The rights of the public in the UK to access data held by state-run organisations are enforced by The Information Commissioner’s Office. I say enforced but effectively unless there’s a very significant series of large-scale errors or deliberate mischief ICO chooses to look the other way.
They’ll more often choose to look the other way in the event that the miscreant organisation is a public body: a large-scale data breach by the NHS in 2017 / 2018 attracted only a note from ICO to NHS Digital gently chiding their error.
Some of the means of looking the other way include ICO issuing a “finding” that the organisation you’ve requested data from has failed to comply with the law, or a “recommendation” that that misconducting organisation complies with the law. Neither of these two results has sufficient force to compel a turnaround from the data controller if they’re determined to dig in their heels. None of these weak regulatory methods described above actually produce the data you’ve requested: if the organisation is sufficiently obstreperous you’ll need to enforce your right of access to the data via civil legal action.
Yes, folks. You’ve guessed it! Another supposed “watchdog” that turns out to be toothless, doddering and tame.
At the beginning of the pandemic hitting the UK in March 2020 ICO issued guidance to organisations over handling data access requests which effectively boiled down to “don’t misuse the fact that there’s a national emergency to get around your statutory obligations”.
Eight months on and the initial finger-wagging approach has been replaced with a new edict from ICO: mark your own homework.
Organisations that infringe the law on data access issues are now routinely in receipt of this standard form letter the first page of which appears below:
Easier than enforcing the law: ICO states the bleeding obvious to data controllers breaching the law.
The “seriously and robustly” in the above extract doesn’t apply to any actions ICO have taken in my experience of the organisation. Even in the face of large scale data breaches for which ample evidence of a data subject’s Section 173 rights being infringed exists ICO still takes the lethargic approaches mentioned above.
Briefly yours and my Section 173 rights are this:
Extract from CPS website.
The letter sent out by ICO continues:
…all of which explains the obligations on an organisation that they are already / should already be aware of.
One wonders what the point is of informing an organisation that’s already purposefully screwed up such as a subject access request what their obligations are. If the body is determined to withhold data for the purpose of – for example – preventing revelation of their own misconduct then a weakly worded letter from ICO will not make them correct their ways.
Misconducting organisations must be quaking in their boots regarding the powers and sanctions bit in the second to last paragraph, knowing ICO is notoriously weak on enforcement.
Thus the Merry-Go-Round of the UK’s weak regulatory and enforcement structure rumbles on.
I’ve written on here before regarding Humberside Police. There’s something about that force that’s rather disturbing: a more blatent flouting of the College of Policing Code of Ethics, a lower standard of behaviour overall from the force towards the public and an open willingness to treat reports of crime and complaints with equal contempt.
Part of this is down to the geographical isolation of East Yorkshire and especially Hull from the rest of the UK. Humberside Police seem to have a genuine and recurring belief that they can do as they wish well away from prying eyes. The largely inept local media such as The Hull Daily Mail pay a part in assisting this of course. Rather than investigateve journalism that would reveal scandals in local policing they opt for click-bait thrill-a-minute headlines that drive traffic towards advertising. The PCC Keith Hunter is perenially inept at holding the force to account and the overall feeling is that he’s happy to sit out his tenure until pension day arrives.
Some of this flouting of the conventions of good policing can be traced back to the period in which Humberside Police were a Chief Constable-less, rudderless and struggling force on the verge of being put into special measures. Audits routinely returned appalling reports by any metrics devised. Nor has the situation and service standards improved greatly in the four years since minor improvements began.
Like most police forces they have a unique ability to both say one thing and do another, as well as shoot themselves in the foot. While professing to detest and crack down on racism within their ranks the actual tale is quite different.
Which brings us to our story for today.
There’s a page on the Humberside Police website which details upcoming misconduct hearings for the force.
Within the last few days this was changed – without any member of the public being informed or the change advertised. The content on the “new” URL as it appears currently (9.12.20) can be seen below.
