iaingould

One Way Or Another, I’m Gonna Get You: Police Abuse of Stop, Search & Road Policing Powers

One evening in March 2022, my client Edward was driving through London in an ordinary and law-abiding manner, when he was pulled over by a Metropolitan Police Carrier displaying its blue lights.

What was the reason that Police were ‘interested’ in my client’s vehicle? One of the Officers in the 7- man squad who stopped my client’s car, PC Williams, subsequently made a statement in which he said that his attention was drawn to Philip’s vehicle “because it had 2 occupants and the driver and passenger appeared to be giving us a good long look before driving off”.

This, in other words, is another variant of the woefully ropy “You were giving us evils” justification which two City of London Police Officers relied upon to unlawfully stop and search my client Allen Norman, whose story I blogged about recently and whose case was recently featured by Rob Warner on his always excellent Crimebodge YouTube channel.

The initial difference between these two incidents, however, was that Edward was in control of a motor car when Police attention fastened on to him, whereas Allen was not. Therefore, the Police did initially have a legal power to require Edward to stop (and thereafter provide his driving licence) in accordance with Section 163 and 164 of the Road Traffic Act 1988, a power which can be exercised ‘at random’.

However, it quickly became clear that the Police Officers involved wanted to indulge their ‘Spidey- Sense’ (all apparently based on an initial hunch of ‘we don’t like the look of you/the way you are looking at us’) far beyond the limits of the Road Traffic Act.

Stop & Search Excuses

After Edward had exited his car, he was immediately told by PC Marenco that he was going to be detained for the purposes of searches for “stolen property” under Section 1 of the Police & Criminal Evidence Act 1984 and for “drug dealing” under Section 23 of the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971.

Both of those search powers, however, require the Officers exercising them to have ‘reasonable grounds for suspicion’ i.e that they will find stolen articles or controlled drugs on the person – they cannot be speculative searches, performed at random or on the officer’s whim. They require objective grounds for suspicion – at least in theory. Officers ‘on the beat’ frequently exceed their powers in scenarios like this.

Edward was handcuffed, despite his totally compliant demeanour, and whilst he had his person searched, other officers went through his car and, indeed, called in a police dog trained to sniff out “drugs and weapons.” When he innocuously asked the assembled officers to get on with things, mildly commenting “Just go through the process” an officer immediately snapped at him “You don’t tell us what’s happening – we tell you what’s going to happen”, betraying the power-play dynamic that clearly governed the officers’ mindsets.

Various vague reasons were given by the Police at the scene and in their subsequent written accounts to attempt to justify Edward’s detention and search, as follows-

That he was driving in an area of “robberies, gang violence and drug dealing” (i.e London, or any other major urban conurbation – an excuse so laughable it has an exact parallel in a classic joke in The Simpsons in which two corrupt cops arrest a man who has just told them he is from New York City “I heard some guy got killed in New York and they never solved the case. But you wouldn’t know anything about that, now would you Steve?”)

“Intel showed [Edward’s] car was registered in Hertfordshire.” (And therefore had no legitimate business being in London?)

“Possession of multiple phones” (i.e two – Edward’s work phone and his personal phone)

“There was a slight smell of alcohol [on Edward]”

Edward did voluntarily admit to the Officers that he had had a single beer approximately an hour earlier. The Officers then performed both a drugs swab, which was negative, and a breathalyser test which demonstrated the truth of what Edward had said, i.e. he was within the legal alcohol limit. Throughout this process, Edward remained polite and cooperative with the increasingly onerous instructions he was given.

The ‘Field Impairment Test’

Despite Edward having passed the breathalyser test, the Officers then insisted that my client perform ‘Field Impairment Tests’ so-called ‘psycho-physical’ tasks designed to further probe his sobriety. This procedure is as laid down in the Code of Practice for Preliminary Impairment Tests, issued under S.6B(2) of the Road Traffic Act 1988.

The first test was “pupillary examination”, an assessment of the size of the subject’s pupils – Edward’s left and right pupils were measured as 8.5mm wide, which was stated to be higher than the average of 6mm.

The second test was the “modified Romberg balance test” – an indicator of a person’s internal clock and ability to balance. For this, Edward was instructed “Stand up straight with your heels together and arms by your sides…maintain that position while I give you the remaining instructions….when I tell you, tilt your head back slightly and close your eyes. When you think that 30 seconds have passed bring your head forward and say stop”. …After 27.48 seconds Edward brought his eyes forward and said stop. The supervising officer went on to record this as evidence of a “delayed body clock”, despite the fact that the normal range for this test is between 25-35 seconds for a person not under influence of any drug.

The third test was the “Walk and Turn test” which is an exercise that assess whether a person is able to divide attention between walking, balancing and processing instructions. Edward was instructed to take 9 heel to toe steps along a line made by paving flags, before turning around and taking another 9 heel to toe steps back in the opposite direction, all the time looking at his feet and counting each step out loud. Edward perfectly performed the correct formation of steps and balance, but was criticised for not counting the steps out loud.

The fourth test is the “One Leg Stand test”, in which Edward was instructed toraise his right foot 6-8 inches off the ground, keeping his leg straight and toe pointing forward, and his arms by his side, and looking at his raised foot whilst counting out loud…1001, 1002, 1003 and so on, until told to stop; with the same test then repeated with his left foot raised instead. I have reviewed the body camera footage of this test, and am personally satisfied that Edward performed it in the correct manner, but the Officer supervising the test nevertheless claimed that at one stage Edward “appeared unbalanced.”

The fifth and final test was the “Finger to Nose test” which is a test of depth, perception and balance. Edward was instructed to tilt his head back and close his eyes…and then follow the officer’s called instructions to lift each of his hands in a designated sequence and touch the tip of his nose with the tip of the appropriate index finger. Once again, the supervising officer would claim that, despite Edward following the vast majority of the instructions with no difficulty, minor anomalies in performance were detected.

The supervising Officer then alleged that Edward’s “dilated pupils, inability to follow instructions and delayed body clock” were evidence of a person “impaired through drugs” and PC Marenco promptly arrested my client on suspicion of driving under the influence of drugs, contrary to Section 4 of the Road Traffic Act 1988.

This entire process had taken over an hour, with the 7 Officers in the squad, and delegates from the dog section, apparently having nothing better to do than stand round watching each other exhaust all of their stop and search and road policing powers on an innocent motorist, until they finally found a flimsy excuse to arrest him. Good job there weren’t any “robberies, gang violence and drug dealing” matters that needed attending to in the Metropolis that night!

Edward was taken to Brixton Custody Suite where he was searched, his detention was authorised for the purposes of a medical assessment, and he was placed into a cell.

