Justice should be blind when it comes to arbitrating impartially between the parties contesting a Court case – but justice should not be allowed to be blindfolded, however, by Police Officers who either fail to switch their body cameras on, confiscate mobile phones, or fail to retain footage which they have filmed, thereby seeking to obscure their activities, avoid accountability and control the evidential narrative.
Last month, I won a victory for my client Mo Izhar at Oxford County Court in proceedings brought against Thames Valley Police. It was a great result for my client, and there are a number of important issues arising from the case which I would like to highlight in this week’s blog post, representing the type of every-day abuses of power born out of Police ‘entitlement’, which must be recognised if they are to be stopped.
Attack of the Clones
One evening in December 2021, Mo pulled up onto the forecourt of a Petrol Station in Oxfordshire driving a BMW. This was a courtesy car given to him as his own car had been damaged in a road traffic accident.
As Mo got out of his car to go to the garage shop, two more BMWs pulled onto the forecourt, ‘boxing’ his vehicle in. Several men in Police uniform alighted from the two vehicles; Officers whom we now know to be PC Husbands, PC Wardlaw, PC Wheeler and PC Palfreyman.
One Officer told Mo not to move, and accordingly he remained by his car whilst the Officer spoke to him. The Officer stated that Mo’s vehicle had been reported as potentially being on cloned plates and that the officers wanted to establish if it was genuine. Mo explained that the vehicle was a courtesy car and that he had the relevant documents; however, as my client made to walk towards the passenger side of his car so as to access it (for the purposes of getting his vehicle paperwork/ID) he was stopped by the Officer, who took hold of Mo’s left wrist. Meanwhile, another officer opened the front passenger door of the car and leant inside, searching it.
It later transpired that Mo’s registration had ‘activated’ the Police vehicle’s ‘in car’ Automatic Number Plate Registration (ANPR) system, as it was believed to have been cloned – but the Officers had no information to suggest that Mo’s car was a clone, as opposed to being the original, legitimate vehicle.
Little Brother Is Watching You
At this point Mo wisely commenced filming his interactions with the Officers by means of his mobile phone which was held in his right hand. Mo protested that he didn’t know who the Officers were (because they had not properly identified themselves to him) and that they had assaulted him (the Officer who had grabbed hold of and was continuing to grip his left arm).
In response to this, the Officer holding Mo’s arm did not apologise, but rather escalated matters by instructing Mo to put his hands behind his back – “because we don’t know who you are” – whilst a second Officer falsely asserted that Mo kept trying to walk off. A different Officer now took hold of Mo’s right wrist and forced him to put his mobile phone down on the bonnet of the Officer’s car. This Officer then handcuffed Mo’s hands behind his back.
This is an all too common Police response to criticism: rather than attempting to explain themselves, and diffuse conflict, they ramp up the level of aggression in order to silence rather than answer the legitimate questions they are being asked.
The Officers then began to question Mo as regards the car and asked him for his ID. He answered their questions and pointed out that he could not produce his ID because they had put him in handcuffs when he was going to get it. The Officer advised that he would get it for Mo, to which Mo replied that he would get it or he would give the Officer his licence number. The Officer accused Mo of being ‘awkward’ and uncooperative, whilst Mo complained about being handcuffed for nothing.
There was no question that Mo was being subjected to both false imprisonment and assault and battery whilst these events were unfolding. Remember that unless they are invoking mental health legislation, or stopping you whilst driving, the Police cannot lawfully detain you when you are out and about in public without either arresting you or performing an official ‘stop and search’ and, even then, they must inform you what they are doing and why. The Police are not entitled to detain you whilst they determine whether or not to arrest you. However, all too often experienced officers (like this squad) will attempt to do just this, apparently banking on people not knowing their rights – or being intimidated into silence. This constitutes at best a lazy and at worse a cynical and bullying abuse of Police power, which they are attempting to exert without all the necessary safeguards which the law has put in place to ensure the proper accountability. Abuse of power abhors both a paper-trail and independent video recording, as you will see as this story continues.
Mo explained that his ID was in his bag in the back of his car whereupon the Officer located and retrieved it.
Mo’s continued detention caused him not only physical discomfort, but also embarrassment given its very public location: several members of the public were watching him as they came and went across the garage forecourt, no doubt thinking that there was no smoke without fire. He continued to remonstrate as to why he was being treated like a criminal and the Officers continued to say that there was good reason for their actions and that my client was being “awkward” and he had “attitude.” Mo was in fact displaying entirely the correct attitude, standing up for his civil liberties, which the Court proceedings we brought would ultimately uphold.