The reason for this sudden change is that a senior officer has been chaged with the use of racist language. This is Stewart Miller, a high-profile DCI with Humberside Police who correspondingly have a lot to loose if the revelation of his conduct is proven true and receives appropriate levels of national publicity.
Humberside Police’s Stewart Miller pictured outside of Sheffield Crown Court.
The details of the alleged offence can be seen in the “new” misconduct page the image of which I have provided above. If true this behaviour constitutes an exceptionally severe breach of ethical and moral codes of conduct by this officer. Racist language, discrimiation and suchlike are uttely unacceptable in 2020 and repellant to the majority of civilised people.
However aware that the revelation of this allegation may cause a stir in the national media Humberside Police have changed the URL of the misconduct hearings page just before posting details of this forthcoming hearing.
The “old” page that the majority of people would see or have an existing shortcut to as of 8.12.20
This is a deliberate and purposeful act to attempt to stop the public becoming aware of these allegations against a senior officer. To see the “new”
The data about the hearing I have shown above can only be located from a careful search on the force’s website. This in itself is cause for concern: Humberside Police can of course claim that they have published the details of the misconduct hearing: but they have done so in a way tactically designed to hide the allegations and the public’s knowledge of the hearing. This is of course deplorable but entirely in keeping with that force’s general obsession with bad publicity. Of course now this matter is out in the open the changing of the URL looks even worse.
The effective hiding of the data regarding this misconduct hearing is also designed to protect this officer and his professional reputation. One wonders how this matter will play out in the event of a guilty finding by the force’s PSD and to what extent they will be prepared to publicise any disciplinary measures against this officer.
The alleged comments were made in summer 2020 just a few days after Humberside Police posted on their site positive content from The Association of Police Chiefs regarding the (as it turns out) aspirational aim for the UK police to be anti-racist following the death of George Floyd in the USA during contact with police.
This sort of behaviour amounts to that which will not surprise seasoned watchers of Humberside Police.
9.12.20 update:
Having been caught out over this matter and it having received some publicity via Twitter on 8.12.20 Humberside Police have corrected the changed URL as of this morning, 9.12.20 so that the misconduct hearing for Mr. Miller is now advertised on the main page that most journalists and public would have a link to.
This blog is in danger of becoming a post largely carping on about service level failures by court staff at HMCTS.
Having said that the errors they make are sufficiently numerous and serious in consequence that they’re like busses: there’s always another one along in a minute. This makes it very easy to produce material for this blog. Although I’m likely to get bored of telling you about all of these errors long before HMCTS stop making them.
Doncaster: the County Court here fails to serve the people of the city well.
The kind of service level failures court staff specialise in would – in any normal workplace – result in disciplinary proceedings. But HMCTS is presently sufficiently desperate to retain any form of staff to keep at least a semblance of function in civil courts that even the most spectacularly gaff-prone employees are retained. Better the devil you know than someone even more slackly incompetent.
The end result of this for court users is of course loss of time, expense and waste of effort.
And so it has been today in relation to a claim at Doncaster County Court, (already noted for more than its fair share of errors in handling this particular claim) at which yet another service level failure has take place.
In several occasions in the past both parties have been all set for trial only for the trial to be cancelled when all are in attendance. Grounds: over-running of a prior matter, file in poor condition etc. On one occasion the file was even lost!
There’s always an excuse for appalling service but the basic grounds ultimately come down to two things: an inability on the part of court staff to administrate claims properly and the failure of District Judges to deploy appropriate oversight of a case or to get a grip on case management issues.
An application in this claim was made in April 2020. Estimated time to hearing was 12 weeks, which of course came and went without any Notice of Hearing.
Two other hearings In the same claim took place in October and November at which the application could have been scheduled to be heard. Needless to say it wasn’t even though the District Judge made clear she was aware of its existence.