Thereafter, Edward was seen by a Custody Health Care Professional (a nurse) who noted the following –

“DP [Detained Person] consented for drug drive procedure. He is alert, conscious and orientated to time, place and person and breathing normally. His sober and clinical observations stable. He is calm, cooperative and polite”

Edward was released from Custody in the early hours of the morning, with no further action being taken against him, and then had to travel back to the location where his car had been abandoned, which, if you’ll recall was, in the words of the Police, a haven of “gang violence and drug dealing”. Fortunately, both he and the car survived unscathed.

In response to a letter of claim which I sent on behalf of Edward, alleging wrongful arrest and assault and battery, the Metropolitan Police initially, and without making any admission of liability, attempted to buy Edward’s claim off cheaply for the sum of £2,500 damages. In seeking a quick settlement in this manner, the Met were also seeking to withhold their documentary and video records of the incident.

I advised Edward to reject their offer and instead pressed the Met to confirm their liability position and provide disclosure of all relevant documents. I was able to obtain from them the Officers’ statements, written records and body camera videos.

With this material in my possession – which confirmed my belief in Edward’s strong prospects of success should the matter be pursued to Court – negotiations were resumed, and the claim was ultimately settled for damages in the sum of £7,000, plus legal costs.

A Litany of Abuse: Police Misuse of ‘Street Powers’

This is an incident which show-cases a litany of day-to-day, very typical and indeed almost casual Police abuses of power and demonstrates how Police Officers can seek to cloak abuse of power beneath a variety of legal excuses, including Section 163 of the Road Traffic Act. Merely having the ‘wrong look’ – absent any other factors – simply cannot be a justification for body search, car search, handcuffing and arrest but sadly this is what happened here, with the Officers involved using what was, in my opinion, one flimsy excuse after another to exert their power over an innocent man who could not reasonably have been suspected of any offence.

There was absolutely no basis for a reasonable suspicion that my client or his vehicle were in possession of/contained stolen goods – that appears to have been an entirely speculative ‘fishing expedition’ carried out by the Police on a whim, without any objective justification whatsoever. If possession of more than one mobile phone is tantamount to suspicion of drug- dealing then it would appear that the vast majority of the professional classes of this country are all closet Walter Whites or Tony Sopranos…

Finally, we had the outrageous decision of the Officers to ignore the negative results rendered by the carefully calibrated breathalyser machine and drug swabbing procedures and instead to overrule those objective measures with entirely subjective assessments of subtle details connected with a person’s ability to balance and count seconds – whilst in the stressful situation of a roadside Police interrogation – and/or millimetres of difference in pupil dilation, in what I can only describe as a combination between the handbook of the Ministry of Silly Walks and those ‘tests’ administered by 17^th Century “Witchfinders” i.e. tests which the subject cannot pass because the interrogator has already decided that they are a Witch (albeit one, here, in charge of a Ford Focus rather than a broomstick).

The prejudicial nature of this ‘Field Impairment’ assessment is, in my opinion, amply demonstrated by the much more objective assessment carried out by the independent Health Care Professional upon Edward when he was in Custody a short time later. This naturally concluded that there was no evidence that Edward was under the influence of intoxicating substances/drugs.

Somewhere it seems, between the breathalyser machine test, the chemical drug swab and the qualified medical professional’s opinion the truth had become distorted by the frustration of Officers whose eagerness to detain my client/exert power over him had apparently increased with each blank card they drew from their deck – no stolen goods; no drugs on his possession; negative breathalyser and drugs test; but he had looked at them the wrong way, or looked ‘wrong’ to them, and so they were determined, one way or another, to ‘get him.’

This type of ego- driven, authoritarian policing causes harm to the person who is its target, harm to the reputation of the Police, is a massive waste of Police time and resources and should have no place on the streets of Britain.

My client’s name has been changed.

Out of Bounds: Police Forces With Geographically Limited Powers

During the course of my career, I have successfully sued every single one of the 43 territorial Police Forces of England and Wales, plus the British Transport Police.

The publicly funded territorial forces, which between them comprise the vast majority of the UK’s approximately 171,000 Police Officers, are based on the geographical counties of England and Wales (e.g Merseyside, Kent, Greater Manchester, Norfolk), with some areas of wider amalgamation e.g South Wales Police. Each Police Officer who serves with a territorial force therefore has a natural and primary ‘base of operations’ but their policing powers are not geographically limited i.e an Officer of West Midlands Police can still exercise powers of arrest, search and entry in Northumbria if required.

Although each Force does try to confine its operations to its own county boundaries, and would generally request local Police to carry out the arrest of a suspect in another region, they are not obliged to do so and their powers and privileges do not ‘fall away’ when they cross the county line.

However, as well as the territorial forces, there also exist a wide variety of “Special Police Forces” whose officers are not full Crown Constables, answerable to the Home Office, but a different species of law enforcement officer, whose typical police uniforms belie the fact that their powers are geographically limited to a specific location or type of infrastructure and cannot generally be exercised outside the boundaries of the same. Such “Special Police Forces” include the following –

British Transport Police (formerly, the Railway Police)
Ministry of Defence Police
Civil Nuclear Constabulary
Ports Police (e.g the Port of Dover Police)
Parks Police (e.g Kensington & Chelsea Parks Police)
Cathedral Constables (e.g York Minster Police)
Cambridge University Police (Clearly Cambridge students need closer control than any others!)
Mersey Tunnels Police.

The Port of Dover Police, as with many other regional port forces, are funded by the owners of the Port and are maintained under powers originating from the Harbours, Docks and Piers Clauses Act 1847 which limits their jurisdiction to land actually owned by the Harbour Board, and extending in a one mile radius beyond.

An embarrassing situation therefore arose when, in 2011, the custody suite operated by Kent Police in Dover itself closed, meaning that any people arrested by the Port Police would need to be transported to the next nearest custody centre in Canterbury – as this would have meant going further than a mile from the Port, the arrest would have become unlawful once the boundary was passed. A temporary solution was put in place, whereby Kent Police had to come to the port to arrest and transport suspects, until the Marine Navigation Act 2013 was introduced, extending the jurisdiction of all regional Port Police to the Police area in which they were located (e.g Kent) but for the purposes of Port Policing matters only.

A recent example of this type of jurisdictional issue is provided by a case which I am currently fighting for one of my clients against Mersey Tunnels Police, who are responsible for the policing of the two road tunnels (Kingsway and Queensway) connecting Liverpool to the Wirral.

Mersey Tunnels Police derive their powers from Section 105 of the County of Merseyside Act 1980 and can only act in the capacity of an ordinary citizen when outside of their jurisdiction, which is defined as that land forming “the Tunnels, approaches or marshalling areas”. If an on- duty Mersey Tunnels officer comes across an arrestable offence when he is outside of that jurisdiction, he is required to notify the local territorial Force i.e Merseyside Police, who will allocate an officer to deal with the matter.

