (despite him later denying that our son had ever been prevented
from seeing his statement). In the end, PC2 reworded our son’s statement on her
report to the CPS, showing some important details incorrectly (e.g. stating that
our son had claimed he had pushed the attacker off the bench, rather than the
other way round) and cutting out other important details entirely (e.g. his
claim, supported by medical and eye-witness evidence,
that he had been attacked from behind).
• Several of the witness statements were not submitted to the CPS
after the first investigation, and again only three of the twelve available
statements were noted as being provided after the reinvestigation. We had
specifically highlighted the most reliable/CCTV-consistent witness statement,
but no record whatsoever was made of this statement in PC2’s
post-reinvestigation report to the CPS. In the original report, no note was made
of the major contradictions in witness statements given by the attacker’s
friends, and (despite requests from us) no such note was made after the
re-investigation either. Police were required on the form to consider “witness
assessment”, but no witness assessments were noted. CI1 later claimed that he
would never challenge witness statements in any case, because he regarded them
to be “objective facts”. (The alternative possibility - that the suspect’s
friends might lie to help him get off - apparently never crossed CI1’s mind.)
• The attacker’s statement was not submitted to the CPS after the first
investigation, and (despite requests from us) there is no note of it being
submitted after the re-investigation either. PC2 had noted some of the
attacker’s testimony on her report, but had omitted the most significant parts
(including his aggressive swearing, the admission that he was motivated by
anger, parts of his testimony that were inconsistent with the CCTV footage, his
walking over a bench towards our son before coming down and attacking him, and
his stranglehold on our son until he was pulled off by eye witnesses) – all of
these self-incriminating details had been carefully
sanitised out of PC2’s report.
• The medical report detailing the severity of our son’s injuries was
not submitted to the CPS after the first investigation, and (despite requests
from us) there is no note of it being provided after the
re-investigation either.
• DI2 had originally told us that the quality of the CCTV footage was not a
problem, as Police could improve it with enhancement software. However, no
enhancement software was applied in the reinvestigation, and accordingly DI2
later claimed that the CCTV footage could not be used as evidence due to its
“poor quality”.
We requested that the CPS be made aware of all the problems
with the evidence from the first investigation, but this does not appear to have
happened (despite the original investigating officer PC1 now being under
investigation himself for gross misconduct in the case); and the CPS still ended
up reporting that they had relied on PC1’s assurances in coming to their
decision whether to prosecute (apparently in blissful ignorance of his links to
the suspect and the fact that he had “messed up” the first investigation).
So if you were expecting that the Police’s ‘reinvestigation’ would now allow justice
to prevail, don’t hold your breath… (more to come)
I can’t wait!
The complete story so far.
Note: The graph above rather unfairly contrasts the week
after Christmas with the first week of the new year. Highest peak is 2nd January.