In January of this year I blogged about the case of my client Shane Price who was subjected to a brutal road-side assault on the A46 in Lincolnshire in May 2021 after he became involved in a dispute with another driver – a driver who turned out to be (then) Lincolnshire Police Inspector Jonathan Mellor.
In my January post, I reported how former Inspector Mellor had been found guilty of gross misconduct in relation to this incident, although only after a torturous and long drawn out process, which had led both Inspector Mellor and myself to the same conclusion – namely that senior Officers in the Force had promised to ‘protect’ him from misconduct charges after this incident; in the end they did not, and so there the opinions of myself and Mr Mellor as to the outcome of events diverged dramatically. Yet this was no thanks to the Police themselves – the A46, it turned out, was not a ‘road to Damascus’, and after Lincolnshire Police attempted to quash my client’s legitimate complaint, it was only because of my client’s courage and persistence, coupled with my legal advice and assistance, that former Inspector Mellor was ever brought to justice. We utilised the appeal channels of the Independent Office of Police Conduct (IOPC), which on this occasion resulted in a rare IOPC intervention; the Police “Watchdog” barring its teeth to force Lincolnshire Police to proceed with the gross misconduct charges against Inspector Mellor, when it was clear that the Police themselves simply wanted to let him settle into a happy retirement.
In my earlier blog, I promised that I would discuss the full circumstances of this case once Shane’s claim for damages against Lincolnshire Police was settled and now indeed I can – as I am proud to confirm that I have recently concluded Shane’s claim for damages in the sum of £100,000, plus legal costs.
The thin red line: Inspector attacks an injured man over a minor driving dispute
I have written before about the sinister coupling which occurs when the ‘red mist’ descends upon a person who is also a member of the ‘thin blue line’; Police Officers whose loss of control of their temper is accompanied, and even facilitated by a sense of impunity, borne out of an expectation that their actions will be excused, condoned or covered up by their ‘brother Officers’ in the wider Police Force.
All too often, such Police Officers correctly assume that the “Professional Standards Department” of their Force will – rather than rigorously investigating complaints and pursuing misconduct charges “without fear or favour” towards their fellow Officers – be batting on the same side as those Officers, as members of the same Police team. It is this problem which lies at the heart of the dysfunctionality of the Police Complaint System, an ongoing thorn in the side of UK justice which I have very regularly had occasion to blog about.
My client Shane Price is of Romany Gypsy heritage, and was at the time of these events in May 2021 a self-employed gardener/tree surgeon. Four days before the incident which occurred on 26 May 2021, Shane had sustained a laceration injury to his left foot whilst using a chainsaw, for which he had had to seek medical assistance, including a tetanus injection and prescription of antibiotics.
On the evening of 26 May Shane was driving his father’s truck, a Ford transit van, along the A46, a dual carriageway with a 70mph speed limit towards Lincoln. Travelling as a front seat passenger in the van was Shane’s then wife.
At one stage in the journey, Shane moved into the outside lane in order to perform a routine overtaking manoeuvre around a slower vehicle in the inside lane of the carriageway. However, he noticed a Ford car, which was travelling behind him in the outside lane, suddenly speed up and begin flashing its headlights/ sounding its horn at him.
Having completed his overtaking manoeuvre, Shane naturally moved back into the inside lane.
The Ford car then came alongside Shane’s van (the Ford was continuing to drive in the outside lane) and as it did so, the driver of the Ford appeared to use his mobile phone to take a photograph of Shane and his wife, before accelerating past and then pulling into the inside lane in front of Shane’s van.
Unbeknownst to Shane at that time, the driver of the Ford was then- Inspector Jonathan Mellor of Lincolnshire Police, who was on duty, but was driving his personal vehicle, rather than a Police car.
My client understandably considered that the Ford driver’s use of his mobile phone whilst driving was dangerous, and so he now, in turn, flashed his headlights at the Ford and signalled for its driver to pull up so he could speak to him.
Accordingly, the two vehicles pulled over.
Inspector Mellor and Shane exited their vehicles and walked towards each other.
Shane noted that Inspector Mellor was wearing a black jacket and was carrying a radio, and formed the impression that he was a security guard. He could not see anything on Inspector Mellor’s clothing to indicate that he was a Police Officer, and nor did Mellor identify himself as such.
Shane began to ask Inspector Mellor why he had taken a photograph of him and pointed out that doing such whilst driving was illegal. To this, the Officer of the law gave the considered reply: “Get back in your vehicle or I’m going to fuck you.”
Shane was taken aback at the level of aggression which was so suddenly being shown towards him, but this was only the beginning of the Inspector’s disgraceful conduct.