In the matter with which I am dealing, three officers from Mersey Tunnels Police handcuffed and purported to arrest my client for ‘causing a danger to public health’ by being out and about during one of the Covid lockdowns during 2020. The location of the arrest was not, however, in one of the Mersey Tunnels, or their approaches/ marshalling areas, but rather a public road bridge (consisting of vehicle carriageway and pedestrian pavement) which overlooked the tunnel entrance but did not directly lead to it i.e outside the geographical jurisdiction of the Tunnels Police.

The fact that Mersey Tunnels police chose to hassle, assault and arrest my client in such a location (when he was doing nothing more sinister than standing alone on the pavement of the bridge, looking at his mobile phone) is indicative of the tendency of all Police Forces, big or small, to overreach the boundaries of their powers, in what is sometime referred to as ‘mission creep.’ It is perhaps not surprising that in a time when many officers were indulging their authoritarian impulses by over-policing the Covid ‘curfew laws’, Mersey Tunnels officers were tempted to join in, even if that meant leaving behind their lawful jurisdiction.

I am here to help push back against all such Police over- reach of powers, and my purpose in this brief overview of the status of the Special Police Forces of our country is to flag up some of the lesser-known limitations on Police authority and to urge you to contact me for advice if you believe you have fallen prey to Officers playing “out of bounds” in this way.

Wrongfully Arrested for Breach of Bail: The Electronic Mistake Service Strikes Again

I have written before about how the incompetence of Capita Plc, the private company responsible for operating the Electronic Monitoring Service (EMS) which supervises criminal convicts/ suspects who have been released with a condition to wear an electronic tag, has led to many cases of unlawful arrest.

The role of EMS employees is to monitor the person’s whereabouts, using Global Positioning System (GPS) technology linked to electronic devices worn on the ankle (tags), to ensure they do not breach any curfew or geographical boundaries which have been imposed upon them by the Court. When they get it wrong, a person’s liberty is unfairly put at risk, as happened recently to my client Mark.

In late 2023, Mark, who lives in south-east London, was facing criminal charges and had been granted conditional bail with an obligation to wear a GPS tag and a condition not to go north of the River Thames.

In early January 2024, Mark’s bail condition was varied such that he could go north of the Thames, as long as he stayed within the confines of London’s outer ring road, the M25 motorway. Having no desire to spend time in prison on remand, Mark scrupulously obeyed these Court- mandated boundaries and so it was with great shock that, a month later, he received notification that he was “wanted on warrant” i.e that the Police were actively seeking to arrest him and that he needed to attend his nearest Police Station so that matters could be dealt with.

That same day, Mark duly attended his local Police Station; he explained that he had received a letter requiring his attendance, but that he had not in fact breached his bail conditions.

Notwithstanding this, Mark was then arrested for alleged breach of those conditions. He was kept in custody overnight before being transported in handcuffs to the Magistrates’ Court the next morning.

At approximately 1p.m., Mark was produced before the Court whereupon it was evident that his bail conditions had now been properly checked, and the allegation of breach of bail was summarily dismissed.

Although Mark was now told he was free, Court staff then insisted that he had to return to his cell whilst the ‘necessary paperwork’ was completed, this added further to his understandable distress, but he was told that the longer he objected, the longer the process would take.

Mark had pre- existing depression and was already under a lot of stress given the prosecution he was facing; sadly his inexplicable arrest in these circumstances significantly exacerbated his mental health conditions.

When I learned what had happened to Mark, I was more than happy to represent him in bringing a claim on a “no win, no fee” basis against Capita/ EMS, who from their past form I fully suspected were to blame for what had happened to him – as indeed proved to be the case. Capita had reported Mark to the Police as being in breach of his bail for entering the “exclusion zone” north of the Thames – notwithstanding the fact that, owing to variation of his bail conditions, Mark was free to come and go within the M25 limits.

I am pleased to confirm that I have this week settled Mark’s claim for £7,300 damages, plus his legal costs.

It seems to me that the Capita staff tasked with monitoring the tag system are in need of special monitoring themselves. Until Capita improve their staff training and levels of service, critical errors like this are going to continue to occur.

My client’s name has been changed.

Wrongfully Arrested At the Airport For Failing To Attend Court in the Future

In the 2002 film ‘Minority Report’ an interesting science fiction premise is explored – what if it was possible to apprehend criminals before they had committed their crimes by use of the ‘precognitive’ talents of a team of psychics? At the start of the film, Tom Cruise is the Police Chief of what is known as the ‘Precrime’ Department.

Appreciating that this is not a film review blog, why am I telling you this tale? It is because I have just settled a claim on behalf of an individual who suffered what I can only describe as a ‘Precrime’ arrest at the hands of Merseyside Police. Whether Mr Cruise will agree to play him in the dramatisation of this blog post remains to be seen…

I have written before about many unlawful arrests which have occurred at airport boarding gates or Passport Control, airport terminals being the nexus where private lives show up most frequently on the radar of law enforcement and therefore where people can often fall prey to mistaken identity arrests arising from errors on the Police database or be ‘caught’ by an arrest warrant which should never have been issued.

Never before, however, have I had a client suffer an airport arrest for failing to attend a Court hearing which had not yet taken place,as I will unfold below.

In December 2022 my client Philip was arrested and released from Custody on bail. He subsequently booked a holiday to Turkey, due to depart on 28 June and return on 8 July 2023.

My client was subsequently charged with the original offence, and a Postal Summons was sent to him requiring his attendance at the Magistrates Court on 3 July 2023. In the meantime, my client had been released from his bail conditions.

Due to the holiday which he had booked before receiving the Postal Summons, Philip instructed his criminal defence solicitors to liaise with the Court to re-arrange his attendance. Assuming that in the circumstances, this fairly reasonable/routine request would be agreed, my client proceeded with his holiday plans and he and his family attended Manchester Airport for their outbound flight as arranged on 28 June 2023.

Had it not proved possible for the Court date to be re-arranged by his solicitors in the intervening time, there was of course nothing to stop my client returning to the UK in time for the Court date on 3 July – however, he was not given the opportunity for either of those events to unfold. Instead, he was approached at the departure gate by Officers of Merseyside Police who had been dispatched to arrest Philip if he was unable to show a return flight to the UK prior to his Court Hearing.

The Officers took Philip to one side, queried his travel arrangements and then purported to arrest him for ‘breach of bail’ on the basis that he would not be “surrendering to the Court on the scheduled day.” He was handcuffed and led out of the terminal.

Philip was then taken to Wirral Custody Suite, and where the circumstances of his arrest were recorded as follows –

BREACH OF COURT BAIL – AO ATTENDS MANCHESTER AIRPORT AS AO IS MADE AWARE THE DP IS BOOKED ON A FLIGHT HEADING TO TURKEY WHEN HE HAS A COURT DATE ON 03/07/2023… DP DETAINED AT THE BOARDING GATE AND ENQUIRIES REVEAL THE DP WOULD NO RETURN TO THE UK UNTIL 08/07/2023 THERFORE MISSING HIS COURT DATE.

