A recently published Court of Appeal Judgment has shone a spotlight upon an area of the civil law in which Police Forces often attempt, by commission or omission, to keep Claimants ‘in the dark’ as a result of malice, lethargy, incompetence – or some combination of those three deadly litigation sins.
The case of Nadine Buzzard-Quashie v The Chief Constable of Northamptonshire Police centred around an attempt by the Claimant, Ms Buzzard-Quashiee, to obtain all available Policy body camera footage (usually abbreviated as ‘BWV’ – Body Worn Video) of her arrest in September 2021, when she alleged that she had been assaulted by the arresting Officers, including by being thrown to the ground and having her face pushed into nettles.
Ms Buzzard-Quashie did everything quite right and by the book – making a direct request to the Police for the footage to be preserved within three days of the incident, and then following up with a Subject Access Request under the Data Protection Act – only to discover that the Police apparently felt that they did not need to play by the same rules. Her data access request was refused, and so she raised a complaint with the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO). The ICO upheld Ms Buzzard-Quashie’s complaint and directed Northamptonshire Police to provide “comprehensive disclosure” of her personal data as soon as possible.
She was thereafter provided with some footage by the Police – but these were only “isolated video clips” which failed to show key parts of the incident, and which led her to the reasonable conclusion that the footage had been deleted, altered, or was being otherwise withheld.
Ms Buzzard-Quashie therefore issued County Court proceedings in August 2022 against the Chief Constable of Northamptonshire for breach of the Data Protection Act 2018, with the express intention of forcing the Defendant to provide her with all missing footage.
Thereafter, in April 2023, Ms Buzzard-Quashie, acting at that time in her own right as a Litigant in Person, obtained an Order from a District Judge which required the Chief Constable to, within 28 days, disclose “all and any” video footage taken on Police cameras relevant to her arrest and detention on 3 September 2021; and if any of the video evidence was no longer available, then an Officer of a rank no lower than Inspector had to provide a written statement explaining what had happened to this footage.
The terms of the Order could not have been clearer – but sadly they fell upon deaf ears as far as the Chief Constable, his officers and his legal advisors were concerned. A DVD was sent to the Claimant in May 2023, but in a format she could not access, and even so it contained only a few more ‘clips’ of the video – not the full footage. Furthermore, no explanatory witness statement accompanied it.
This was indeed a catalogue of contempt by the Chief Constable; the head of an organisation whose purpose is to uphold the law and which had first ignored the Data Protection Act, then the ICO, then the Civil Procedural Rules (CPR) and finally a direct Order of the County Court. If you get the impression from this conduct that Policing institutions often seem to think that the civil law should not apply to them with as much seriousness as it does to other parties because they are on the front lines of the criminal law, then you would not be alone. It is, frankly, a disgrace.
The undaunted Ms Buzzard-Quashie responded to this obfuscation, indifference and passive- aggression on the part of Northamptonshire Police by issuing an application for contempt of Court against the Chief Constable, which in my opinion was entirely the right course of action.
In response, the Chief Constable did, belatedly, provide two statements in relation to the issue of disclosure – both alleging that all of the video evidence which survived had been disclosed despite Ms Buzzard-Quashie’s beliefs to the contrary – although notably neither of those statements were made by Police Officers of any rank, let alone an Inspector or senior. The statements were instead provided by a civilian staff member, who described herself as a Data Protection Officer for the Force, and by one of the Solicitors working within the Police Legal Department.
The Contempt Application was eventually heard by Her Honour Judge Genn in March 2024 and was unfortunately (and incorrectly) dismissed, with a costs order actually being made against the Claimant on the following basis –
- There was no penal notice on the original Order;
- The Chief Constable was not personally responsible for acts performed by other members of the Police Force; and
- There was no deliberate intention on the Chief Constable’s part either not to comply with the Order or to interfere with the administration of justice.
Thankfully, the determination and fortitude which had got Ms Buzzard-Quashie this far in the face of adversity, did not desert here her, and swallowing her dismay, she took her case to the Court of Appeal.