Whilst my shocked client continued to try to speak reasonably to the Officer, Mellor grabbed hold of Shane’s arms and violently pulled him to the nearby grass verge.
In the process of doing this, Inspector Mellor grabbed Shane by the neck and then pushed him backwards towards a fence.
When Shane was against the fence, Mellor again put his left hand on Shane’s throat. Increasingly concerned, Shane told his aggressor that he had an injury to his left foot, and protested that Mellor was assaulting him.
Inspector Mellor, meanwhile, despite the fact that he had initiated the violence, and despite the fact that Shane was trying to reason with him rather than fight back, now used his radio to call for ‘back up’.
Shane repeatedly asked the Inspector to move his hand away from his throat, and attempted to push the Inspector’s hand away from him, to no avail. Instead, Mellor threatened my client with the words “I will fucking put you down!”.
Sometimes rogue Police Officers are referred to as ‘thugs in uniform’. This would not be an appropriate phrase to use about Inspector Mellor, however, as he was not wearing a uniform.
The Officer did then release his grip on Shane, and stepped back – but only to throw a punch into Shane’s face with his fist, using considerable force.
Inspector Mellor then grappled with Shane, punching and kneeing him whilst shouting “Get the fuck down!”
Shane asked what the Officer was possibly doing, and tried to defend himself. The Officer continued to escalate his actions rather than calm them, however. He now grabbed Shane’s arms and delivered an excruciatingly painful stamp to Shane’s left foot – a stamp which Shane could only believe was a deliberate cruelty, in view of the fact that he had just told the Officer about his existing injury.
Inspector Mellor now pinned Shane down on the ground, shouting at him “You have been fucking pulled haven’t you? Stay down!”
Shane was finding it difficult to breathe under the weight of Inspector Mellor, and complained that he could not breathe a number of times. He could barely believe what was happening to him.
Meanwhile, Shane’s wife – who had remained in the van – made a distressed call to 999 reporting that a man (whom of course she did not know was a Police Officer) had assaulted her husband for no reason.
Fortunately, Shane’s wife had also been recording the incident on her mobile phone. I have said before and I will say it again how invaluable our mobile phones are in exposing Police misconduct and holding Officers to account in situations in which, in the world before mobile phones, they would almost literally have been able to pull rank on ordinary civilians – all persons being equal, but Police persons being more equal than others when it came to ‘one person’s word against another’ testimony.
I attach below the shocking video footage showing just how this incident unfolded.
Officers to the Rescue – of Inspector Mellor
Leaving Shane on the ground, Inspector Mellor then walked to his vehicle and returned dangling a pair of handcuffs. It was at this stage that Shane realised that Mellor was probably a Police Officer, but Mellor had still not actually identified himself as such, and did not do so even when he returned with the handcuffs.
A large number of Police vehicles now began to arrive and uniformed Officers poured out of them – Inspector Mellor’s ‘back-up’; in a semi-farcical, but also malevolent reversal of their true purpose, all of these Officers were here to assist the aggressor in this incident, rather than the injured man lying defenceless on the ground.
Indeed, one of the newly arrived Officers now approached Shane, put his knee on my client’s back and handcuffed him in the ‘rear stack’ position.
Despite my client and his wife’s attempts to explain the true events – including the fact that Shane’s wife had the whole incident on video on her phone, immediately available for anyone to see – the Officers were only interested in what their colleague Inspector Mellor was telling them, and one of them, PC Key, now informed Shane that he was under arrest.
Indeed, one of the Officers now pulled the old trick of claiming that he could smell cannabis from Shane’s vehicle. My client, who knew he was innocent, told the Officers that they could drug test him to which the Officer replied: “We are going to, don’t worry”.
This drugs test was then indeed carried out on Shane, of course producing a negative result.
Shane requested an ambulance, as it felt as though his foot was bleeding, and he explained that Inspector Mellor had ‘jumped’ on it for no reason. The Officers who were holding him captive were not prepared to entertain calling an ambulance, and told Shane that he would only get to see a doctor whilst he was in custody.
Before being placed into one of the Police vans, Shane volunteered to the Officers that he had a small knife on him, which he used to cut rope during the course of his work and the Officers took this item from him. Shane was then locked into the ‘cage’ in the rear section of the Police van.
PC Key remained outside the van and began to inspect Shane’s knife. One of the other Officers claimed that the knife was not for cutting ropes, asserting that he himself had experience as a tree surgeon. A female Officer then commented “Offensive weapon – excellent!”
Sadly, this was not just a bad joke. PC Key now re-opened the doors to the van and informed Shane that he was further under arrest for possession of “an offensive weapon” and the doors to the van were then shut again in his face.
