Lowestoft Police Vendetta

The Complaints Process

There are many government agencies that purport to investigate complaints made against the Police and Crown Prosecution Service. Some of them are:

• Professional Standards
• Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC)
• Senior police management team
• District Crown Prosecutor
• Deputy Chief Crown Prosecutor
• The Independent Assessor of Complaints (IAC)
• The Courts (Administrative, Civil and Criminal)
• Police Complaints Authority (PCA) now defunct replaced by IPCC
• Police Complaints Board now defunct replaced by PCA

The sequence of defunct organizations is itself a red flag. The exact same pattern can be observed in the series of disgraced organizations that handled complaints about dishonest and incompetent law firms. When the public demands that a broken process be fixed the government dissolves the disgraced organization, creates a brand new organization with a totally different name, and then re‑hires substantially the same staff that previously worked for the disgraced organization. This pointless re‑branding is paid for with the tax payer's money.

How independent are these investigators from the police? Well let us take a look at one example: Mr. Andy Bushell is an investigator with the Professional Standards department of both the Suffolk Constabulary and the Norfolk Constabulary. I asked him on several occasions if he had any connection with the police. He assured me emphatically that he did not. He emphasized that his salary was paid for by Suffolk County Council. I asked him if he had ever been a police officer, and he denied emphatically that he had. He was lying: He had previously been a police officer with the Suffolk Constabulary, and had achieved the rank of Inspector. He had also been the Felixstowe District Commander. Why lie to me about that?

How “independent” is the often disgraced “Independent Police Complaints Commission”. Well, it is now their official stated policy that unless the police have killed someone they will simply forward the complaint to the police force that is the subject of the complaint, and ask them to investigate themselves. IPCC have reduced themselves to a mail forwarding organization. And why must the Tax Payers fund such a pointless agency to forward mail when the Post Office will happily forward mail for free?

All of these complaint handling organizations view their role as frustrating legitimate complaints. They have a repertoire of techniques available to them to achieve this goal. Let us now explore some of their methods in the following paragraphs.

Isolate From Context

One of the techniques used by complaint handling agencies is to isolate a situation, and deal with it out of context. An innocent action may appear to infer guilt, or a criminal act appear benign, if the surrounding circumstances are carefully hidden. If a victim fails to report a crime at the time it occurs would this adversely affect their credibility? Many people would think yes it would. But if you are now allowed to know that the Police had threatened this victim with arrest, and even prison, if they continued to report crimes committed against them, would this change your perception. By carefully controlling, and suppressing, relevant information, the police are able to distort the way in which even an impartial observer would interpret what little information they are allowed to receive.

Entitled To Rely

Prior to 1985 the police not only investigated criminal complaints, but were also responsible for prosecuting those cases. The Prosecution of Offences Act 1985 (c. 23) created a new government agency, the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), and transfered the responsibility for the prosecution of offences from the police to the CPS. Today both the police and CPS maintain the dogma that they are separate and independent agencies. However, they work together and inter-operate to such an extent that they are de facto merely two façades of the same underlying organization.

This duality is exploited by the respective complaint handling organizations. The Professional Standards Department of the police will point the finger of blame at CPS. Likewise the District Crown Prosecutor handling complaints against the way in which CPS handled a case will point the finger of blame at the police. For example, the police turn over their evidence to CPS, and it is up to CPS to make a charging decision. If CPS makes the wrong decision it is not the fault of the police. Conversely, CPS base their charging decision on the evidence provided to them by the police. If CPS makes the wrong decision they can blame it on the quality of the evidence provided to them by the police. In any event, neither the police nor CPS are responsible for making the wrong charging decision.

This pattern is repeated on a more local scale within each façade. For example, the police have a workflow system that passes a case from one officer to the next. No one person can be blamed for anything. Each officer catching the case can simply say that he/she was following policy and procedure. Each individual is just another cog in the machine, has no responsibility for failure and can deny knowledge whenever it is expedient to do so.

This institutionalized finger pointing is accepted by all complaint handling organizations as a legitimate defence. Indeed, when the time comes for the complaint handling organizations to investigate their own handling of the complaint, they will use the exact same excuses themselves.

Using Previous Failures to Justify Refusing to Act Later

The police say that because their first investigation failed they cannot conduct any further investigations into this matter. They refuse to accept new crime reports from me regarding additional crimes by the same offenders that have come to light more recently. The police say that the matter has already been investigated. However, these new crimes have not yet been reported to the police, and so the police could not possibly know that they have already been investigated.

Over the years three Professional Standards investigators have stated three quite different versions of why the first investigation failed.

• Excuse 1: A member of the “Gang of Twenty”, Elisabeth Ann Pike, told the police to terminate their investigation. I am puzzled as to why the police would accept this order from the offenders being investigated.
• Excuse 2: The police turned the file over to the Crown Prosecution Service, but the CPS prosecutor made a decision that the evidence collected by the police was not strong enough to win at trial. Another example of two façades of the criminal justice industry pointing the finger of blame at each other.
• Excuse 3: Andy Bushell of Professional Standards told me years later that the decision not to prosecute was made by a Detective Chief Inspector. That is clearly a police officer, not a CPS lawyer. So the police cannot even keep their story straight as to who made the decision to fail.

Dumb Insolence

I provided rigorous evidence to DC Hogan that a collection of Corgi/Dinky die-cast model toys that were sold at Durrants Auction Rooms by Brian Allan were my childhood toys, and that they could only have come from my house. DC Hogan refused to act on this evidence. Later DC Hogan claimed that she had not seen this evidence. I filed a complaint that DC Hogan had lied to me and deliberately suppressed this evidence. She responded that she had not lied because although she admitted that she had been given this evidence, she had chosen not to look at this evidence, and so had not lied when she claimed that she had not “seen” this evidence. I find DC Hogan's argument to be ridiculous, indeed it is Dumb Insolence. So why does IPCC and Professional Standards accept DC Hogan's defence?

Meta-Meta Investigation

This technique involves restricting the scope of the investigation to such an extent as to prevent the issues from being discussed at all. When a complaint is made Professional Standards refuse to address the original issues. They will only investigate the investigation itself. This is a meta-investigation. It only concerns itself with whether or not the police officers that conducted the original investigation broke any rules, or deviated from policy, while carrying out their investigation. If this meta-investigation is appealed the subsequent investigation is limited in scope as to whether or not the Professional Standards investigator broke any rules or deviated from policy. This is now a meta-meta-investigation; an investigation of the investigation of the original complaint. Neither the first Professional Standards investigation, nor the appeal of the Professional Standards investigation, is allowed to investigate the original crime. Thus, no matter how or why the original investigation failed, there will never be any chance of rectifying that failure.

Inadequate Service

This technique involves fixating on trivial aspects of a complaint while ignoring the serious matters. Inadequate Service is things like not returning phone calls or failing to keep up an agreed upon schedule of updates. Although this may be an issue it is nowhere near as important as armed robbery or assault with a deadly weapon. But Professional Standards, IPCC, et al will use these trivial issues to divert attention away from the issues that they should be giving a high priority to.