In the face of this Appeal, the Chief Constable filed yet further evidence disputing the existence of any further video footage – this time in the form of a witness statement made by a Chief Superintendent of the Force. In this statement it was claimed that the missing parts of the video footage were no longer available because they had been “automatically deleted”.
Yet Ms Buzzard-Quashie’s implacable determination continued and, finally, shortly before the Appeal Hearing in October 2025 the Defendant’s façade completely cracked.
In a new statement, the Force Solicitor explained that after permission to appeal had been granted to Ms Buzzard-Quashie, the Solicitors now representing her had requested the audit logs for the Officers involved in the arrest, which would show when and how all footage which had been filmed was uploaded.
It appears that it was only in the face of these specific requests, in the context of the overall persistence of the Claimant’s campaign for justice, that the Chief Constable’s legal team actually bothered to carry out the thorough and diligent search for disclosure material which they should have done in the first place. By the very basic method of actually searching against the arresting Officers’ names they rapidly discovered no less than three video files containing BWV footage which had never before been disclosed to the Claimant, and, indeed, the existence of which had been repeatedly denied by the Chief Constable’s staff and lawyers.
Contempt of Court was therefore admitted by the Chief Constable, who issued an apology to the Claimant and the Court and agreed various Orders relating to statements of explanation and further investigations, about which the Court of Appeal, with withering sarcasm, observed (in paragraph 38 of the Judgment of Lord Justice Fraser) “Compliance with those Orders by the Chief Constable is not, for the avoidance of doubt, in any way optional”.
Joking aside, however, that is precisely the problem. Long experience as a solicitor who has successfully sued every Police Force in England & Wales, has shown to me that all too many Chief Constables do see full compliance with civil Court Orders – particularly those requiring a diligent and comprehensive search for all relevant evidence – to be optional, or at least not a priority.
Behind the Curtain: Police Incompetence, Indifference and Obstruction of Civil Justice
The simple, plain truth of this matter was that proper searches for the videos had never been carried out by the Police, no doubt because it did not suit them to do so and borne along by the smug complacency which arises when a large organisation is allowed to conduct its affairs with a lack of transparency and accountability – which is habitually the case with the Police in civil litigation matters.
It is a sad but true state of affairs, that the Police very rarely voluntarily provide disclosure of all relevant evidence in response to a civil claim. Very frequently I have had to fight tooth and nail on behalf of my clients, often obtaining Court Orders and sanctions against a Defendant Police Force, in order to force them to hand over material which is critical to the case. It should not be, but is in fact the case, that it is Claimants and their solicitors who have to spell out the types of searches that need to be undertaken and provide spoon- fed lists of the material that the Police and their Lawyers should be looking for, in the face of an unwritten Police policy of obstructionism which I can only describe as Contempt of Claimants.
All too often, the Police are the boys who do not so much “cry wolf” – as “deny” wolf.
I suspect that Police Forces are enabled and encouraged in this particular brand of illegality by the attitude exemplified by HHJ Genn’s first instance decision in the Buzzard-Quashie case. Remember that she concluded that in Police litigation the person with whom the buck stops i.e. the Chief Constable is so far elevated above the day to day machinations surrounding any particular case, that he should not be held to blame for disclosure failings – whilst those who do have to carry out the searches and sign statements on the Chief Constable’s behalf are generally interchangeable and essentially faceless members of staff (civilian employees, fairly junior Officers, in-house Lawyers etc) who are themselves neither the Officers whose actions have given rise to the claim, nor the named Defendant (the Chief Constable) and who are very often allowed by the Court to get away with broad statements that “searches have been carried out, which have not revealed anything” – without any requirement for them to meticulously and properly define what searches have been made – by whom, when and of which types of records/ databases, and nor are they generally expected to provide an audit trail (hiding behind a hybrid of legal professional privilege and misplaced ‘deference’ to the Police).
