Tag: abuse of police powers

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Turning a Blind Eye. How West Yorkshire Combined Authority Helps Local Police to Evade Accountability.

In this blog post you will learn how local authority organisations tasked with holding the police to account will fail to do so. Because even when there is significant evidence of misconduct on the part of the force, including attempts to suppress a reasonable investigation, the supervisory organisation will ignore this and prefer instead their own tick box review of police misconduct which fails to address or examine the police’s deliberate mishandling of a complaint.

The issues raised concern West Yorkshire Police and West Yorkshire Combined Authority.

One of the issues we continue to return to in this blog is the inability of supervisory organisations to be able to hold other organisations lower down the food chain to account.

This occurs for a number of reasons. In this matter it is both historically the case that locally based organisations tasked with holding West Yorkshire Police to account are incapable of doing so, but also when such organisations commit an error in their own review of an investigation they ignore the error in any subsequent correspondence. At all stages the emphasis is maintenance of public confidence in the police complaint system, which results in a failure to properly examine and investigate complaints raised with proper rigour.

This matter concerns West Yorkshire Combined Authority and their inability to be able to hold West Yorkshire Police to account when the police’s Professional Standards Department Standards Dept. fail to properly investigate a complain. Indeed even when they appear to have deliberately scuppered a complaint investigation WYCA do nothing. The authority’s website states that one of their functions is “holding the Chief Constable to account” categorically this is not true. When an instance of abuse of power or process occurs WYCA look the other way.

Alison Lowe OBE is the West Yorkshire Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime (DMPC). She is pictured below. The supervision of the local force is her responsibility and ultimately that of West Yorkshire Mayor Tracy Brabin.

Alison Lowe is currently the person next in line responsible for supervision of police after the local mayor.

But first let’s travel back into the mists of time. 

Prior to West Yorkshire Combined Authority taking over supervision of police complaints in relation to West Yorkshire Police there existed a Police and Crime Commissioner. This was Mark Burns-Williamson.

During his time as police and crime Commissioner for West Yorkshire he proved not only significantly gaffe prone but also incapable of holding West Yorkshire Police to account.

The reason for this inability to hold the force to account is widely known. Burns-Williamson was involved in a messy love triangle in which he wrote an unfortunately worded letter to his rival. This matter was suppressed by West Yorkshire Police DI Simon Bottomley and since then until the end of his tenure in post in 2021 Burns-Williamson would avoid using PCC powers to hold the force to account. He was literally caught by the nuts by West Yorkshire Police who because of their suppression of the complaint about the letter had a significant hold over him. This prevented the Police and Crime Commissioner from fully exercising their reasonable duties in holding Police to account.

The Burns-Williamson inaction figure is available in bearded and clean-shaven variants. Optional dodgy contents of his office safe play set also available!

Burns-Williams time as commissioner was characterised by a series of notorious exposures of misconduct in public office on the part of the organisation he was tasked with supervising. West Yorkshire Police have an international reputation for incompetence and dishonesty practiced even on those in their own ranks and the period of a Police and Crime Commissioner supposedly supervising them was characterised by a new intensity of incompetence, corruption and smearing from all levels of the force.  

Now let us move forward to the present. 

The College of Policing publishes a Code of Ethics, which is routinely ignored and in fact the subject of of humour amongst many police forces. It also provides a series of guides of behaviour and conduct that it deems reasonable for officers to be able to show in the course of their duties. This covers a number of different aspects of policing and is in effect a Code of Conduct broadly similar to The Highway Code in that it provides a structure of behaviour that would give the public confidence they are being policed correctly. The more an officer adheres to what the College of Policing guidelines are in a situation the less likely it is that they will go off on their own tangent and open themselves and their Chief Constable to a charge of misconducting themselves.  

One of these guidelines covers how officers should conduct themselves when undertaking visits to the home of a member of the public. The code is clear in how officers should behave when on home visits.

This isn’t photoshopped.
A lot of modern Plods really are this out of condition!

In an October 2020 visit to a member of the public’s home two officers of West Yorkshire Police attended. One of them breached the guidance in a clear and obvious way. So clearly in fact that the breach was obvious to all, including the colleague they attended with. This was subject to a complaint to West Yorkshire Police made shortly afterwards.