My client had, of course, already and long since been released from bail in this matter. He was not subject to any bail conditions and the Custody Record entry made it clear that he was, in effect, being arrested for failure to attend Court some 5 days prior to the Court Hearing – or, in other words, for a ‘Precrime’.

My client was placed into a cell, whilst his criminal solicitor made urgent representations as to this ridiculous state of affairs.

However, by the time Philip was NFA’d (told he would face no further action) and released, the flight with the rest of his family on had long since departed and he was obliged to book a further flight to join them at considerable cost.

At the Hearing itself on 3 July, representations were made to the Court by Philip’s legal representative that he was on holiday so was unable to attend and that the holiday had been booked before the Notice of Charge was sent to him. As a result, and as one could have expected without psychic powers, the Hearing was adjourned.

I am pleased to confirm that in response to the detailed letter of claim which I sent to Merseyside Police, they promptly admitted liability for the wrongful arrest of Philip and I was able to negotiate a very satisfactory settlement of £6,000 damages plus legal costs for him. This more than covered his additional flight expenses…

Whilst I am pleased to have resolved this particular case so swiftly I am afraid to say that I don’t need pre-cognitive abilities to know that law enforcement ‘mistakes’ will continue to regularly occur at our country’s airports, and if you have been the victim of similar type of wrongful arrest, please don’t hesitate to contact me for advice and representation.

My client’s name has been changed.

“My Bad” Cop: Stinger Deployed On The Wrong Car

In the Summer of 2022, my client Matilda was driving her car along the A3 northbound in Surrey; also in the car were her 20-year-old son and two of his friends. It was a routine journey on an ordinary day; and little did Matilda and her passengers know that a Police ambush was being prepared ahead – and they would become its target.

Matilda exited the A3 at junction 10 and approached the roundabout at the end of the slip road, intending to traverse the roundabout and join the M25 motorway. As the vehicle approached the traffic light-controlled junction with the roundabout, my client noted a bus had broken down in the fourth lane on the slip road, blocking it, and accordingly she stayed in the third lane.

As Matilda continued driving past the bus, a “stinger” device was suddenly and without warning thrown across the road in front of the vehicle by PC Downs of Surrey Police.

Stingers, also known as road spikes, are a form of device used by Police and military organisations worldwide to enable them to intercept/ incapacitate target vehicles. They are a belt of spikes capable of being quickly whipped out across the road and which then rip and puncture the tyres of the moving target, slamming it into an immediate and violent halt.

Matilda’s car ran over the “stinger”, which punctured all four tyres, stopping it dead and throwing all its occupants about. As this occurred, Police Sergeant Ayrton pulled his police car in front, blocking the road and causing a line of traffic to form behind my client’s now-disabled vehicle.

PC Downs approached Matilda’s car and reached in through the open driver’s side window to take the keys from the ignition, whilst shouting at her in an aggressive manner, his hand hovering near his taser gun. At this point, however, PS Ayrton shouted at his colleague that this was ‘the wrong car!’ PC Downs acknowledged his gross mistake with breathtaking brevity – shouting “my bad” to Matilda – before running away from her car and further down the line of vehicles that had formed behind, followed shortly afterwards by PS Ayrton.

The officer’s attitude, summed up by his flippant remark, is almost incredible: he had deployed a dangerous weapon, specifically designed to engineer a car accident, which could have resulted in even more serious injuries than it did – and he attempted to brush it off as if he had accidentally bumped shoulders with someone, or fumbled on a computer-game controller.

The officers then approached another car several vehicles behind my clients’, and apprehended the driver of that car, who had evidently been their actual target. PC Downs had hugely ‘jumped the gun’ in his deployment of the stinger. During this time, no officers remained with my clients or offered them any further apology or explanation. Matilda was extremely distressed and began to experience a panic attack.

After some time, PS Ayrton returned to the vehicle and spoke to my clients. He informed them that the officers had been intending to stop a car further behind them, which was suspected to be stolen (it had triggered ANPR – Automatic Number Plate Recognition – cameras as possibly bearing ‘cloned’ plates) but that unfortunately there had “been some confusion about which car it is we needed to stop.”

Sadly, it transpired that the Police had not just stopped one vehicle wrongly – the driver immediately behind Matilda, also entirely innocent, had likewise found his vehicle becoming ‘collateral damage’ as it also hit the stinger.

Initially, PS Ayrton informed Matilda that the officers would not assist in recovering or repairing the vehicle, despite their acknowledged “bad”, and she would be obliged to make her own arrangements for alternative transport and repairs. However, after Matilda called her husband, who is in fact a Police Sergeant in a neighbouring Force, it was agreed that the officers would make the necessary arrangements for the recovery of the vehicle.

After several hours at the roadside, Matilda’s vehicle was recovered and taken to a garage where its tyres were replaced.

My client subsequently submitted a complaint to the Surrey Police’s Professional Standards Department (PSD), who in response admitted that PC Downs had made a “visual misidentification” of her vehicle and that accordingly his “service was unacceptable”- one of those tortuous pieces of Police jargon in which empathy is buried in bureaucracy.

Matilda suffered nasty seat belt ‘burn’ injuries across her stomach, hips, shoulder, and chest; but the incident had also left marks in her mind. At first, she had feared that they were being ‘carjacked’ by criminals; even when she realised that the people outside her car were Police Officers, she feared being tasered by them – particularly given PC Downs’ initial aggression. For a long time afterwards she suffered from anxiety and sleep disturbance, as well as a fear of driving which was compounded whenever Police vehicles were around.

I have considerable experience in representing people who have suffered exactly this form of Police stinger ambush. I gathered expert medical evidence to establish the extent of the impact upon Matilda and her son and am pleased to confirm that shortly after I issued Court proceedings against Surrey Police, I was able to settle their claims for significant damages plus legal costs.

The message my client and I wish to send to Surrey Police at the end of this, is that stingers are potentially highly dangerous weapons, which must only be used with the utmost due care and caution – not treated like toys in one of those games of cops and robbers which, sadly and all too often, real life officers like to play.

My client’s name has been changed.

£20,000 Damages for Postal Summons Address Error Arrest

In early 2023, an Officer of Nottinghamshire Police contacted my client Roisin in relation to a minor road traffic accident in which she had been involved. Arrangements were made for Roisin to attend a local Police Station, to be interviewed under caution, which she duly did.

At the conclusion of the interview, Roisin was told that she might be summonsed in due course to attend Court.

My client heard nothing further about this matter, and was thus utterly shocked when, almost seven months later the ‘Boys in Blue’ turned up at her home to arrest her for failing to attend Nottingham Magistrates Court.

Roisin honestly explained that she was unaware of any Court summons or requirement for her to attend Court. The Officers were unfazed by this and replied that they had no option but to arrest her.

