15 May - Ignorance and corruption in Bexley
With
only one Council meeting this month (Full Council on the 25th) there may not be much to report but one of several recent emails aroused my interest.
It wasn’t the one, welcome though it was, which drew my attention
to Bexley’s favourite property developer taking
an interest in Plumstead’s Plume of Feathers public house. A Grade 2 listed building but
Murky Depths has already covered that subject in some detail.
Nor was it the one that told me that Kulvinder Singh’s favourite Conservative
candidate had knocked on the sender’s door to tell him that Bexley had a low rate of
Council Tax. Being fully aware of BiB’s annual summary he
contradicted her but was firmly told he was misinformed.
Who is it that selects such ignorant individuals to represent them?
No,
the one that brought back a lot of memories was the one that asked if I knew anything about the case
reported by the Evening Standard back in 2013. A case concerning an assault on a teenaged boy and captured on CCTV.
I most certainly did because I had a long series of conversations with the
teenager’s father. He wrote a series of guest blogs and they were
assembled into a single page
which makes for shocking reading.
The Index to individual blogs is a new addition to BiB.
If you ever doubted that Bexley Police was thoroughly corrupt ten years ago then
here is the proof complete with condemnation from a judge who subsequently
resisted pressure from the police to change his verdict. (It was said to be disrespectful to them.)
At one point the police suggested the assault had not even taken place.
CCTV evidence was dismissed, witnesses discredited and witness statements
rewritten. An MP was fobbed off and the submission of evidence to the CPS was selective.
Needless to say the same old names crop up in the father’s analysis of officers’
corruption as in several similar incidents around the same time. A time when
Bexley Council worked hand in glove with Bexley police in order to cover up for their own dishonest activities.
Featuring prominently was the Chief Inspector who said he was unable to trace the officer who threatened
to arrest me if I criticised Councillors.
There was the one who tried to convince me that it was impossible to trace who
posted obscenities about me and others on his own website. Another who stood in
two different witness boxes to lie about what a Bexley blogger had said in order
to secure a conviction while the truth was in the evidence bundle unread by a useless defence solicitor.
Yet another who wrote to all the local politicians to tell them that I had been
charged with sending malicious communications via Twitter more than a year
before I opened an account with Twitter.
Almost needless to say, the Chief Inspector who
wrote to Bexley Council to
arrange a meeting with the objective of resolving Councillor Craske’s situation
after he had been arrested.
No action was taken against the assailant and all the evidence pointed towards
him being in some way related to a Bexley police officer. Bexley police not only
covered up various failings and withheld or lost evidence but they refused to
correct their records which attempted to put the blame for the injuries on to
the victim, hence the court case reported by the Evening Standard.
The Chief Superintendent who took charge in Bexley soon after these events
attempted to clear out the corrupt officers by transferring them to other London boroughs but it wasn’t
long before he too left for pastures new. Moving control from Bexleyheath to Lewisham
under the BCU arrangements may have finally achieved what that CS tried and failed to do.