Complaints to West Yorkshire Police are examined and considered – although more often than not dismissed on spurious grounds – by their Professional Standards Department. The logic of allowing police to investigate themselves is perhaps better left to others to explain.

In this matter they did three things to dishonestly skew the complaint in their favour. The three facts below represent a salutary warning to anyone who makes a complaint regarding the police that they will seek to loose evidence not in their favour and misdirect the investigation.

One

A complaint of the breach of the Code was made shortly after the visit. The officers in attendance wore body worn video, which could have proved the substance of the complaint to be factually accurate. But the body worn video was allowed to be destroyed before being viewed by Professional Standards Department at West Yorkshire Police. No attempt to retain the material for viewing was made. Thus the first piece of clear evidence that misconduct occurred on the home visit was lost. Likely deliberately.

Two

Significantly also a witness present at the home address during the visit was not questioned or approached in any way by police investigating the complaint. Again as with the loss of the body worn video footage this likely occurred to skew the process of the complaint investigation in favour of West Yorkshire Police exonerating the officer whose conduct had been highlighted. In the same way police failed to interview the other officer not subject to the complaint of a breach of the Code. Again this is deliberate action to skew the complaint investigation in the police’s favour.

Three

Then in the most devious manipulation of the complaint process West Yorkshire Police misdirected the complaint by investigating the officer who had not committed the breach of The College of Policing guidance rather than the one who clearly did. This together with the destruction of body worn video footage – which would have proven the complaint was factually sound – and the refusal to approach a witness to the facts are suggestive of an organisation which has attempted to suppress an investigation which would have found against one of their officers.

This is not however a new thing for West Yorkshire Police. Their Professional Standards Department standards department has dozens of different ways of minimising, trivialising, diffusing and reducing a complaint to the point where, however reasonable and valid it may be, the matter will not be investigated or assessed with rigour due to it. The point of this is of course the maintaining of professional reputation.

What price police reputation and integrity? Well at the moment about the same as this old badge goes for on eBay.

The 2021 independent report into the murder of journalist Daniel Morgan and the failure to solve the crime by the Metropolitan Police defined institutional corruption as:

“Concealing or denying failings, for the sake of the organisation’s public image, is dishonesty on the part of the organisation for reputational benefit and constitutes a form of institutional corruption.”

In circumstances large or small the police are prepared to manipulate cynically the complaints system in order to get officers off the hook. And in such situations the need for reasonably effective and careful supervision of police Professional Standards Departments is clear.

However staff at West Yorkshire combined authority specifically the Deputy Mayor’s office, who are tasked with supervision of police complaints where the complainant seeks review, seem to be suffering an unfortunate hangover from the days of Mark Burns-Williamson.

Police failed to find in favour of the complainant. The mishandling of the complaint worked rather well for them. So the matter was referred to the Deputy Mayor’s office at West Yorkshire Combined Authority. This is the next stage in the procedure of the complaints process. 

The matter was initially assessed and investigated by Karen Grey of West Yorkshire Combined Authority. 

And important fact to remember in relation to any complaint that you may refer to such as a Police and Crime Commissioner, a local authority, or The Independent Office of Police Complaints is that the matter that was originally under investigation by the police’s Professional Standards Department will not be investigated again.  

This means that police can misdirect any complaint made about their behaviour at the initial stages of that complaint and that the later appeals stages will not look for or attempt to correct those errors. The complaints system is being tactically gamed therefore to maintain the police’s professional reputation. Local authority organisations and IOPC are assisting in this.

The body tasked with review of the Police findings in respect of a complaint will conduct a tick box exercise which is essentially to review if the police have fulfilled their own tick-box exercise within their earlier complaint investigation. There will be no investigation into egregious breaches of procedure or abuse of process.

In keeping with this the investigation of the wrong person was missed by Karen Gray. The destruction of body worn video footage barely warranted a mention and the failure to interview a witness or the other officer present likewise. In short the means by which West Yorkshire Police had skewed the investigation, by dishonest means and to evade finding against one of their own officers for a breach of the College of Policing Code, were ignored by the review process.

This does not in anyway represent effective oversight of the police’s own handling of complaints. The same personnel who were present when the organisation was the Police and Crime Commissioner up until 2021 have moved to the new Combined Authority / Mayor’s office. Given that the reasons PCC Mark Burns-Williamson was incapable of holding police to account are well-known I’m forced to ponder what the WYCA’s excuse for the same lamentable lack of diligence is?