Roisin was then taken into Police Custody where she was searched and processed and detained in the cell block overnight. The whole experience had been made more terrible for Roisin by the fact that the arrest took place in front of her youngest child, and she was reduced to crying for most of the hours that she spent in the grim and unpleasant Police cell.

The following day she was transported to Court in handcuffs feeling as bewildered, humiliated, and degraded as any law-abiding citizen thrown into such a situation would be.

Thankfully, at least, it did not take long after the Court Hearing commenced for my client’s innocence in this matter to be vindicated; it was quickly established that the Court summons had been sent to my client’s old home address, where she had not lived for some five years.

It is frankly appalling how many people like Roisin suffer wrongful arrest by reason of ‘incorrect address’ errors every year – and indeed how much legitimate Police and Court time is wasted in the process as well. I have blogged about precisely this form of wrongful arrest numerous times over the last 18 months, showing the prevalence of the problem. It is the ‘collateral damage’ caused to people’s lives by bureaucratic laziness/ sloppiness within the criminal justice system, and absolutely inexcusable.

On the basis that it was Nottinghamshire Police Officers and/or staff who were responsible for issuing the original Court summons to the incorrect address (when my client had done all that she reasonably could to ensure they had her correct address, including cooperating with the initial contact earlier that year and attending a Police interview), I advanced a claim on her behalf against the Chief Constable of Nottinghamshire for:

False Imprisonment
Negligence
Breach of the Data Protection Act 2018
Breach of Article 5 of European Convention on Human Rights
Assault and Battery (the latter being the application of any and all force to Roisin during her arrest and imprisonment – but especially including the entirely unnecessary use of handcuffs upon her).

I am pleased to confirm that in December 2023, following receipt of a detailed letter of claim which I had sent on behalf of Roisin, East Midlands Police Legal Services, acting on behalf of the Chief Constable of Nottinghamshire, accepted that the Postal Requisition had been sent to my client’s previous address as a result of a Police “administrative error” and that liability for all of the causes of action outlined in my letter of claim was admitted.

Roisin was detained in total for over 26 hours. Her compensation would, however, be measured not only by reference to the precise amount of time for which she was deprived of her liberty but also the sadly much longer lasting psychological impact of a wrongful arrest, and I therefore arranged for Roisin to be examined by a Clinical Psychologist.

When you leave a Police cell behind, it does not necessarily leave you behind. After her arrest, Roisin’s sleep was frequently disturbed, by thoughts that noises outside her house were someone coming to ‘get’ her and by disturbing feelings of being trapped in the cell and separated from her young children (aged only two and four at the time). This got so bad that she was eventually prescribed sleeping tablets. She suffered symptoms of low mood and of anxiety – even something as simple as an unexpected knock on the door could trigger a panic attack and cause her heart to race. She also became very nervous and on edge at any sight of Police officers in the local area. She was signed off work for some time as a result of these symptoms.

The medical expert whom I instructed diagnosed Roisin as suffering from a Specific Phobia, as well as anxiety and depression as a result of this incident.

I am pleased to confirm that in April of this year I was able to conclude Roisin’s claim for damages in the sum of £20,000, plus her legal costs, on the back of that report and with a threat of Court proceedings against the Police. The kind of threat which my Police opponents know I do not bluff about!

If the Police arrest you after using the wrong address, you may be entitled to compensation and I can help you to maximise your award – getting you every penny you are entitled to for such a shocking invasion of your privacy and violation of your liberty; and thereby hopefully helping the Police to learn from their mistakes.

My client’s name has been changed.

£17,500 Damages for Student Mauled by Police Dog

Police dog bites can result in compensation.

For all that Police dogs are often anthromorphised as their Officer’s ‘partner’ the fact is that their role on the front line of Policing is not as a companion, but as a tool for tracking and, if necessary, attacking. A taser gun is a weapon which takes no pleasure in what it does, but a Police dog is; trained to channel their ancestral hunting urges into tracking, chasing, biting and hence detaining criminal suspects. The Police dog is therefore a weapon which must be used with the utmost caution, especially as the biting injuries they inflict can leave horrendous scars.

“Not Had A Bite For Weeks”: A Case Study

One evening in the early summer of 2020, my client Harry, a student then aged 18, and a small group of his friends walked onto the playing field of their former primary school. The lads did nothing untoward; they were simply reminiscing as they walked around the field; it was a nostalgia trip. They had been able to gain access to the school field via a large, old, and well-known gap in the fencing that separated the field from a public footpath.

Unbeknownst to Harry and his friends, they had been spotted by a local resident who put two and two together, got five and then made a call to the Police.

Police patrols arrived in the area, including a Police dog team.

By this time, Harry and his friends were already on their way back out of the school grounds, having entered an area of undergrowth which separated the field from the public footpath.

From the other side of the fence, on the footpath, the Police dog evidently detected their scent. The dog was now close to the gap in the fence and by his behaviour was indicating to his handler that there were people in the undergrowth.

Harry heard a voice say “Police! Come out!” In obedience with this instruction, Harry and his friends continued walking towards the gap in the fence, which was their intended exit point in any event.

However, without waiting for them to emerge, the Police Officer now shouted “Come out now, the dog is coming over! Get him! Get him! Get him!” whilst simultaneously releasing the Police dog through the fence.

To be entirely clear, a period of only 20 seconds had elapsed between the Officer issuing the first command to Harry and his friends to ‘come out’ and then issuing the second command, which was for his dog to locate, bite and thereby detain the target.

The Police dog approached Harry at speed, whilst Harry was still walking towards the gap in the fence in order to follow the first ‘come out’ instruction.

The Police dog bit Harry on his right thigh, which immediately caused him to go down in shock and pain onto one knee.

The dog then released Harry’s leg and instead bit him on his upper left arm and lower shoulder, forcing him face down on to the leaf- littered ground.

The Police dog pinned Harry to the ground, while continuing to bite into his shoulder and repeatedly shook him in a violent manner.

Harry was in fear of aggravating the dog further and attempted to lie still on the ground, while the Police dog continued biting his shoulder and shaking him.

Harry sensibly did not resist or attempt to defend himself against the Police dog in any way – believing that a submissive approach would minimise any further injury he might suffer.

Within seconds, the Police Officer himself arrived on the scene, shouting at Harry to “Keep fucking still” and calling him a “Fucking idiot”.

Eventually the Police dog released his grip on Harry who was left in a state of shock, bleeding from several wounds. The Officer declared Harry his “Prisoner” but did not formally arrest him, nor attempt to ascertain who he was – nor show him any compassion.

Instead, the Officer just ordered Harry to continue walking towards the footpath, which was of course where he had been going in the first place, sending him on his way with another abusive, and contradictory, instruction – “You fucking make any moves you get bitten again!”

In the meantime, the Police dog had moved onto another of Harry’s friends who was lying in the undergrowth nearby, and also bit him. The Police Officer then noticed the remainder of the group of friends and after also threatening them “If you fucking move, you get bitten” instructed them to move towards the footpath, where other Police Officers awaited.