This is a critical fact: that staff failed to schedule the application in a way that would have dealt with it reasonably at an appropriate time within the claim, saving the parties time and effort. Having acknowledged receipt of the application they simply forgot all about it
…until the point I sent them a timely reminder in relation to the application. This brought a further hearing date. Which again drags all the parties over to Doncaster for what ultimately ends up as a futile exercise.
When the matter of the application could have been heard within other hearings in the same claim but wasn’t because court staff forgot about it we have clear evidence that the civil court system has collapsed and cannot now administrate in even the most basic respects.
How do many legal professionals react to their cases being so poorly run? Often by keeping their heads down and accepting the situation. To speak out in public or in the court itself would perhaps cause damage to careers and lead the judiciary to take against them on future appearances. And so nothing in the civil system improves.
HMCTS service standards are… well not very good at all really!
A Freedom of Information Act request to The Ministry of Justice produced the following data.
Payments made for poor service from HMCTS increasing year on year.
The data largely speaks for itself. Payments made to court users for poor service increase year on year as HMCTS falls apart.
Poor customer service by HMCTS is costing at least £292k per year in payments made to disgruntled court users. This is of course not counting the time taken to correct errors they have made which also counts as a loss to the public purse and creates delay overall in the system.
Most importantly if you’ve been in receipt of poor service from a court make sure you complain. And don’t be fobbed off: they’re experts at dissembling and denying. Of course at every stage also request to be compensated. It’s only when the budget for payment of compensation exceeds what The Ministry of Justice is prepared to pay out that service standards will improve.
Being an example of how HMCTS commit critical errors in handling civil claims and how they then evade responding properly to complaints.
Street of Shame: HMCTS are currently based in the old Home Office building in St. James’, London.
The Phoenix Partnership (TPP) are a company noted for the provision of dodgy software to the NHS. Errors in systems provided by TPP resulted in the biggest data loss in NHS history. In that incident in 2017 / 2018 hundreds of thousands of people had their medical history sold to US companies, despite having signed to confirm they did not wish their data to be shared, breaching every conceivable data protection principal.
A claim was started by myself into this significant data breach as my own data was amongst that shared against my express written wishes that it should not.
Here’s where the fun begins.
Because the standards of service at Leeds Combined Court are uniformly awful a claimant has to struggle against both the ineptness of the court’s handling of a claim as much as they have to fight to prove their case. Like many other areas of modern Britain the State by a combination of ineptness and avoidance makes everyday tasks significantly more complex and difficult than they need to be.
The results of an investigation into the errors made by the court by HMCTS Customer Investigations speak for themselves. An extract from the letter is below but to summarise (and include detail HMCTS failed to, you’ll not be surprised to learn), the errors made in the claim include – but are not limited to:
1. Fourteen months to action a Directions Questionnaire put in by the Defendant TPP. This failure by court staff to manage the claim in the most simple and basic way effectively brought the claim to a grinding halt.
2. Despite emails from myself chasing the progress of the claim within those fourteen months no action was taken by the court. In effect emails chasing progress of the claim and requesting updates on what was happening were simply ignored.
3. The court should have referred the matter of the Directions Questionnaire to a judge within a matter of a few weeks of it being received. They failed to do this. No other system in their offices alerted staff to the fact that an ongoing claim was stuck in stasis and no-one seemed to both to check on its progress.
4. Consequently this delay breached one of the Overriding Objectives in the Civil Procedure Rules to deal with cases justly and swiftly.
5. Naturally this generated a complaint from myself.
The first stage response of this was mendacious, evasive and effectively sought to deny any errors had been made. The excuses offered by the court were barefaced and failed to fit the facts such that a child could have picked holes in their logic.
6. I appealed and requested a second stage complaint response from the Court Manager at Leeds Combined Court, the reliably slippery Joanne Town.
7. And reliably slippery is what she proved to be. Or maybe she was embarrassed to have to answer for the significant error made by staff. No communication came back from her as a second stage complaint response. This was chased several times over the course of some months. See the footnote at the bottom of this blog entry.
By this failure to respond HMCTS sought to kill the complaint and I presume they believed I would walk away and forget the thing.