The suboptimal nature of the Combined Authority’s review of the police handling of a complaint, the critical facts of West Yorkshire Police’s own purposeful mishandling of the complaint in order to draw conclusions that police had handled the complaint in line with their obligations

A further review by Julie Reid, Head of Policing and Crime at West Yorkshire Combined Authority, failed to acknowledge that Karen Grey had made any errors in the handling of the complaint. So in effect then while the original complaint was subject to malfeasance from police, the complaint to WYCA about Gray’s mishandling of the original matter was also covered-up.

The ultimate price of this is paid by the public of course. While police are able to cover up misdeeds with impunity and the review organisation also fails to admit it has failed to spot key errors in its own investigation the standard of policing will never improve

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The Not-Independent Office of Police Complaints

Were you aware of the numbers of former police officers working for the supposedly Independent Office of Police Complaints?

The organisation describes itself on its own website:

We are independent, and make our decisions entirely independently of the police and government.

But a document that IOPC prefers not to draw attention to can be accessed online at:

Copy of IOPC staff diversity stats 310320 FINAL proofread.xlsx (policeconduct.gov.uk)

This shows the – frankly – shocking numbers of former officers and former police civilian staff employed at IOPC. An organisation that is supposed to be independent in relation to complaints made against the police.

Can it really be expected that staff working for IOPC are prepared to justly and reasonably criticise their former force or colleagues they’ve worked with hand in glove for years? Of course not. There’s a reason officers on Twitter use the hashtag #PoliceFamily

Indeed the figures speak for themselves: there’s a roughly one in ten chance of a complaint made about the police being upheld.

In the event of a complaint against the police you would be better off ignoring the police complaints process altogether and moving directly to instruct solicitors.

More seriously in the event of a fatality during contact with the police the staffing ratio of former officers presents a considerable barrier to a free and open investigation of the facts in such serious cases.

Ain’t life in Britain grand!

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The Force Won’t Be With You! Illegality at West Yorkshire Police

BEING the story of how a data access request led to a breach of the law by West Yorkshire Police.

Few people would argue against the notion that West Yorkshire Police has an international reputation for corruption and incompetence. One of the less enviable roles to have at the force is in the Data Management departments dubbed, rather imaginatively as Information Compliance and Right of Access. Those pesky members of the public requesting data they’re perfectly entitled to must grate! This in those departments you stand as gatekeeper for great swathes of your information that must not be released as it could show your brother officers out to be inept, lazy or actually corrupt.

Consequently the job of anyone in a data access role at West Yorkshire Police is more akin to a doorman at the gates of Hell stopping Desmond from escaping than the role suggested in legislation as a facilitator of access to information.

Consider Section 77 of the Freedom of Information Act which states that a person…

“is guilty of an offence if he alters, defaces, blocks, erases, destroys or conceals any record held by the public authority, with the intention of preventing the disclosure by that authority of all, or any part, of the information to the communication of which the applicant would have been entitled”.

…at West Yorkshire Police data access employees certainly consider this. Particularly the blocking and concealing aspects. And it probably keeps them awake at night.

A data access request was made to Right of Access department at West Yorkshire Police in early October 2020.

Eventually the data was provided (in February 2021) and as is par for the course this was considerably outside of the time limits allowed in law for the production of it and is thus is a breach of the law.

Additionally the mishandling of the original requests suggests misconduct in public office and willingness to commit a Section 77 offence on the part of a person or persons at Right of Access dept. It is for you, dear reader, to decide if this also constitutes a criminal offence of misconduct in public office.

A complaint was made to the (equally imaginatively named) Professional Standards Department (PSD) which they fudged. They were then instructed to re-investigate the complaint by The Office of the Police and Crime Commissioner (OPCC) for West Yorkshire.



Part of the re-investigation instructions relate to data that was clearly withheld by Right of Access Dept. from PSD in contravention of their duty of care and candour. That this withholding of data skewed the result of the PSD investigation resulting in the matter being referred to OPCC.

I’m willing to take a pretty safe bet that Right of Access did not inform PSD of the matters below in the original complaint investigation…

Eland Road Police Station, Leeds.