On exiting through the gap in the fence onto the footpath, Harry was immediately confronted by a number of Officers, one of whom handcuffed him and told him that he was being “detained” but provided absolutely no further information to justify this i.e. Harry was not informed that the Officers were arresting him on suspicion of any criminal offence, and nor was he told that they were exercising Stop and Search powers. All Police powers of detention require such explanations to be given to the subject, if it is at all reasonably practical to do so, otherwise they are illegitimate; an essential safeguard against arbitrary authoritarianism and abuse of power. But Harry was understandably too shell-shocked by what had happened to challenge the Officers, as they rode roughshod over his rights in this manner.

In pain from his injuries, particularly the deep bites he had suffered to his left shoulder, Harry was led away and made to stand near a Police vehicle on the adjacent street whilst his friends were also handcuffed and detained.

Harry was then ‘frisked’, again without any legal basis for a search being stated or explained to him.

The Officers partially cut away Harry’s clothing to look at his upper body injuries and took photographs of them. Harry gained the distinct impression that these photographs were not going to be used as part of any legal process, but instead were being taken as some sort of trophy or souvenir by the Officer.

The Officers did not examine the injuries to Harry’s leg, and they did not offer any first aid at all for any of his injuries.

Instead one of the Officers merely commented to Harry that he had “seen worse” dog bites.

Harry’s handcuffs had been removed, and he now began to feel dizzy and light headed and had to sit down.

The assembled Officers continued to say that Harry’s injuries were not serious and attempted to joke about the incident. Harry also heard an Officer – whom he suspected was the dog handler – remarking that the Police dog would be happy as he had “not had a bite for weeks”.

The dog handling Officer then gave Harry a ‘bite information card’. Harry felt sick and was in a lot of pain, as well as shock. He did not want a piece of paper, he wanted an ambulance and he told the Officers this.

They did agree to call an ambulance for him, but Harry was then told that the Officers had cancelled it and had decided to take him, as well as his companion who had also been bitten, to the hospital themselves, where they duly deposited him.

As Harry walked into the A&E Department at the hospital, one of the Officers who had driven him there called after him to point out that Harry’s right leg was bleeding.

Harry’s injuries were initially treated in the A&E Department, where he first required an x-ray and a tetanus booster injection; then due to the severity of his injuries, he was transferred to another hospital for assessment by a specialist Plastic Surgeon.

Harry’s wounds were washed out and sutured under local anaesthetic. Although he was discharged from hospital the same day, he was required to take antibiotics and attend wound check ups. He experienced pain and tenderness from his wound for a period of three months whilst they healed, during which time he was unable to properly exercise and he developed a, thankfully temporary, aversion to dogs whenever he saw one.

He was, however, left with permanent, albeit pale, scar marks on his upper left arm and his left shoulder blade region. Whilst generally hidden by his clothing, these marks will be with him for the rest of his life.

Approximately 10 days after the incident, Harry submitted a Police complaint.

Sadly, his complaint was treated with the lack of seriousness and the short shrift that Police Professional Standards Departments (PSD) will always try to get away with if they can.

Only seven days after he lodged his complaint, Harry received a response from PSD which stated as follows –

“With regards your complaint a decision has been made that no further investigation will take place at this time. The review by Professional Standards has determined that the deployment of the police dog was lawful and proportionate.

As your complaint has been appropriately dealt with through the logging process, we will not have any further contact with you about this matter and there is no right of review against the outcome.”

Whilst Harry was denied a right of review in terms of his complaint, the Police should not have invested those words with quite the sense of self-satisfaction and finality that they did; because Harry still very much had the right to sue the Police for what they had done to him, and this is what he sought my expert opinion upon.

Police Dogs & Misuse of Force

It cannot be disputed that Harry and his friends were on private property (a school field) when the Police were called; however, they were merely walking around, talking between themselves at a time when the premises were completely deserted and trespass itself is not a crime. It is a tort (civil wrong) but you can effectively only be sued for it if you have caused the owner/occupier of the land some discernible loss or damage. This was manifestly not the case here.

You cannot be arrested for trespass, because it is not a crime, and this would explain why even at the beginning of the incident no attempt was made to arrest Harry and his friends by any of the Officers involved.

In that context, the use of force by the Police dog handler in this case was an absolute travesty, being a totally disproportionate and excessive response to a situation which did not in fact require any use of force at all.

Police dogs are highly trained animals, with different ‘operational modes’ depending upon the instructions which they are given by their handler, and the situation which confronts them. They have a number of very useful roles to play in supporting the functions of the Police, which do not at all involve use of force and these include the following:

tracking scents
searching for suspects or vulnerable persons
searching for property/evidence.

However, Police Dogs obeying an instruction to ‘attack’ are also weapons and in that context constitute one of the most frightening and extreme types of ‘anti- personnel’ force which the Police have in their arsenal.

In a case in which there were unknown people present on school premises, it may well have been appropriate to use a Police dog to locate them, and indeed this was what was done when the Police dog on the footpath detected the scent of Harry and his friends. As it happened, Harry and his friends were voluntarily exiting the undergrowth, and in doing so were complying with the only Police instructions they had been given. Nevertheless, it might still have been appropriate to send the Police dog to find them if more time had gone by, and they had not in fact presented themselves to the Police outside the premises.

In this respect, a Police dog can be sent to search for potential suspects in a manner that does not have to end in violence. Police dogs are trained when searching for people, to initially locate and ‘guard’ the person that they find with a show of force i.e. barking, that same barking simultaneously functioning as a signal to bring their handler to the scene. When a Police dog is sent to perform such a task it is specifically trained not to attack the suspect unless the suspect attacks the dog, or is perceived by the dog as attempting to ‘escape.’

In a terrifyingly short period of time between his first becoming aware of persons in the undergrowth, and without giving them any realistic chance to comply with the command issued – to exit the undergrowth and show themselves – the Police Officer in this case jumped straight to a use of force deployment of his dog. The body camera footage (which I swiftly took steps to obtain from the Police on Harry’s behalf) confirmed that the period of time between the first command and the Officer releasing his dog in attack mode was only 20 seconds.

Whilst entirely blind as to who was in the dark and undergrowth, and without any evidence of threat from or the commission of a criminal offence by those persons, the Police Officer released his dog into the wooded area with the command “Get him, get him, get him” which is a deployment termed ‘Chase and Attack’.

Police dogs are selected for their “high prey drive” which means they like to chase a fleeing target, channelling their ancestral wolfish instincts of the hunt.

What the Police dog handler in this case could have done – if he genuinely felt that he could not wait any longer for the persons in the undergrowth to show themselves – would have been to release his dog to commence a search only, as described above, with a shouted warning to any persons in the vicinity, such as this (taken from the “Police dog’s Training and Care Manual 2002”) – “I am now releasing the dog. When it finds you, for your own safety you must remain still and quiet and you will come to no harm”.