8. But I didn’t. Consequently the matter was referred to The Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman (PHSO) as a complaint along with several other matters that HMCTS refused to address through their own complaints process. These other matters are presently ongoing.
9. When PHSO requested a response and data from HMCTS on this matter and the several others before the Ombudsman HMCTS decided to settle this matter immediately via a cash offer to myself. Likely they didn’t want PHSO poking around to discover some of the things that go wrong in court offices. Or maybe they simply knew that the game was up as the errors made were too great to ignore.
10. This cash offer and admittance of fault came from HMCTS’ Customer Investigations head Richard Redgrave. Normally Redgrave and his team deploy complex tautology to evade response, avoid admitting fault and avoid paying compensation.
An extract from the letter admitting fault. Edited to remove the compensation amounts paid in the past.
The interesting thing to note is that this all represents not an unusual pattern of mishandling of a civil claim by HMCTS. These are everyday errors in a court system in which case files are in exceptionally poor shape and staff morale is at rock bottom.
Nor is this way of handling a complaint unusual or out of the ordinary. My experience of dealing with HMCTS staff has proven to me that the deny – ignore – avoid tactics are the standard response to complaints. Consequently the service standards never improve as they are unable to accept any wrongdoing has occurred.
The usual friendly customer service from HMCTS!
Footnote: in July 2019 HMCTS issued some new guidelines for its staff.
HMCTS decided it was, ‘the human voice of justice’. Based on three commitments, HMCTS said it will listen to you, explain everything clearly and guide you. ‘It’s a useful approach we are starting to apply every time we communicate – whether it’s when we speak, write or connect with the people who use our courts and tribunals, or the people we work with.’
We have now become a society in which many people are lacking in the ability to use basic critical faculties regarding information they receive. Because of this they are more prepared to align their thinking with narrow, sectional interests.
These people can then be persuaded to perform activities which go against their own best interests and those of our wider society.
How has this happened and what purpose does the spread of disinformation and outright lies serve, particularly those in relation to COVID-19?
Funded by the sinister and obeyed by the stupid. An example of a type of sticker seen lots recently in our urban areas.
Disinformation comes like a wolf in sheep’s clothing. It often seeks to persuade from a standpoint of “us against them”, as the above image shows. The two stickers above start by putting their arguments by claiming they are on the side of the people against the Government. This is palpably not true. In a situation in which there is a lethal pandemic the interests of the people are to protect themselves and those around them from the spread of the virus. Neither of these stickers promote this. They are actively against it and so to do as the first sticker suggests puts yourself and others at direct risk of harm. The second seeks to re-inforce the first by suggesting that the Government information on the pandemic is incorrect without stating what part is wrong. It’s there to build an atmosphere of mistrust to reinforce the message of the first sticker. And film director Ken Loach would also like his royalties for the misuse of the image.
Much of the anti-mask, “virus is a conspiracy theory” set have a series of narrow sectional interests that coincide with letting the virus rip through society. Thus they are not interested in your or my personal freedom. Claims that they are marching against the “new world order”, microchip implantation via vaccination and half a dozen other fabricated falsehoods are hooks to pull in the gullible into acting against their own best interests and starting up a culture war. If they were campaigning for freedom then there are plenty of existing worthy campaigns they could join to increase the freedom of action in society. Those run by groups such as Liberty spring to mind.
Being vaccinated is a pro-social act which actually does increase freedom. For a start the freedom not to be infected with a potentially lethal virus. Vaccination may not help you but it may stop others around you being infected. It is the apex of how society should reasonably operate: a partnership in which you take care of my interests and I take care of yours. Likewise wearing a mask in public places reduces the spread of COVID-19. This is also a pro-social act that helps everyone in society by stopping / slowing the rate of infection until the forthcoming vaccinations are widely taken up.
At present there are sufficient dark forces looking to destabilise society.