It was quite transparent whose side the assembled Police Officers were all on, and that they were actively looking for any excuse to ‘criminalise’ Shane, whilst treating Inspector Mellor as, well – one of the gang.
All of this was on the basis of Inspector Mellor’s flimsy ‘say so’ that Shane had first caused him to pull over, and had then pushed him. All of this was apparently ‘lapped up’ by the Officers at the scene, who on the other hand were studiously ignoring Shane’s wife’s video of the incident.
Shane was then taken away to Lincoln Police Station.
Playing For the Blue Team
Shane was booked into custody. He told the Sergeant that he wanted to make a complaint, and take Inspector Mellor to court. At this stage however, all the mechanisms of the justice system were aimed at Shane, not Mellor. Shane was informed that he was under arrest for “assaulting an emergency worker”.
The twisted version of events recorded in the custody record was as follows –
“THE D/P [Detained Person] WAS DRIVING A FORD TRANSIT TIPPER ALONG THE A46 TOWARDS LINCOLN. THE D/P HAS REPEATEDLY FLASHED HIS LIGHTS AT INSP. MELLOR WHO WAS IN HIS PERSONAL VEHICLE IN FRONT OF THE D/P. BOTH THE VEHICLES HAVE THEN PULLED INTO THE SLIP LANE AT THORPE ON THE HILL. THE D/P HAS THEN CONFRONTED INSP MELLOR WHO HAS HELD OUT HIS HAND AND THE D/P HAS PUSHED HIM. A SCUFFLE HAS THEN ENSUED RESULTING IN THE D/P BEING DETAINED PENDING ARRIVAL OF OTHER OFFICERS. FOLLOWING ARREST A SMALL KNIFE WAS FOUND ON THE D/P.”
Thereafter, my client was finally allowed to see a health care professional (HCP) in relation to his foot injury.
There would be far fewer episodes of police misconduct, and fewer wrongful arrests of innocent members of the public if it wasn’t for what we might call “Blue Team” thinking i.e. officers not only displaying a lack of objectivity when they come across a conflict situation between ‘one of their own’ and a member of the public but actively wanting to support the case of the other officer. This was summed up by a conversation between PC Key and a female officer (captured on body worn video) in relation to Shane’s arrest in which PC Key stated “I am not going to believe him [Shane] over the Inspector …..” and “use of force wise, I think Jonny [Inspector Mellor] will be alright, provided he’s [Shane] assaulted him first …. in fear of immediate violence……” .
After spending a miserable night in the cells, Shane was interviewed under caution the next morning and then released under investigation.
The attitude and behaviour of Lincolnshire Police so far had made it very clear that they were keen to believe Inspector Mellor’s version of events, and to criminalise my client as a result. However, Shane had a very strong piece of objective evidence that he was able to call upon i.e. the incontrovertible testimony of the mobile phone footage which his wife had filmed from the van, depicting the incident at the roadside from start to finish. Although PC Key and his colleagues had not bothered to review this footage at the scene, the police could not bury their hands in the sand about it for ever.
On 28 May 2021 Chief Inspector Outen assessed Inspector Mellor’s conduct, following an initial complaint having been made by Shane’s father. Chief Inspector Outen considered that “escalation [of the incident had] come solely from Inspector Mellor” and that the force used by him was excessive, deliberate and gratuitous. Chief Inspector Outen assessed the officer’s conduct as potentially amounting to misconduct and recommended that Inspector Mellor be removed from operational interactions with the public in the meantime.
Indeed, on 21 June 2021, Chief Inspector Outen recorded that a formal investigation was required, and it was now considered that there was an indication that Inspector Mellor may have committed a criminal offence. Significantly, by this time, there had been widespread news coverage of the incident, as the video taken by Shane’s wife had been circulated on Facebook and I suspect that the Police felt that in the glare of the media spotlight, they had to be seen to be taking robust action. If the cat had not been out of the bag, in the form of the phone footage, would criminal charges against the officer have been brought at all? The subsequent response of the Police to the outcome of those criminal proceedings may hold the answer to that question, as I will come to later.
On 9 September 2021, Inspector Mellor completed a prepared statement for the purposes of his own interview, in which he falsely denied using his mobile phone whilst driving and falsely denied assaulting Shane. Furthermore, within that statement, Inspector Mellor made reference to his “knowledge of the Briggs-Price family” (not actually my client’s family) and referred to them as a “criminal family”, which had no relevance to the incident itself, but which appeared to be an attempt to prejudice Shane in the eyes of others by drawing a link between his Romany ethnicity and criminality, a form of racist dog- whistle.