During Mo’s ongoing, unlawful detention, several Officers searched the interior of his car, including the boot. It was unclear what, if anything, they were looking for. Mo’s detention in handcuffs continued to attract the attention of passing members of the public and he again expressed his embarrassment.
In response to my client’s legitimate questions as to why the Officers were doing this and his polite protests as to their conduct, the Officers continued to berate him, telling him to “lose the attitude” and “your attitude stinks”. After Mo identified himself as a HGV driver, one of the Officers unnecessarily commented “It’s like me saying all HGV drivers are wankers…..”
An Officer also falsely asserted that Mo had attempted to walk off when the Officers first approached him, which was so patently untrue that Mo protested “Do not lie”, to which the Officer replied that he wasn’t lying.
Eventually, after approximately 10 minutes, apparently having satisfied their curiosity/ exerted their power enough, the Officers advised that they were prepared to release Mo and removed his handcuffs.
Mo now requested a stop and search record but the Officers refused on the basis that Mo himself had not personally been searched. Mo then pointed out that his vehicle had certainly been searched, to which the Officers disingenuously responded that his vehicle had not been searched, but they had simply been ‘looking for his ID’. Mo correctly asserted (as Garage CCTV footage would incontrovertibly prove, cutting through the darkness the Officers subsequently created by deleting their body camera recordings of the incident) that in fact the Officers had “went through all the car.”
As Mo held the line and asked if the Officers were refusing to give him a search record, they fell back on another ploy to avoid a paper-trail, by exaggerating the length of time it would take to produce in an apparent attempt to try and make their victim give up: “We’ll give you one if you want to wait…It’s going to be about half an hour though…I’d go and get a cup of tea if I were you because you’re going to be here a while.”
Call A Dick, A Dick?
Is the Police definition of a ‘dick’: a person who knows their rights and is prepared to stand up for them?
In response to the Officer’s rather transparent attempt at stalling, which I have transcribed above, Mo astutely called their bluff, saying the Officer himself could get a cup of tea and take as long as he wanted. A short time later (not in fact half an hour, as it turned out) Mo was given an official log number. As the Officers then began to depart, one of them warned my client that if he continued to ‘carry on’, he would put him ‘on the system’ so that he would be repeatedly stopped. The same Officer then called Mo a “knob” and then “an absolute dick” but when challenged by Mo as to his disgraceful language initially denied saying this, apparently unaware that my client had captured the Officer’s insult on his mobile phone, and then claimed that he only said that Mo was “acting like a dick”. This type of frankly smart-arsed semantic back- talk would not get members of the public very far if the positions were reversed, I am sure we can all agree.
As it was, Mo had no immediate recourse for his anger and frustration as the unrepentant Officers drove off, but thankfully he was soon able to reach out to me, and we started to put matters right by means of the civil justice system, aided by Mo’s wise decision to record the incident on his phone and to seek the garage forecourt CCTV from the owners of the petrol station. It was very well that he had done so, as the Police Officers themselves all failed to mark up their body camera recordings for preservation, thereby allowing them to be deleted, and when Thames Valley Police legal services responded to the claim they wrongly alleged –
- that Mo had been immediately obstructive (rather than co-operative);
- that he had attempted to walk away, rather than engaging with the Officers;
- that the Officers had not searched Mo’s car;
- that the last Officer had not sworn at Mo in any way.
An Unrepentant Attitude: But We Made Them Sorry
These assertions were maintained in the Defence which Thames Valley Police filed to my client’s County Court claim, but were then exposed by our disclosure of the video evidence which Mo had gathered – leading to the Police having to hastily revise their factual account. They filed an Amended Defence, hiding behind the phrase “attrition of memory” to describe what the less charitable amongst us might suspect were deliberate falsehoods by the Officers – every single one of these supposed gaps in their memory being in the Officers’ favour rather than neutral or in Mo’s. But even now the Police were only prepared to concede partial liability – admitting that Mo had been unlawfully detained and his vehicle interfered with, but seeking to deny that he had been assaulted – and in any event maintaining that Mo should receive only ‘nominal damages’ (i.e, small change).
Hence it was necessary to proceed to trial, which took place before His Honour Judge Andrew Davies on 5–6 February 2025 at Oxford County Court, and at which my client received a significant award of damages and legal costs, plus the great satisfaction of public vindication. None of the individual Officers involved in this incident may have been prepared to apologise – but we made them sorry.
I will continue my account of this case in Part 2 of this blog next week, when I will highlight some of the Judge’s key findings at trial and the lessons to be learned in how to protect yourself from Police misconduct and win claims against them.
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