These amount to the usual ragbag of far left and far right groups, alongside our old chums the obstreperous and the contrarians who automatically are against whatever you might happens to be in favour of or any reasonably held consensus. These are operating alongside foreign powers who seek to destabilise western societies for their own ends. I suspect the stickers such as that seen in the image above are paid for and posted by such persons or else home-grown eugenics enthusiasts who have an honest (though morally repugnant) belief in survival of the fittest. None of these people have yours or my best interests at heart and they seek to persuade people to act against their own interests via a variety of underhanded means.
There was a time when such as vaccines etc. were understood to be a positive force: they enabled hundreds of millions of people to live without the fear of communicable and life-changing diseases such polio.
However thirty years of (1) a dumbed down eduction system (2) a media – especially newspapers – that prioritise showbiz news over critical analysis and readership engagement with the real world (3) social media allowing a slow-drip feed of misinformation and outright lies (4) Prior exposure by investigative journalists of genuine abuses of power which lend weight to the idea that there are further, hidden abuses of power happening beyond what we presently know about. I would add also (5) that the inept and incompetent handling of the pandemic by the UK Goverment has been sufficiently poor as to assist and promote misinformation about the virus and Government intentions. It is quite believable that COVID-19 is being allowed to spread through poor areas just like it was through nursing homes.
All these things have led to a position in which conspiracy theories such as those abounding around COVID-19 have fertile soil. They allow the sectional interest groups I have mentioned above to have a stronger foothold whereas many years ago they would have been confined to the crank fringes. If – as in happier times – the only means of getting your crackpot theories out into the world amounts to hand-printed leaflets and a sandwich board your theories won’t go far enough to harm others.
Harmful, unscientific and morally reprehensible ideas around COVID-19 are being freely disseminated. These are wrapped up in conspiracy theories in which the Government, Big Science and (in the USA at least) the “deep state” are said to be acting from sinister motives. These ideas promote a narrative in which persons acting against medical and scientific advice are seen to be expressing their individual freedoms in defiance of the state. This is simply wrong.
A conspiracy theory is a comforting thing: it offers a catch-all explanation for one or more of the wrongs of the world. Belief in such a conspiracy theory ennobles the believer with a sense of access to some secret knowledge or insight into how the world works; which does account for how difficult it is to prise people away from such theories once they start to head down one or more of the bizarre cul-de-sacs that conspiracy theories represent. It’s difficult to wean someone off a conspiracy theory as it requires the afflicted person admitting they were wrong and have had the wool pulled over their eyes.
People are prepared to believe all sorts of odd conspiracy theories but fail to see actual and genuine efforts to deprive them of their rights, money and liberty. The current UK scandal over sourcing of PPE equipment via lucrative contracts by the UK Government to Tory party donors and friends is a real-life conspiracy which has been ongoing since March 2020. Protests in the streets against this scandal: zero.
Conclusion: at least in part many people are being drawn to crackpot theories spun to create chaos and destabilise society via a variety of means. In worrying times people cling onto extreme views which seem to present a catch-all explanation for problems. That these ideas gain ground when people are unable to critically assess the sources of information they are presented with and the reasons they are being persuaded to act in a specific way.
Humberside Police are one of those forces that you wonder how they get away with it.
Largely hidden away from the rest of the country on the edges of East Yorkshire they have a reputation every bit as unwholesome as other local forces.
One reason they do seem to get away with it is both geographical distance from the rest of the UK and of course lack of proper oversight. Their perennially ineffective Police and Crime Commissioner Keith Hunter recently showed the level of consideration he has for the local pubic by manhandling a visitor asking perfectly reasonable questions out of his office. As a former officer himself old habits die hard.
The PCC’s behaviour is of course equal to the contempt for the public shown by the force itself in such matters as inadequate custody suites which – on the basis of the last inspection reports I read – were shockingly poor, particularly in regards to the welfare of young people held in custody.