In early November 2021 a decision was made to take no further action against Shane in relation to the trumped-up allegations of assault and ‘possession of an offensive weapon’ and, then, later that month, the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) authorised the charging of Inspector Mellor with an offence of assault against Shane, contrary to section 39 of the Criminal Justice Act 1988. The tables had now decisively turned – or so it seemed at the time.
Inspector Mellor was thereafter suspended from duty, until the criminal case against him was resolved.
My client now had a mounting sense that justice was going to be done; that the system was working in his favour. In March 2022, Shane was informed by Police Sergeant Pearson of Lincolnshire Police’s Professional Standards Department (PSD) that he had completed his complaint investigation report and that the Appropriate Authority (i.e. the senior officer whose job it is to sign off the report) had concluded that Inspector Mellor had a case to answer for gross misconduct in respect of both his uses of force against Shane and his use of his mobile phone whilst driving.
Sadly, this sense of victory for Shane – that he was being believed by the powers that be, and that Inspector Mellor was properly being held to account – soon afterwards turned to ashes in his mouth. On 11 May 2022 the trial of Inspector Mellor took place at Nottingham Magistrates’ Court, where my client gave evidence against the officer, and the video footage of the incident was played – but where nevertheless, at the conclusion of the trial, Mellor was acquitted. It was recorded by the presiding judge, District Judge Ikram, that the Crown had “not disproved self-defence”. Inspector Mellor himself proudly declared that his view that his actions were “careful, proportionate and necessary” had been vindicated.
I will pause here to observe how I have had to blog before about how the pro-police attitudes of the judiciary at large have a tendency to give police officers accused of assaulting members of the public, maybe not the Seven Lives of a cat in Court – but certainly more than the rest of us have.
My client then received a yet further body blow – and one that was perhaps, in context, even more shocking – as PS Pearson now revised the complaint investigation report, apparently in light of the criminal verdict, and despite the fact that, whilst criminal actions must be proven “beyond reasonable doubt”, whether an officer has committed professional misconduct is assessed on the much lower standard of the “balance of probabilities”, he now purported to find that Inspector Mellor did not have a case to answer in respect of either the use of his mobile phone or assault upon Shane. Unbelievably, it seemed that the complaint investigator had reversed his own findings, despite the fact that no new evidence had come to light, and simply on the basis that Mellor had not been found guilty in the criminal court. That fact alone, should have had no bearing on the misconduct process – and the actions of Lincolnshire Police’s Professional Standards Department now, in my opinion, demonstrated a total lack of integrity. It was the disingenuous act of those who must have known better to naively pretend that a verdict of “not guilty” in a criminal court equates to a professional conduct ‘exoneration’. Not guilty is, by its very nature, a negative verdict; it means that criminal guilt was not proven, not that innocence was, or that a person has now been certified as an angel.
PS Pearson’s re-writing of the report was approved by Superintendent Clark, the Head of Professional Standards, who wrote to inform Shane of the ‘new’ outcome on 4 July 2022.
Furthermore, in or around June or July 2022, Inspector Mellor was allowed to retire from the Force, presumably with a full pension entitlement; thanks to the second version of the complaint report, the officer had now been ‘cleared’ of the misconduct charges that were hanging over him.
I am sure you can appreciate how this left my client feeling. Having been beaten up by the side of the road, he had been wrongfully arrested and spent the night nursing his injuries in a police cell. Then, when it finally seemed that the Police were on his side and were working to hold Inspector Mellor to account – he had been abandoned by them. It seemed to me that the innate reluctance of the police to discipline one of their own comrades had been let loose as soon as Lincolnshire Police had an excuse – no matter how flimsy; in this case, the “not guilty” verdict in the Magistrates’ Court.
In the opinion of myself and Shane this was a travesty of justice and, indeed, a corruption of the police complaints process. The original assessment of Mellor’s actions as amounting to misconduct should not have been contaminated by either the comments or verdict of the criminal court; the fact that they were, spoke to me volumes about how reluctant the police were to bring misconduct charges in the first place against ‘Jonny’ Mellor. It seemed that PSD felt that they had been forced into making adverse findings against Mellor because of the strength of the video evidence – but their lack of commitment to that position is demonstrated by how quickly they jumped ship when, frankly, they thought that both they and Inspector Mellor could get away with it.
Both Shane and I, however, were completely determined not to let either Inspector Mellor or his Force off the hook, and in Part Two of this blog I will address the actions we now took, and explain how Shane was able to get up off the floor – and win this fight.
Read Part 2 of this blog post here.
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