Evidently, the Officer did not do this. Instead he specifically sent his dog not merely to locate but to attack the unknown persons in the undergrowth, which turned out to be Harry and his friends.

The Police dog would have fully understood the instruction “Get him!” to be an instruction to chase and detain a fleeing suspect by biting. Harry had not been told to stand still – he had been told to ‘come out’ and so was a moving target as the dog approached, and in the dog’s eyes, no doubt a ‘fleeing suspect’ who needed to be bitten.

The dog cannot be criticised for acting in accordance with its training, any more than a taser gun can be criticised for firing when its trigger is pulled; but in all such cases the Officer must be able to justify the use of force as reasonable and proportionate – and in Harry’s case I strongly felt that he could not.

The Police dog handler had completely mishandled this situation:

1. He had instructed unidentified people – who had certainly not been positively identified as offenders – to come out i.e. not to stand still but rather to keep moving (which they were doing), and then

2. within a matter of seconds he released his dog with specific instruction to attack and detain any persons who were moving in the undergrowth.

My great familiarity with incidents of Police violence leads me to attribute what happened in this case as result of the Officer’s ‘excitement’ at playing ‘cops and robbers’, blowing up a minor situation beyond all proportion – just like tasering someone in the back after the most minor of altercations.

Sadly, it seems that in Police dog teams, it is not only the animal whose blood can be got up by the thrill of the hunt.

The Police Officer had no idea who was in that wood, and no evidence that any crime had been committed, that any threat was posed or any reasonable basis to believe the ‘suspects’ were fleeing. If he thought they were fleeing, he should have issued them with a command to stand still and released his dog in the first instance to detain them with bark not bite – but instead he went straight for the ‘kill’.

As it happened, Harry and his friends were older teenagers, but given the nature of the premises, it is entirely possible that a group of children could have been in those woods. The Police Officer had no idea at all who he was setting his dog upon.

And finally, let us not forget that this particular Police use of force – the deployment of a Police dog – is very different from the majority of other forms of ‘weaponry’. The searing pain caused by a CS gas spray is intense but transitory; even bruising caused by baton strikes generally fade, but the powerful bite and tearing jaws of a Police dog can cause life-changing injuries and will leave indelible scars.

In all the circumstances therefore, I am very satisfied to have pursued Harry’s claim against the Police to a successful conclusion. Following the commencement of Court proceedings, the Police denial of liability has been replaced by an agreement to pay my client damages of £17,500 plus his legal costs.

My client’s name has been changed.

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£22,500 Damages For Good Samaritan Assaulted By Met Police

One afternoon in December 2019, my client Amir, a man of exemplary character, was walking through a London suburb when he noticed a group of Metropolitan Police officers surrounding a Sainsbury’s security guard whom he knew.

Amir was concerned as to the unnecessarily aggressive manner in which the officers appeared to be dealing with the security guard and so decided to speak to them about their conduct.

In a country which prides itself on “Policing by consent” as being the first principle of law-enforcement, citizens should not feel reticent about challenging the behaviour of officers, provided they stay within the boundaries of the law and good manners, which was exactly what Amir did. This type of public scrutiny is an important balance on the authority of the Police and should be accepted in good spirit by them.

Unfortunately, that was not the reaction Amir got.

Amir calmly and politely asked the officers why they were ‘ganging up’ on the security guard. PC Hussain said something like “What do you mean?” Amir replied “We’re even now, what’s the problem?”

Without warning, PC Hussain then stepped forward and pushed my client in his chest forcing him back a step or two, whilst, at the same time, PC Christie took hold of Amir’s right arm.

Amir was shocked by this sudden and unnecessary use of force, and instinctively and in self-defence lightly pushed PC Hussain back with his hand, while stepping backwards to create some distance between himself and the officers and said “Don’t touch me.”

Unfortunately, the Officers’ blood was now evidently up, as PC Hussain stepped forward and pushed Amir backwards again, and then struck Amir in the face. Whilst this was occurring, PC Christie took hold of Amir’s right arm from behind.

When these types of incidents happen, it is highly common for the Officers involved to display a real ‘gang’ mentality – such that once one of them has lost self-restraint and used unnecessary force, others tend to join in as well. In this case it was PC Chowdhury, who was brandishing a baton in his right hand and who proceeded to hit Amir on his back several times with it. PC Hussain then took hold of the Amir’s neck and shoulders and tried to force him down. Finally, PC O’Neil placed a handcuff on my client’s right wrist and forced his arm behind his back.

All of the Officers then tried to pull Amir to the ground whilst shouting “Get down, get down” and “Stop resisting” amongst other things. During the struggle, Amir’s hood was pulled over his head.

“Stop resisting!” is a stock phrase that I can only describe as the battlecry of Police brutality, generally yelled at a victim of Police aggression in an attempt to paint the victim as a perpetrator somehow responsible for the officers’ attack.

Amir was in total shock at the conduct of the Officers, but tried to remain standing in order not to be taken to the ground. He correctly asserted that PC Hussain had “attacked” him first.

The officers then overpowered Amir and he fell onto the ground onto his right side. His hands were handcuffed behind his back.

PC Chowdhury informed Amir that he was under arrest “for assault Police” and at this, Amir felt a blow to the left side of his body. A bystander asked PC Chowdhury why he had hit the Claimant when he was on the ground to which PC Chowdhury replied “Shut up” and then asserted “He punched my colleague.”

Amir was aware that a group of bystanders had gathered. He explained to the crowd what had happened. PC Chowdhury looked on grinning and mockingly said: “Of course, of course” and “Keep lying, keep lying.”

Amir was brought up into a sitting position and PC Chowdhury said to him: “You’re arrested for assault on police, the grounds of arrest are you punched my colleague, you’ve confronted him and you’ve tried to hit him.”

PC Hussain then accused Amir of wanting to be arrested, and said that Amir had “Kicked off”.

To the contrary, Amir asserted that PC Hussain had caused the situation because of his “ego and pride”.

PC Hussain and PC Chowdhury then had a conversation as to whether the security guard should be arrested and suggested that the security guard had ‘caused’ Amir to assault the officers. Neither assertion was true.

PC Chowdhury again accused Amir of having ‘punched’ PC Hussain. At this time, PC Chowdhury was stood above Amir and to his left. As Amir looked up at him, PC Chowdhury jabbed Amir in his shoulder, pointed his finger at his face and then waved his hand in an ‘air slap’ gesture towards Amir’s face.

Amir was conscious of the excessive force deployed by the officers so far and asked bystanders to record events, whereupon PC Hussain accused the Claimant of “wanting to be famous”. In fact it was the Police officers who had dragged Amir into an action movie not of his own making…

The officers then spent the afternoon driving Amir around between Police stations until, on the third attempt, they found one with capacity to receive him into custody.

At the Police Station, Amir was further arrested for an alleged Section 4A Public Order Act offence.