But while holding the public largely in contempt officers can expect lavish prize ceremonies at The Humber Bridge Country Park Hotel, a venue synonymous with chicken in a basket style meals and budget wedding ceremonies. These police awards stem from the days the force were in a Chief Constable-less mess which almost ended up with them being put into special measures. Handing out cut glass awards helped to boost the morale of the troops, albeit on a temporary basis. Clearly no gongs were forthcoming from any other source at that time and so the force decided to award gongs to themselves.
The days in which the force almost ended up in special measures still hang heavily over Humberside Police. The epithet “Where we do what we want” has seldom applied more to a UK force in modern times, Met Police excepted. Overall in those days and to a lesser extent now Humberside officers still tend to do what they want.
The consequence to all of this is that quite a number of officers from Humberside Police end up before their Professional Standards Department and such hearings now appear to be increasing in frequency. This suggests an increasing breakdown in internal discipline and operational effectiveness that needs to be addressed urgently.
Of course PSD generally tend to go for the low hanging fruit which means the officers most likely to be prosecuted are PC’s caught slacking off, pulling a sickie or whose face doesn’t appear to fit around the station. Occasionally officers are thrown to the wolves just so PSD can appear to be exercising some form of oversight. The more serious miscreants and offenders further up the slippery ladder are ignored. In the modern police force assistance over cover-ups are rewarded with promotion and rocking the boat by sacking someone who knows “where the bodies are buried”, metaphorically speaking of course, has the potential to bring the whole house of cards tumbling down.
So this recent case seen directly below reminded me of a well-publicised matter from a few years back – which is still a shocker – which I will discuss in a short while.
Busted!
As you can see the basic charge is that this PC has been passing confidential police information on to criminals. Guaranteed this data will have been specifically requested by Ronnie and Reggie, will be of considerable use to said criminals and there will have been a payment involved somewhere down the line. That’s the way these things work.
Police databases include something called the PND or Police National Database. This is a huge wealth of half-truth, rumour and suspicion which will have entries on just about any person who has come into contact with the police for any purpose. Unlike the Police National Computer which must be accurate (containing as it does details of convictions, cautions etc.) the PND can contain outright unsupported rumours, slurs and spite.
Do please bear in mind you have no right of access to whatever falsehoods might be stored on the PND about you: although you can make a request for all the data uploaded by an individual force about you to PND. You then have a legal right of correction of the same.
Which brings us back round to Humberside Police.
As we’ve already seen there’s a tendency in the force to dip into and out of police systems for officer’s own benefit. Any access to PNC or PND is logged however so anyone doing so is easy to locate. Officers dipping into databases for their own curiosity or benefit tend to forget this.
Which brings us to DC Julian McGill.
Busted! Again.
The report above isn’t the full story as there’s been several instances of computer misuse from this officer over the years. This resulted in a final written warning and the hearing described below in which his career was on the line:
Believable? You decide!
McGill at the time was serving as part of the local Police Federation. A fact that will have of course been unlikely to influence the position of the misconduct panel in any way! Generally gross misconduct results in only one outcome and since the offending act was admitted (he could hardly deny it given his access was logged) the decision of the panel was very much at odds with the seriousness of the offence.
However this all ties into my original premise that Humberside Police – situated away from prying eyes – seek to do what they like. Accessing police databases for their own use is simply one part of this and the brushing aside of an instance of gross misconduct is a further example.
Many ticklesome articles in the new Private Eye magazine (no. 1535, 20th November 2020) including this choice one on police recruitment.
Private Eye comments on police recruitment.
As always there’s many a truth spoken in jest.
At present the workload of the average Plod would incline anyone with the ability to obtain employment elsewhere to do so. Truly a policeman’s lot is not a happy one.
Nor are matters likely to improve with the new recruits when they’ve finally got some wool on their backs.
The lesson The Ministry of Justice learned to their cost was that sacking every experienced prison officer within range meant that the newer and less experienced were unable to handle the job with subtlety and skill. This caused a further recruitment problem as newly recruited staff also began to leave in droves once they realised the true horrors of the job they’d be facing daily.
