I’ve written on here many times before about how Humberside Police are particularly useless, even in a hotly contested field of local forces.
However even I fell off my chair at the sheer incompetence of the subject access response provided by their Information Compliance department this week.
A subject access request provided by the force amounts to a nonfeasance as the response:
1. Fails to provide the data requested.
2. Is issued outside the legal time limit for a response to be provided.
3. Repeats back the same information put in the original request.
Here’s the letter in full. I have redacted the header.
The key sentences are in the fourth and fifth paragraphs seen above. These are reproduced from the original request. Data cannot be obtained from the Police National Computer – however data that has been entered into the PNC by a local force can be obtained from the same regional police force. Hence the request to Humberside Police.
The substantive reply is seen below:
Here we focus on the second paragraph. It essentially repeats the data I put to police in the first instance.
Consequently the force has failed to react correctly to the subject access request in every conceivable aspect.
This suggests that the intention is to continue frustrate any further request made for the data using the rights conferred in italics in the letter to do so as the response to any further requests that might be made.
The Information Commissioner’s Office has been informed.
Flurry of activity at GMP in the last few days starting with this considerable shocker:
Overall GMP has been known to be a failing organisation for some time but no active intervention to stop the fall in service standards has been made by GMP itself, The Home Office or HM Inspectorate of Constabulary.
On Wednesday the Chief Constable, reckoned to be amongst the worst in a very competitive field, resigned citing “long term health issues”. None of these issues had been apparent or seemed to prevent him discharging his duties prior to Tuesday’s news regarding non-recording of crimes.
On Thursday the force was placed into special measures following Home Office intervention.
That’s a triple whammy of connected events.
Most interesting from my perspective is how GMP denied any failings in regards to service standards until the scandalous failure to record crimes became public. Like every British police force at present the effort made to hide errors and failures is tremendous. The mantra of the modern Chief Constable is that the professional reputation of the force must be maintained at all costs.
How many other forces will end up in special measures by the end of 2021? I’m willing to take bets on at least two.
This blog post is best avoided being read on a full moon for reasons which will shortly become obvious.
In a meeting due to take place tomorrow, Friday 18th December the Ethics, Integrity and Complaints Committee of Leicestershire Police will discuss the reasons why the number of supposed rapes recorded by police are high while the number of prosecutions for the offence are low.
Current Labour Party leader Sir Kier Starmer is known to be one of the individuals behind the mantra of “we believe the victim”, a post-Saville call-to-arms which led to a turnaround in modern policing resulting in the prosecution of thousands of men for supposed historic sexual offences. Many of these men were geriatric and due to the passage of time since the supposed offences their accusers unable to produce physical evidence of wrongdoing. In the post-Saville climate however one person’s word against another remains sufficient to enable a wrongful conviction; particularly over something as emotive as a sexual offence allegation.
Some fifteen years ago the proportion of wrongfully convicted men in gaol was around one in twenty. The figures are likely presently significantly higher.
Yet an accusation of rape remains one of the problematic offences for police to investigate. The number of offences compared to the number of convictions carries a massive disparity. The Leicestershire Police report to be discussed tomorrow helps explain why.
You can read the leaked report into the matter below. It gives an insight into the level of lunacy currently practiced in the British Police overall.
In short the statistics for such offences given to the public are wrong. Police have known they are wrong for some time and that they provide a wholly distorted and prejudicial view of the true extent of rape offences. The report explains why this is so.
The most memorable part of the report concerns a complaint by a woman of assault by a werewolf. An actual werewolf. Not just a hairy bloke. The matter took some four months to investigate at a cost of goodness knows what to the taxpayer.
🐺 – 🌕
The matter of supposed rape by a supernatural being is still recorded as an offence.
More serious is the extract below:
In short when a false claim of rape has occurred police do not obtain a retraction (failure to do so keeping the non-offence as a recorded offence) and police do not appear to seek to obtain a retraction as it would leave the complainant open to prosecution for wasting police time. This stops false accusers and compensation-seekers from being prosecuted and would enable them to “have another go” at a later date. The lucrative gravy-train of false allegations thus rolls on and everyone on the criminal justice system benefits. Except the poor bloody defendant of course.
If enough false accusers were to be prosecuted the well of complaints that the British police have been supping from since “We believe the victim” was introduced would shortly run dry.
This approach however is too common-sense. It would however solve the problem of false statistics and keep innocent men out of gaol.
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.
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.
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.
The recent death of Peter Sutcliffe (a man dubbed in the media as The Yorkshire Ripper) presents a practical public-relations problem for West Yorkshire Police. It again raises the spectre of how Sutcliffe was able to kill so many people for such a sustained period. The answers make uncomfortable truths for that force.
Sutcliffe in 1974
West Yorkshire Police’s failure to catch Sutcliffe in what was one of the UK’s biggest manhunts plays a significant part in their present international reputation as a force beset by incompetence and corruption. It is a reputation with considerable justification.
