24 December - The inevitable response to a malicious allegation
I am afraid that what follows is not really appropriate to the Season of
Goodwill to all Men but if you have any sense you will not be reading Bonkers on
Christmas Eve anyway, but for readers who don’t like bullying Councillors and have wrapped their presents early
or are perhaps avoiding the washing up or the Queen’s Speech on the 25th, here’s an update on the Massey business, the spiteful
pair who think that repeating what they themselves put in the public domain on BiB or revealing what they did in a public place is a criminal act.
And to think the same degree of intellect is responsible for all Bexley
Council's budget decisions!
You know the story by now but if you don’t there is
a summary for you to read.
After six months the police came to the same conclusion that most other people
did on Day 1 and this is their brief confirmation…
Dear Mr Knight,
I sincerely apologise for the delay in updating you with the police position on
the blogs posted regarding the Larch Grove party. You will I’m sure be happy to
hear that no further action is being taken against you in this respect. However,
I must remind you that case law and legislation is evolving all the time in
respect of the internet and publishing and what may be ok today may not be so in
the future. Even under current legislation every set of circumstances presented
could mean that laws are broken. Please be mindful of this.
Yours sincerely,
As
you might imagine, being threatened with arrest by a couple of rather aggressive
cops, the female one particularly so, does tend to push up oneְ’s stress levels
somewhat even though various people, some with a legal background, assured me
that I had not got anywhere near to committing an offence. Nevertheless I was
left to wonder what was going to happen next for seven months. It seems to me
that it might be yet another example of how Bexley police will always dance when
Bexley Council pulls their string.
We saw it when
an obscene blog was traced to Cabinet Member Peter Craske’s
internet connection and a new and naive Borough Commander, unacquainted with
Bexley's ways, was appointed. Craske
was arrested very soon afterwards - 13 months after the offence was committed.
But heavy duty political strings were pulled and Bexley Council was able to
set up a meeting with
the Crown Prosecution Service for one purpose only. To get Councillor Craske off
the hook. The corruption which has been rife at Bexleyheath police station is
still under investigation. It is only a week since the current investigating officer
told me that he had uncovered yet another piece of paper which should have been
revealed to him long ago.
Bexley police took to the dance floor again when Bexley Council became concerned
that their cover up of Councillor Cheryl Bacon’s
minor transgression of the
Local Government Act began to unravel and they had to get the police to change
their original story that no member of the public had misbehaved at a Council
meeting. As a result of that a police constable recently had his knuckles rapped for
getting his first report wrong! Or at least that is what the letter from the
Met’s Directorate of Professional Standards (DPS) said. More likely, it was a lie and
they did nothing.
The Independent Police Complaints Commision sent that case back to the DPS for further
investigation. Maybe they will do their job properly this time.
I would not suggest that overreacting to the Massey’s demands is in the same league
as falsely claiming there was
no evidence to pursue a Council crime or rewriting
crime reports at the request of Bexley Council a year after the event, but it is not
in my opinion something to be shrugged off. If what I had done was borderline
illegal, wanting to interview me about it would be acceptable, but it was not anywhere near to being
illegal according to professionals both legal and journalistic. That being the
case the police must be either incapable of making any sort of reasonable
judgment and therefore incompetent, or they are as beholden to Bexley Council as
I think they are. So I dashed off the following missive.
Dear Inspector,
Thank you for your email which did not come as a surprise.
Immediately after your
two officers told me on 20th May 2016 that a Miss
Victoria Massey had made an allegation of harassment I referred all relevant
blogs to [name redacted] who among other things checks news items for legal
compliance at [name of major news outlet redacted]. She said that nothing I had written fell foul of the law
nor would it offend against the more stringent standards [redacted] adopts.
Had the story been of national importance she would have been passed it fit for
publication and would not have felt it necessary to blur a photograph which was
in the public domain and could be found without difficulty. I think one can
therefore conclude that what I published did not come anywhere near being unlawful.