So it will be with the new police recruits.
Possibly also unwise to have a large surge of untested youngsters in uniform, pumped up with testosterone and a newly-found sense of self-importance, kitted out with weaponry and the power of arrest let loose on the public.
One can only hope that new recruits will be paired with more experienced officers. But PC George Dixon is long since retired and these days six months or more in the frontline on the force and you’re considered a veteran. Stay for a year and doubtless South Yorkshire Police – the force that loves to hand out awards to underperforming officers – will have a decanter set and tin plaque to pass over to you.
An additional problem. Recent reports in the local press show South Yorkshire Police and West Yorkshire Police finding themselves and their transport under severe attack on entering some estates in Leeds and Sheffield. Police cars and vans were recently destroyed as they have also been outside of Goldthorpe Police Station in South Yorkshire.
Here we can see how spirited local residents have offered their opinion on police service standards.
Can it be long before armoured “snatch squads” operating in a similar fashion to those grabbing terrorist suspects in post-invasion Baghdad are sent in to spirit suspects away from troubled estates?
So if you do see such officers on the streets soon be sure to look out for their armoured snatch too.
Yesterday one of my cases was assessed and received judgment from Mr. Justice Warby, who just last week delivered an initial appraisal of the Coleen Rooney v. Rebekah Vardy case which is presently before him.
Sir Mark David John Warby, styled The Hon. MrJusticeWarby
As one might expect based on his reputation the judgement in my claim was incisive, carefully worded and hit all the correct notes.
It makes something of a change to deal with a judge who is focused on the best and most natural route for a case in line with the Overriding Objectives as opposed to the way some more local judiciary handle cases!
In March 2017 Mr. Justice Warby was appointed Judge in Charge of the Media and Communications List and is to be appointed to The Court of Appeal from 2021.
In modern police parlance “cuffing off” a job means to look for a way to avoid dealing with a complaint about a crime made by a member of the public. Shonking means the same thing. South Yorkshire Police is very much focused on internal award ceremonies for its staff and members of the public calling to report criminal offences gets in the way of this. Most inconvenient.
So here’s the story. I had an offence to report on the basis of information that came my way. Having researched the offence and charging guidelines for the same as well as collated sufficient documents to show who was responsible and how I completed the South Yorkshire Police online form. This is their preferred way of contacting you. And so I waited for contact back. And waited. And waited.
Eventually a series of phone calls were made on one afternoon to South Yorkshire Police via 101. The poor handling of the initial report from the webform data and subsequent poor handling of all subsequent contacts are described below.
Basically the webform was ignored. Phone calls to check on the progress of the report of a crime were also consistently mishandled.
From the 1980’s to the present day SYP is mired in scandal.
The basic issues are as follows:
1. A complaint of a crime was made. This was done via the online form for such. That the response from the online form took longer than the 72 hours the website states for any action to be taken in respect of the referral of a crime.
2. That the online form had still not been processed some 7 days later.
This amount to the first effort to “shonk” the job.
3. That from comments made by Professional Standards Dept. at SYP in a later email to me it would appear that this online referral has been “lost”.
4. Following the lack of response to the webform a series of phone calls were made by me on the Tuesday and Wednesday to SYP to establish what was happening in relation to the online referral.
5. That these calls were either cut off when transferred to the appropriate department or else rang out for an exceptionally long period. The time it took to get through to someone was the time of my journey that day from West Yorkshire to Bridlington on the East Yorkshire coast. Some one hour and fifteen minutes.
6. That on eventually speaking to an officer he stated that he had no copy of the online form in front of him but proceeded to dismiss the referral of a crime being committed on the basis that this incident was not a crime and therefore not something that police would deal with.
This is incorrect. I quoted CPS guidance and sentencing guidelines that clearly show the activity reported was a criminal offence.
Most police officers have a very poor working knowledge of the law and are often the worst people to decide if an offence falls into their jurisdiction or not. Or if an offence has been committed in law. Without sight of evidence etc. the officer was additionally on very shaky ground.