In civil cases, one generally gets the impression that the Police do not go looking for material that they don’t want to find. The great investigators of the criminal law are seemingly allergic to the concept of investigating themselves, despite the fact that the very nature of the Police organisation and the training of its Officers/ Staff means that if there is any organisation which is capable of following all the leads to identify every scrap of relevant evidence – it should be them.
In this respect I am greatly encouraged by the Buzzard-Quashie Judgment, in which the Court of Appeal has finally sent a real warning shot across the bows of Police Forces (and Police Lawyers) everywhere.
The Court found that Northamptonshire Police’s conduct in failing to comply with the April 2023 disclosure Order was “wilfully disobedient” and that it was quite correct in the circumstances for a finding of contempt to be made against the Chief Constable who is “the legal personality of the Police Force”, without there needing to be any proof that the Chief Constable himself was involved in the ‘contemptuous’ acts (or failures to act), or indeed had any knowledge of them until that late hour when shame- faced staff and lawyers came knocking on his door.
Quoted with approval by the Court of Appeal was the Judgment of Lord Woolf in M v Home Office [1994] UKHL 5 [1994] 1 AC377 –
“The object of the exercise is not so much to punish an individual as to vindicate the rule of law by a finding of contempt”.
Just as much as the Chief Constable will be held legally responsible for the blow of an Officer who breaks your nose – so he will be held in contempt for the actions of Officers or civilian employees which break the rules of Court.
The follow- up Judgment on sanctions arising from this case, was issued by the Court of Appeal on 20 November 2025.
It was in this ‘second part’ of the Judgment (the decision on Sanctions) that the most damning facts of the entire sordid affair were revealed; for as paragraph 9 of the Judgment (at point 4) makes clear –
“At least one of the new pieces of video, produced and disclosed only in October 2025, entirely vindicates Ms Buzzard-Quashie’s position regarding certain matters which occurred during her arrest. The audit log for the video files clearly shows that this was viewed by at least one Deponent, who then went on to attest a few days later in a witness statement for Court proceedings that the video did not exist”.
It was also noted that it is now accepted that there were no less than five videos that had never been provided to the Claimant, even though they clearly existed, prior to late October 2025. The Court of Appeal as well as condemning the actions of the Police Force – from top to bottom – also quite correctly praised the “tenacity and resilience” shown by the Claimant herself, without which “the false position on the facts taken by the Police Force over such a long period would never have come to light”.
The ultimate sanction in this “troubling” case was that the Chief Constable was fined £50,000. I do not expect that to be the end of the matter, however; a referral has already been made to the Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC) and I have no doubt that professional sanctions of the severest level will fall upon the heads of any found to be complicit in direct manipulation of the evidence (such as the Police witness referred to above). Jobs and careers are at risk, and, frankly, they need to be.
How Claimants Suing the Police Should Use This Judgment
The days of the Police being allowed, through the mouthpieces of their lawyers or insurance representatives, to report that “nothing has been found” on the basis of vaguely defined, unevidenced or entirely unexplained searches/disclosure exercises must become a thing of the past. It is of note that in the Buzzard-Quashie case no less than 1200 pages of audit logs had to be thoroughly examined by the lawyers acting for the Claimant before the full extent of the ‘hidden’ video footage was revealed.
As a call to arms, I would urge all Lawyers and Litigants in Person involved in claims against the Police to interrogate all future disclosure statements made by their Police opponents through the lens of this Judgment. Do not let them get away with vague, broad and unevidenced assertions. Remind them of the amount of false statements and missing evidence which Northamptonshire Police’s ‘business as usual’ approach to this claim produced – leaving the Court of Appeal aghast. Use these findings as fuel for requests for further information, pursuant to CPR Part 18 and requests for specific disclosure, pursuant to CPR Part 31. Unsheathe the sword of “contempt of court” when required. Remind them of the financial, professional and criminal consequences – contempt of court, contempt of Claimants.
The Police system will have been given a salutary shock by this result: now we need to keep them on their toes.
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