I brought together various items which were already in the public domain. Among
them that the local business run by two Bexley Councillors, Don and Sharon Massey
had failed (Companies House); that their Register of Interests (Bexley Council)
no longer listed a home in this borough and that the Larch Road address was used
for partying. (From unprotected Facebook pages).
A Larch Road resident, Mrs Briggs, provided details of disturbances which had
warranted attendance by the police. None of what she said, and most certainly no
part of the extract I published, has ever been in dispute. Neither has anyone
disputed the business failure, the sale of the Massey’s Bexley home or the
purchase of another in Rochester. All of those things were available to anyone
spending five minutes with a search engine.
I have photographs of the Masseys in and around their new house which I have not
felt appropriate for publication but again they are not hard to find on the web.
Never have they shown the slightest interest in keeping their activities private
and their self publicity has continued unabated long after they made their
unwarranted accusation right up to recent days.
Given the professional advice of a legally trained journalist that I did not get
anywhere near to committing an offence and your confirmation that my carefully
worded blogs were not unlawful I would like to know precisely which part of my
blog the police officer who decided to send three officers to my house believed
broke or got near to breaking whatever legal threshold he had decided was in
force on the day in question.
I informed your Chief Superintendent on 3rd June that I did not intend to make a
complaint about the two officers who threatened me with arrest despite PC346RY
Kirsty Stephens being in my opinion unnecessarily confrontational and aggressive
but those intentions do not apply to the officer (Detective Sergeant [redacted])
who made the decision to despatch them.
Unless you can identify something that I published which went well beyond
anything referenced above and was unarguably borderline illegal I consider that
the officer was at fault.
You have previously said that the police consider themselves obliged to assume
that every accusation of harassment is a valid one “unless there is credible
evidence to the contrary”. That credible evidence was the blog which no one,
from experts through to other Councillors, including Conservative Councillors,
believe got anywhere near to being harassment.
Please let me know what I wrote that your officer believed might be unlawful
when all the evidence is that it was a long way short of that which in turn
suggests he is either incompetent, for not checking the facts on my website, or
more likely succumbed to a repetition of the political pressure placed on Bexley
police which we both know is the subject of two separate investigations already.
At the moment I do not see how this case will not become the basis of a third.
Beyond the fact that Miss Massey (who I had not named at the time) made a
complaint about my reference to a party I have no idea what exactly I am
supposed to have done that would interest the police yet you ask me to be
“mindful” of the need to observe the law which you say “is evolving daily”.
How am I supposed to be even more cautious when you provide not the slightest
clue as to how close I came to a transgression back in April and May? How can
bringing together pieces of information gleaned from the web and available to
anyone become a crime and how can any sensible police officer reach that
conclusion when the evidence it is not is just a mouse click away?
Unless you can identify an issue I have failed to see a formal complaint against
the officer who made the decision looks to be the inevitable next step.
Similarly, and once again referring to your email dated 15th June 2016, unless
you can identify something I did that any reasonable person would regard as
“stalking” or “which causes serious alarm and distress which has a substantial
adverse effect on the day to day activities of the victim” then another logical
next step would be for me to make an allegation of malicious harassment against
the Masseys.
Repeating what they had themselves decided was appropriate for public
consumption together with information from official sources cannot possibly have
caused as much stress as being accused of a criminal act, threatened with arrest
on my own doorstep and then being left in limbo for more than six months.
I look forward to your response in the New Year.
yours sincerely,
For regular readers reports such as that above may seem repetitious, for which I apologise, but
new readers come along all the time. What spewed forth from a keyboard at the
end of Councillor Craske’s telephone line has been available on a password protected
page since June 2011 - Bexley Council suggested to the police that I should be
prosecuted for placing it there - but someone must have read it for the first
time this week.
Just looked at the Craske blog. I can’t believe he wrote it. Has he got a 12 year old son? If he has not, the man must be pathetic!