7. That the same officer rang me back several minutes later. He had performed a search on my name after our initial conversation and my refuting his comments that the matter complained of was not an offence in law.
8. That his call back to me amounted to harassment and intimidation. His manner during this second call was offensive, uncivil and harassing. Having tried to “cuff / shonk the job off” only to be confronted by a member of the public who knew the law put his fragile and delicate nose out of joint.
Most police officers have exceptionally fragile egos and cannot bear not to have the last word on something. As sites such as the exceptional. ://crimebodge.com show (especially I would recommend their YouTube channel) this can often lead to violence and assault from the officer if a member of the public stands their ground.
9. That the officer concerned did this solely for the purpose of causing harassment, vexation and distress. On the second call he refused to give his name or service number when asked which is usually indicative of an officer misconducting himself. South Yorkshire Police have plenty of form for this. Ask the miners who were at The Battle of Orgreave: SYP removed their epaulets displaying service numbers so they couldn’t be subject of individual complaints.
South Yorkshire Police are internationally famous for violence and criminal negligence.
That overall the standard of conduct in relation to this matter was sufficient to cause loss of professional reputation, such as it is, for the force. Overall the behaviour described above gave the impression of South Yorkshire Police as being inept, incompetent and evasive.
Later that day is I rang again. This time to make a formal complaint. The College of Policing Code of Ethics has a series of guidelines which had each been breached in the police’s handling of this matter. Not least of these are those related to courtesy and respect. https://www.college.police.uk/What-we-do/Ethics/Documents/Code_of_Ethics.pdf
I was told I would be called back in a few days. However again there was no response.
This matter relates to the following issues in the College of Policing Code of Ethics:
1. Authority, respect and courtesy.
2. Duties and responsibilities.
3. Conduct.
I emailed Professional Standards Department at South Yorkshire Police a few weeks later. The response was initially in terms of my complaint call of a few weeks earlier and stated:
Unfortunately, we are unsure as to who the officer was who spoke with you…
This suggests that the admin systems at South Yorkshire Police are not robust enough or else that they’ve already tried to evade examination of the complaint in the same way as they avoided examination of the original report of a crime. The comment is also vague: do they mean the misconducting officer I spoke to at around around lunchtime or the one spoken to to enter the complaint at 18:30 on the same day?
But it gets worse:
In relation to the online complaint form this does not a appear to have been received by us.
So an additional copy was attached to the response. Neither the original web form reporting a criminal offence nor the complaint form sent by email were received by the force. How many others have been similarly missed by them?
By this point some three weeks had elapsed since this complaint form was sent in to Professional Standards Department and their sobriquet was looking further and further misapplied. The South Yorkshire Police webform auto-generates a copy of the complaint for the public so it is unlikely that a copy was not sent to PSD. The comments they made about not receiving a copy are likely bunkum.
They stated:
If you would like to reply to this email with your initial complaint, we will pass it for assessment and ask our assessors to look into it asap.
So this created a further issue to the complaint: that failure to record the initial complaint call made around 18.30hrs in the evening to SYP via 101 amounts to a further breach of duty. A copy of this call will have been recorded on the Airwave system, which records all incoming and outgoing calls from police stations.
The failure to properly action the issues raised by phone in the evening call amounts to an effort to evade dealing with the complaint from an early stage. The “loss” of the follow up complaint form to PSD is a further effort in this direction.
Matters have now been before Professional Standards Department at South Yorkshire Police for two months without visible progress.
The whole fiasco makes SYP look doubly incompetent in their behaviour in failing to action the original webform, then “cuffing off” the job on the phone.
Then they fail to record and action the complaint made from 18:30hrs on the same day and further claim a follow up communication on the complaint was “lost”.
Heaven help people who actually live in South Yorkshire when it comes to reporting crime or making a complaint to SYP. Because the force’s systems are clearly set up to avoid having to deal with either.
Legal Babble 