The original request for data made in October 2020 resulted in a letter of 4.11.20 from Right of Access dept. which stated that the request was rejected for 60 days as ROA had decided to impose an arbitrary and illegal ban on my making data access requests. The illegality of the ban was pointed out to ROA.

The pointing out that the ban was illegal appears to have generated a change of heart. A few days later (16.11.20) this ban was lifted and a further letter of 16.11.20 assigns the request a reference number. Great! It’s finally moving forwards! The letter of 16.11.20 claims the request is being processed.

However illogically the following day the request was then again refused in a letter from Right of Access dept. of 17.11.20.

This attracted an internal review request from me. The response from ROA to this was:

“internal reviews [has been set up]… an independent member of the team who was not involved in this decision will assess your requests and whether they should be processed.

The matter was also referred to the independent watchdog for data access rights, The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) as a formal complaint.

ICO considers that 40 days is sufficient for the production of an internal review. The internal review was of course not concluded after this time and so the reviews were both chased with ROA after 40 days on 12.1.21.

West Yorkshire Police staff hard at work.

The result of the internal reviews were inconclusive and weak in that they upheld the original failure to produce the data without giving sustainable grounds in law.

Now here’s a hot tip next time a police force refuses your data access rights:

In order to act as a check on Right of Access dept. at West Yorkshire Police (experience leads me to not believe a word they say) I occasionally request the same data as has been requested from ROA from another police force to check matters such as the right of access in law to the data and entitlement to the same. This is something I specifically do as in the case discussed here where there is an outright refusal to supply the data. Having an uninvolved second party check what you’ve been told is truthful is frequently invaluable.

A letter in response from Humberside Police from them confirmed the rights to the same type of data requested from West Yorkshire Police.

So I wrote back to ROA on 20.1.21:

I refer to the attached correspondence with Humberside Police in relation to [reference number given]. In this correspondence I requested from that force the same documentation that has been requested from West Yorkshire Police…

Following the usual game of silly bastards that police force’s like to play in their initial response letter the data was provided in accordance with the obligation on Humberside Police in law.

The same legal obligation that has compelled Humberside Police to provide a copy of the data also obliges West Yorkshire Police to provide the same to me. Your internal review of the matter and the provision of the same from a local force must mean that the law compelling disclosure of this data from Humberside also compels the disclosure from your force.

I await a copy of the data requested…

A copy of the covering letter from Humberside Police confirming the right of access to the data requested was also sent to ROA on 19.1.21.

ROA wrote back on 21.1.21 saying the matter is with the ICO but that I am not prevented from making further requests.

I request again on this date a copy of all the data originally requested in October 2020. This request is acknowledged on 22.1.21. The data was finally provided in February 2021.

After the original refusals and messing around by ROA it must have galled the that they’d been backed into a corner with no further escape route. If the data is obtainable from one force it must logically be obtainable from all.

The point of the lengthy backstory above is this: ROA habitually seek to retain data that the production of would prove embarrassing to West Yorkshire Police. This purposeful retention of data breaches the law as it activates both yours and my Section 77 rights under data access legislation and the illegal retention of it is an example of misconduct in public office as the law is habitually flouted to avoid the production of data access requests.

In the above matter once the entitlement to data had been established from another force ROA had no option than to provide the data requested, but of course prior to this the data had been subject to so much hand-wringing and wrangling to avoid its disclosure, including the illegal imposition of a ban on requests being made and the arbitrary refusal of a legal and legitimate data access request.

Conclusion

I should not have to fact-check the legal position with requests to other police forces when a request for data has been refused by West Yorkshire Police. But it does help! Equally I should not have to do this for the purpose of getting ROA department backed into a corner from which they cannot continue to refuse access to data. Again though this does help! This is wasting my time and public money simply because ROA sees its position as a gatekeeper for information rather than accepting its actual position in law as a facilitator.

Section 77 cited above is clear: it is an offence to attempt to block access to data that the public has a right to.

Recently The Office of the Police and Crime Commissioner for West Yorkshire Police has had a number of members of the public complain about the police’s Right of Access dept. Will this lead to a broader investigation of systemic and purposeful effort to block public access to data by delay, dithering and denial? Watch this space.

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ICO Address Police Breaches of the Law on GDPR

Police forces are notoriously bad at responding to subject access requests (those are requests for your own personal data) as well as requests for data overall from the force, especially if the request for access is made by the public.

