28 November - A lull before the next storm
While Bexley council is in ‘best to say nothing’ mode and is refusing to
answer awkward questions it is hard to know which is worst. Manufacturing blogs
from very little or to put things on hold for a while. Both are likely to see
visitor numbers fall under the present 30,000 a month but boring regular readers
with recycled news is not an attractive proposition and there may be better ways
to use the time.
The Independent Police Complaints Commission upheld my complaint that the Met’s
Department of Professional Standards wrongly gave Bexley police a clean bill of
health following their failure to identify
Bexley council’s obscene blogger. But
that complaint related only to the period June 2011 to 23rd August 2011 when Bexley police announced
they could make no progress.
What
has never been complained about is Bexley police’s further failures over the following
year or so. In particular the fact they traced the obscenities to the IP address associated
with councillor Peter Craske’s phone line and then took more than six months,
possibly as many as eight, before applying for a search warrant. Plenty of time
for the evidence to be spirited away.
Borough Commander Victor Olisa said those eight months were spent eliminating me
from their enquiries. He actually said in front of Elwyn Bryant and my MP that he
believed I may have hacked into councillor Craske’s phone line and set him up. I
think he was getting desperate with his search for excuses.
The original plan was to make a further complaint in March this year but Elwyn Bryant had secured
a promise from the Crown Prosecution Service the previous month to send him an important document
so it seemed sensible to wait for it. Nine months later Elwyn is still waiting and the
issue of the CPS’s FOI law breaking is now with the Information Commissioner.
By the end of May the police had promised to reveal some of their own files so
it seemed sensible to wait for them too before making an official complaint.
That promise developed into a Subject Access Request and now we have the Met police
breaking the Data Protection Act by missing the statutory 40 day deadline by
four months. I feel there has been enough waiting and a complaint must go to the
IPCC about Bexley police’s failures from September 2011 through to January 2013.
Blogging effort will be diverted into reminding myself of who was involved in
that second failed investigation and letter writing. Bexley police’s self confessed “political interference” must be examined further.
The
other outstanding job is updating
this website’s Home page which hasn’t
changed since April.
I have in mind a permanent record of councillor Cheryl Bacon’s lying following
her misjudgment on 19th June. The voters of Cray Meadow
are entitled to know exactly what they are getting if they are tempted to vote
Conservative and a page devoted to Cheryl may be useful to her political rivals. I have
made a start
on it but there is a lot yet to be added and it will
probably look very different by the time it is edited and finished.
When that is done it will be time to tap into Mick Barnbrook’s experience and
compose an allegation of Misconduct in Public Office against Cheryl Bacon,
Legal Officer Lynn Tyler and Human Resources Director Nick Hollier, all of whom
have either lied, concocted excuses for lies, produced false statements from people
who have subsequently disowned them or have refused to consult witnesses prepared to speak the truth.
So
that’s it for a while except that I promised to put out a little news item on
Sunday. Meanwhile I only have one small statistic to bring to your attention.
Since this current Conservative shower was elected in 2010 they have attracted
a total of 49 complaints from members of the public. 48 of those complaints were dismissed as totally worthless.
The one exception was against current deputy
mayor Geraldene Lucia-Hennis who was ordered to take an anger management course
after an argument at the Crayford Community and Business Forum ten months before the 2010 election.
Clearly she was soon forgiven.
Note: The reference to Lucia-Hennis proved to be incorrect. Her complaint
was before 2010. The complaint upheld was in fact by one councillor against another.