14 March (Part 2) - Endemic police corruption
I know it is easily said but it is also easily proved. The police are far too
political and because of it, corrupt to the core.
The Police Complaints Authority (PCA) was set up in 1985 to replace the
discredited Police Complaints Board and 19 years later the PCA was disbanded as
not fit for purpose and replaced on All Fool’s Day by the Independent Police Complaints Commission. (IPCC.)
Their true Independence was easily confirmed by their staffing levels on opening
day. A staggering 84% were ex-coppers or
ex-customs. (†) Inevitably there was not a
lot of Independence on display.
A former Metropolitan
Police Officer who went on to work for the IPCC says it is riddled with
“corruption and discriminatory practices”.
And probably it is. (Click image for newspaper report.)
When Bexley Police were refusing to properly investigate the obscene blog that
we now know originated on Cabinet Member Peter Craske’s internet connection I
complained to Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe, the Met Commissioner. That was six long years ago.
He sent the complaint to his Directorate of Professional Standards (DPS) and six months later their
Sergeant Michelle Gower provided me with a pathetic white wash.
It just didn’t make any sense and was full of the most elementary errors.
I passed her report to the IPCC who agreed that Sergeant Gower had failed to
conduct any sort of proper enquiry. They sent it back to the Met’s DPS in 2013
and it was two years before they even got around to looking at it.
Despite the investigating officer making lots of encouraging noises and
promising “to get you a result on this one” at the end of 2017 he reported
that not one single police officer in Bexley had done anything wrong.
It was easy enough to drive a coach and horses through the lame excuses provided
and an eight page letter (plus 30 pages of appendices) went to the IPCC last December.
In the meantime the IPCC become totally discredited like all of its
predecessors and was rebranded to try to hide its failures. It became the Independent Office for Police Conduct.
Last week I received a 14 page letter from the IOPC bearing the same signature as
that on their first (IPCC) response more than five years ago. The letter
confirms that absolutely no police officer in Bexley made any mistakes.
The IOPC has explained that tracing the obscene blog to Cabinet Member Craske’s
home address in the October but not seizing his computer until the following
June was entirely consistent with efficient policing.
Finding the offending blog on his computer and deciding that he must have
downloaded it (and another not yet published) from the web out of curiosity like loads of other people
gave Craske an entirely plausible excuse. Forgetting that they had traced the
obscenities to his IP address and not someone else’s eight months
earlier was not a grave error to disgrace every officer involved.
Conspiring with Bexley Council and the Crown Prosecution Service to “resolve
Councillor Craske’s situation” is not in any way a strange thing to do. There
may not be an explanation for it but attempts to pervert the course of justice must be accepted.
Need I go on? There are pages of similar nonsense. Seven years after Councillor Craske had
his moment of madness hundreds of letters and emails have proved just
one thing. The police and their protectionist bodies are all hopelessly corrupt.
The root cause of it in the Craske case was political interference. A Sergeant
in Bexley admitted it. She then denied it locally when she realised that was not
the party line but admitted it again when interviewed by the DPS.
Elwyn Bryant’s theory is probably correct. That theory is that Councillor Craske would have
been charged but for Bexley Conservatives calling in a favours from high
places. That might explain why Bexley Police chose to ignore CPS advice too.
† Source: Dirty cops, bent justice and racism in Scotland Yard by Michael Gillard and Laurie Flynn.