Sutcliffe was not blessed with high intelligence enabling him to evade capture. Nor was he the popular fiction version of a serial killer: a creature of almost animal cunning and divine luck. Granted he was aided considerably in his activities by the relative infancy of forensics in the late 70’s. But this does not tell the whole story.
For the most part the reason Sutcliffe was able to carry on killing was down to long-identified administrative and operational failures on the part of the police. He is known to have been interviewed several times by officers in the course of their investigations but each time was discounted for further investigation. Other operational errors are known to have included an excess of paperwork generated in the course of the investigation. Detectives were hindered rather than helped by the weight of data generated and the primitive storage of such.
I would argue another failing contributed to the deaths of thirteen women. This is that police officers both at the time and now have a particular mindset which pre-disposes them towards both a closed minded approach to investigations and a form of “tunnel vision”. This comprises some of the issues I’ll discuss below.
Personal characteristics
To start with it’s popularly said that a Yorkshireman is a particular sort of stout character. Gruff, uncommunicative and 100% convinced he’s right in the face of all opposing evidence. Bluff and stiff-necked. The Harry Enfield comedy version of a Yorkshireman isn’t far from the mark. You know as well as I do the popular stereotype. For some reason beyond my capacity to fathom West Yorkshire Police provides a home to people very much of this mindset: there is a poisonous organisational culture which incubates some undesirable personality characteristics.
“Ah’ll say what ah bloody well like!”
Consider the absolute certainty with which the senior officer in the Sutcliffe investigation, George Oldfield, was sure the killer was the voice on the Weirside Jack hoax tape is a tragic example of this unwillingness to admit to error once a set path has been taken. In the police both of the 70’s and today face-saving is also a strong motivating force. Especially so when consistent underperformance or failure are likely to result in downgrade to civilian worker status.
A former Australian Director of Public Prosecutions Nicholas Cowdry produced a book called “Getting Justice Wrong” in which he argued that tunnel-vision on the part of officers (…he must have done something even if we can’t get him on what we’ve arrested him for!) plays a significant part in police failures. Tie this into the inability to admit to errors being make and you’ve an already toxic mix.
The “right” sort of victim
Sutcliffe’s first few murders were women largely at the margins of society. It is only with his killing of Jane Macdonald, a shop worker, in 1977 that the investigation increased in speed and urgency. This was partly in response to media pressure. But police then and now categorise crimes reported to them in an internal value system based partly on the perceived “worth” of the victim in society (socio-economic status etc). Sutcliffe attacked a young woman outside of Bradford in 1974 who sustained horrific injuries but police handling of the complaint and their investigations were at best suboptimal. The same occurred later when he attacked a lady who was a member of the BAME community in Leeds. Her complaints were “cuffed off” (to use the current parlance of West Yorkshire Police) rather than investigated. it is likely because of her background and low educational attainment that she was not considered a significant enough figure for her complaint to be deemed “worth” investigation.
Presented without comment. BBC News report on the day Sutcliffe’s death was announced.
The “right” sort of crime
Easy to solve crime is preferred. Especially if it’s hitting targets or addressing an issue of public concern. More complex investigations are likely to be shunned on the basis of the time, expenditure and difficulty of prosecuting successfully. Then and now police have one eye on the crime statistics and are more likely to address issues of public concern based on recent media exposure of such crimes. There’s a reason The Serious Fraud Office are so notoriously unsuccessful despite The City of London being rampant with financial corruption. In the matter of the Sutcliffe investigation it is arguably only when he began to operate outside of the red light areas from 1978 onwards that the police ramped up efforts due to increased public concern. This public concern increased again from 1980 onwards.
Conclusions
Ultimately Sutcliffe was caught by sheer luck and the most basic of police work.
He was picked up by uniformed constables from South Yorkshire Police in a situation in which he was likely preparing to kill again. Having disposed of his weapons behind a toilet cistern under the pretext of needing to urinate it is the quick-thinking of a South Yorkshire PC which led to the discovery of the weapons and the eventual confession of Sutcliffe that he was the killer.
The hugely expensive and lengthy investigation by West Yorkshire Police had been an excruciating waste of time and money. Arguably by tying itself in knots by a combination of weak administration and blinkered mindset the investigation had allowed Sutcliffe to carry on killing.
Serial killers are thankfully exceptionally rare and unusual. The advances in forensic technology and other policing methods in the forty nine years since he was caught render another Yorkshire Ripper type of killer thankfully even less likely.
However a weak spot remains in the mindset and attitude of police officers as I have discussed. Then and now significant barriers exist in investigations due to habits it’s almost impossible for police officers to break. This is partly fostered by an inherited organisational culture and thus will remain with us for some time yet.
Legal Babble 