The Information Commissioner’s Office has recently published a report (link seen below) outlining just what an absolute catastrophe police responses to these requests are.

Click to access timeliness-of-responses-to-information-access-requests.pdf

As ever with such a report the real eye-opener are the recommendations made by ICO. In this instance these are nine points which show how UK police forces are failing to deal with data access requests in anything like an efficient and professional way. Often this is because the purpose of data access legislation clashes with police’s wish to keep information regarding errors in procedure and process wholly secret.

Title page of ICO’s report.

This report will cause consternation in particular at failing Humberside Police, a force subject to many eye-watering fines from ICO in the past for failures to comply with the law on data access by the public. The recommendations ICO suggest will likely be impossible for the force to implement.

West Yorkshire Police – as expected one of the forces most likely to break the law to try to avoid the production of data – said at a meeting convened by their Police and Crime Commissioner recently that they would be looking at increasing the staffing in the Information Management Department in the next year (budget permitting) to cope with the demands made upon it. “Looking at” and “budget permitting” is another way of saying that nothing will be done to address the problem.

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“Accessing Police Systems for an Improper Purpose”

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.

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“Cuffing” or “Shonking” at South Yorkshire Police.

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.

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West Yorkshire Police: COVID-19 Super-Spreaders?

Presently the East Yorkshire city of Kingston Upon Hull has the highest COVID-19 rates of infection in the UK. The virus appears to be running rampant in the city causing a significant numbers of deaths.

The Guardian has quoted local Hull resident Gavin Storey in an article published this week. The original article can be found at:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/nov/18/gypsyville-hull-most-deprived-and-covid-infected-suburbs-in-england

It states that Storey thinks it suits the ruling class have let the virus run riot through deprived communities like his. He says:

“It seems like they are trying to get rid of us. That way when it’s over they won’t have to spend so much money around here. Let the kids go to school, spread it to their parents and then let them all die. Most of the people in the country who are on benefits will be dead.”

Twitter users react to Mr. Storey’s comments in the article.

This all got me thinking about the initial wave of the pandemic to hit the UK in spring 2020.

According to information passed over to me in a conversation in spring 2020 from one of Leeds’ top criminal defence solicitors West Yorkshire Police were arresting and pulling suspects in for questioning with an urgency and speed which was quite at odds with the nature of a lethal pandemic and the requirement for people to self isolate.

Those arrested were not given masks and at that point before the end of the first lockdown self-sourced PPE was not commonly owned like today. The overall idea at that point was to protect by keeping your distance from others which makes the arrests carried out seem even more bizarre. Command Teams must have been aware of the risk of police stations as focal points for the spread of the virus. Frontline officers were of course given PPE but of dubious effectiveness which had been sold to the force, desperate to be seen to protect officers, as a “job lot”.

This is also unusual behaviour for a force which remains in financial dire straights considering the potential costs of increasing the pace in ongoing investigations.

Indeed I was told that at that time even people who had been released under investigation for a long period and who had no notification of progress on potential charges were being re-arrested and brought in for interview.

UK police tend to be toxic at the best of times.

In the same way as Mr. Storey thinks schools are being used to spread COVID-19 in deprived communities the sudden urge of West Yorkshire Police to pull in suspects for interview in the initial wave of a lethal pandemic seems… unsettling.

Were these actions part of a deliberate policy to assist the virus to spread in deprived communities?

Is this too outlandish an idea? Then consider also that in spring 2020 the elderly and frail were discharged from hospitals into care homes without adequate screening to ensure they were not infecting others.

The initial Government policy on the virus was to let it run through the population. This was the planning in the early stages of the UK’s response until SAGE, the Government’s scientific advisory group, suggested this strategy would lead to potential UK deaths of up to 250,000. This initial discredited strategy meant excess deaths through the initial lockdown coming too late. It is known that former Government advisor Dominic Cummings is a eugenicist who employed another advisor for a short period in February 2020 before that person’s past writings in eugenics were made public leading to their dismissal.

In every one of multiple other respects the UK’s response to the pandemic was lethargically slow and inept. This situation continues to this day.

The idea then that there has been purpose in the UK’s handling of COVID-19 has some merit. That the initial plan to allow the virus to rip through the population is still in play but not stated openly as a matter of State policy.

It is likely then that people with either criminal records or suspected of committing a criminal offence have been considered in the same light as the fail and elderly: a potential burden to society and something best gotten rid of. That the virus provides (to the State) a convenient ability to do just this.

I know of one clear instance of West Yorkshire Police officers attending at a suspect’s home without masks or PPE in May despite being aware of a vulnerable person being present at the home. Breaking subject access request laws the Right of Access Department at West Yorkshire Police have failed to release body worn video footage of this incident showing officers attending without PPE.

The theory that West Yorkshire Police were actively pulling in suspects in an attempt to spread Coronavirus around is just a theory.

But it’s a theory that does seem to fit into the overall approach of the authorities towards the virus from the inept Test and Trace system to Eat Out to Help Out. All of these have assisted the virus to move through the poorer sections of the population to the point where we’ve ow reached the second point of national lockdown within one year.

In South Korea there have so far been less than 600 deaths from COVID-19. Britain has (at a low estimate) 60,000 to date.

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Malfeasance at the Office of West Yorkshire Police and Crime Commissioner

The West Yorkshire Police and Crime Commissioner is Mark Burns-Williamson, a largely gaff-prone failed politician. Heaven knows there’s sufficient data out there in the public domain to show that by any stretch of the imagination the man is unsuited to any role requiring public trust.

My favourite one details how he sent an inadvisable letter in a “love triangle” which would ordinarily have rendered him open to criminal prosecution. This was however covered up by West Yorkshire Police’s (then) DCI Simon Bottomley leading to the eternal gratitude of Burns-Williamson to the force he is supposed to scrutinise.

It also appears his office is prepared to manipulate and ignore facts to protect the very organisation it should be holding to scrutiny.

This blog entry tells the story of one such incident.

Burns-Williamson demonstrates the degree to which he hold the local force to scrutiny.

In May 2020 The Ministry of Justice’s Data Access Office sent data to a person (who we will call the recipient) in error.

This data was information on a third party who lived in the London area. This amounted to a serious data breach as the disclosure included the subjects name, address, date of birth and bank account details etc. as well as other disclosures regarding a series Proceeds of Crime Act proceedings against the data subject.

The recipient of the data informed The Information Commissioner’s Office and The Ministry of Justice as well as the data subject whose information had been disclosed. He also posted regarding this on Twitter but did not reveal any confidential information in so doing.

Data Access at MoJ requested the recipient remove the mocking tweet. The recipient of the data refused citing his freedom of expression under The Human Rights Act and that no offence in civil or criminal law had been committed by the tweet.

Three days later the recipient of the data was arrested at his home by West Yorkshire Police on the basis that he had breached The Data Protection Act. The allegation being that he had shared the confidential data sent to him in error on Twitter.

This was palpably untrue as an examination of the tweet would have confirmed. However police did not examine the tweet for themselves but took it “on trust” from MoJ that a supposed offence had taken place. Of course it hadn’t but MoJ were burning with indignation that a serious data security error had been made public and to their official regulator on data matters the ICO.

Police were aware that no offence had occurred.

The bar for arrest for any offence is set very high as recent cases such as Rachid v. The Chief Constable of West Yorkshire Police (2020) show. Instead police took it on trust from The Ministry of Justice that an offence had occurred in a situation in which the Security Manager for MoJ’s correspondence (seen by this blogger) reveals his desire to give the recipient “a nasty shock”.

The recipient’s home was entered by police on his arrest. In the middle of the Spring 2020 pandemic a vulnerable family member who was shielding was subject to interaction with police who did not wear PPE or take any form of precautions regarding introducing COVID-19 infection into the home. Electronic devices were removed and the home was ransacked in the search. The officer leading this was PC Alan Jackson. Police actions amount to trespass to property (since there were no reasonable grounds for arrest) alongside trespass to goods and wrongful arrest.

The home of the recipient of data was raided by police without PPE in the middle of the spring pandemic.

Predictably no charges were brought. Emails seen between the Officer in Charge (OIC) and The Ministry of Justice reveal MoJ immediately loose interest when the recipient was arrested which fits in with the prior email claiming MoJ wanted to give him a nasty shock. No further action resulted to the recipient from either Police or MoJ.

A complaint was duly made by the recipient to West Yorkshire Police Professional Standards Department (PSD). Their internal investigation under The Police Reform Act 2002 confirmed – but only internally to the police – that the arrest was wrongful on the basis that WYP had not seen or been provided by MoJ with any indication that a criminal offence had taken place. Other aspects of the complaint made were ignored by PSD and not investigated.

An organisation such as West Yorkshire Police which has an international reputation for both corruption and incompetence needs to be able to head off complaints and minimise them early on. The investigation concluded in a document called an Assessment and Progress Log that there had indeed been no reasonable grounds for arrest, therefore logically the arrest was unlawful. This document was an internal document not for public or complainant’s consumption.

Police of course cannot admit that they have erred to the complainant. It opens the door for civil action for wrongful arrest and payment of compensation. It also amount to loss of professional reputation.

Thus the results of the PSD investigation which were presented to the complainant in August 2020 were totally at odds with the actual true findings of the investigation. The official line was that nothing untoward had occurred and that the arrest was legitimate: the unseen internal report stated quite the opposite. A copy of this report has since been obtained from WYP and examined.

If you find that the above shocks you then I would respectfully point out you may have little experience of the police complaints process and the extent to which it seeks to hide the conduct of misconducting and underperforming officers.

The complainant found some 21 issues with the PSD investigation response which were either suboptimal or evaded examination of the facts. Of course if you’re prepared to commit mendacity on such a scale as a police complaints office then it’s best to keep any communication simple. The response provided by PSD’s Vicky Silver was clearly exceptionally evasive and the errors in it were manifest.

Police Professional Standards Departments go to any length to dismiss valid complaints.

The complaint was progressed as an appeal to The Office of The Police and Crime Commissioner for West Yorkshire, this being a body with supposed oversight of the local force. Karen Gray at PCC was tasked with the examination of the appeal.

It is a basic element of any investigation that the investigator should have access to all of the data available to be able to reach a reasoned conclusion. This is common sense. In the course of the PCC’s investigation they either failed to obtain copies of documents such as the PSD Assessment and Progress Log or else were provided with a copy of the relevant data but chose to ignore it in favour of a rubber-stamped approval of the earlier PSD investigation.

Thus the office of West Yorkshire Police and Crime Commissioner have shown themselves to be either as throughly dishonest or professionally incompetent as the police force they are supposed to supervise. Further they are prepared to support the local force in their dishonesty.

A further complaint was made regarding the failure of the PCC to obtain all relevant data meaning that the Karen Gray investigation was fundamentally flawed. This was responded to more recently by PCC’s Jane Owen who has stated that Karen Gray could not have been aware of the Assessment and Progress Log on the basis that it was produced after the conclusion of the original PCC review.

However the document in question from PSD is dated 5.6.20.

Therefore it was produced BEFORE the complaint was referred to PCC by around two months. The response that it was not available in the original PSD investigation is therefore an outright lie.

It is of course inconceivable that an investigation properly conducted would not have requested a copy of, assessed and examined the PSD Assessment and Progress Log which was in existence by this point and therefore PSD’s position that Karen Gray had access to all of the required documentation to enable correct conclusions is not only incorrect but also deliberately misleading.

The essence of the complaint to PSD regarding wrongful arrest etc. was proven – as that office was well aware – by 5.6.20.

All subsequent efforts of PSD and the office of the PCC for West Yorkshire have sought to bury the facts under an increasing mound of guff and nonsense.

PSD chose to issue a response completely opposite to the facts they had themselves established and The Office of The Police and Crime Commissioner has assisted them in this cover-up and continues to do so.

In a desperate final attempt to avoid further scrutiny Jane Owen writes:

I have concluded that you have used the Office of the Police and Crime Commissioner’s complaints process to try and change the outcome of your complaint… and the subsequent review undertaken by this office but – in line with the statutory guidance that has been issued that sets out how reviews have to be handled – you do not have a further right of review

Is it any wonder that both West Yorkshire Police and The Office of the Police and Crime Commissioner have such a poor reputation both locally and nationally?

Certainly both are prepared to bend the truth into impossible angles to avoid any admission of error or loss of professional reputation. Perversely this ends up in a situation as described above in which loss of face and reputation end up occurring both from the original issue and the labyrinthine efforts made to conceal it.

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