PC Chowdhury provided the circumstances of arrest as;

“DP [Detained Person] has approached officers who were dealing with an altercation with security at Sainsburys, DP was shouting at officers, actively resisting and has slapped an officer’s hand”

In fact it was Amir who was carrying the results of the Officers’ assault upon him. The vision in his left eye was blurred and he felt pain and discomfort in his upper back and both wrists. The stop-start journey to custody had left the tight handcuffs cutting into Amir’s wrist for a prolonged time, rubbing them red-raw.

Amir was now subjected to the degrading process of being a Police prisoner: he had his DNA, fingerprints, and photograph taken, and was then placed into a cell.

He was subsequently interviewed in the presence of a duty solicitor and robustly denied the allegations made against him, explaining that it was PC Hussain who had pushed him first.

Notwithstanding the truthfulness of his account, in the early hours of the following morning Amir was charged with assaulting PC Hussain, contrary to Section 1 of the Assaults on Emergency Workers (Offences) Act 2018, specifically alleged as an assault on PC Hussain in the exercise of his functions as an “emergency worker”. Amir was then bailed to attend the Magistrates Court in January 2020.

PC Hussain and PC Chowdhury both signed MG11 witness statements in which they alleged that Amir was an aggressor who ‘wanted’ a confrontation with the Police and who had struck the first blow in the altercation, by slapping PC Hussain’s reasonably raised hand. The truth or falsity of these statements would be borne out by the subsequent Court proceedings, but it is worth noting here that what had begun as an allegation that Amir had thrown a ‘punch’ had now been downgraded in both officers’ statements to a ‘slap’…

Amir knew he was innocent. But he had the threat of this prosecution, a criminal record, and a possible custodial sentence, hanging over his head all throughout the first year of the Covid Pandemic. He had to endure the inconvenience and social stigma of preliminary Court appearances as a ‘criminal suspect’ until, at a hearing at Snaresbrook Crown Court on 6 January 2021, the Crown Prosecution Service, as is so often the case in these scenarios, decided to offer no evidence against my client i.e they had concluded that they were not going to get a conviction. Amir was understandably relieved, but at the same time somewhat deflated that he had been denied the opportunity of vindicating his name in open court.

When Amir sought my assistance in getting compensation from the Met, I advised him to not only sue the Police for assault and battery and wrongful arrest (false imprisonment), but also to bring a claim for malicious prosecution. It was clear to me throughout the process of bringing this claim, that the object was not primarily financial for Amir, but to, quite rightly, use the civil courts to complete that process of vindication of his name – and to shame the officers who had abused him.

If you are charged with an offence because of accusations by a third party, then the Police would almost certainly not be liable for their role in facilitating or furthering that prosecution, if they honestly believe that the allegations made against you might be true, even if the evidence supporting them is weak. The Police are not liable for a ‘negligent prosecution’ in the sense of one brought on weak and circumstantial evidence or furthered by the false allegations of another person, if they honestly suspect you of the offence. But they are liable, as an organisation, if the false allegations instrumental in the bringing and/or continuation of the prosecution come not from the mouths of members of the public, but from Police Officers themselves. That is what converts a prosecution from being ‘merely’ weak, ill-founded or ill-advised into being actively malicious.

In this case I was able to argue that several Metropolitan Police Officers had, directly and deliberately:

presented false accounts that Amir had been the aggressor whilst outside Sainsburys on 18 December 2019.
presented false accounts that Amir had assaulted PC Hussain outside Sainsburys on 18 December 2019.
fabricated those accounts of Amir’s conduct in order to substantiate a prosecution and to cover up the true circumstances of the incident on 18 December 2019, namely the Officers’ excessive uses of force and unlawful arrest of my client.

Police Body Camera evidence was available. After I thoroughly reviewed it, I was satisfied that the footage verified my client’s version of events. But, notwithstanding that, he still faced an uphill struggle against the united testimony of several Police officers and their legal team, who continued to maintain that Amir was the aggressor. As witnesses, Police Officers can ‘blur’ the facts of the body camera footage with carefully calibrated ‘stock phrases’ – for example, in this case, PC Hussain stating that he was not pushing Amir but raising his hand in the air “to keep a reactionary gap” between them, and PC Chowdhury stating that he saw “what looked like a punch” from Amir. When multiple Officers are reciting mantras about how volatile/ potentially aggressive a person was – even when this is completely untrue – repetition can win over Judge and Jury. The Police are also in a position, unlike members of the public, to cash in on the social credit their profession gives them, particularly in a Court room, where the mere fact of their uniforms can seem to add extra weight to their words.

However, I am very pleased to confirm that shortly prior to it being listed for trial, Amir’s civil case settled with an agreement by the Met to pay him £22,500 damages plus his legal costs.

So, who really laid hands on whom first in this incident? There are 22,500 reasons to think we can be confident about the answer to that question, although it leaves another – why it had to come to this in the first place?

At the material time, my client was merely trying to provide assistance as a concerned citizen, speaking up against what he honestly believed was bullying behaviour. ‘Policing by consent’ requires Officers to remember they are citizens in uniform and not Robocops. They have to be prepared to answer questions and de-escalate situations, rather than putting power and ego first; that is the essence of public accountability in a democratic society.

Unfortunately, as the Sunday Times highlighted in February, incidents of Police use of force against members of the public rose from 491,984 in 2020 to 608,164 in 2022: a very distressing increase of almost 24%. This coincided with the Covid lockdowns and the ‘curfew’ powers which over-eager or ill-advised Police officers took it upon themselves to enforce against law abiding citizens during those years.

The question must be: with greater power, does greater opportunity for irresponsibility follow?

Certainly, those statistics suggest that the barometer of Police egos has continued to rise – with concerned citizens like Amir in the firing line.

And that should be of concern to all of us.

My client’s name has been changed.

Thames Valley Police Pay £57K Damages to Family for ‘Wrong Address’ Raid

One of the simplest mistakes the Police can make is to misread an address and ‘raid’ the wrong property under a search warrant or other planned operation – a ‘schoolboy error’ which causes a terrifying ordeal for the innocent family who experience what can only be described as a ‘home invasion’ – an inversion of what should be a family’s safest space into a theatre of nightmares, particularly for the children of the family.

Despite the number of clients I have represented who have suffered exactly this form of ‘wrong address’ raid, I still remain surprised at quite how prevalent it is; such an easy problem for the Police to avoid, and yet time and time again Force after Force smashes down the wrong door.

My client Arthur Owusu and his family reside in Reading. The street number of their house is 25, and Arthur lives there with his wife Faith, their three school-age daughters and Faith’s brother George. The family have lived there since 2013. They were not just recently arrived tenants, stepping into a property associated with somebody else.

Early one morning in 2022, Arthur was preparing breakfast in the kitchen, whilst his daughters got ready for school upstairs, when he was disturbed by loud banging on the front door.

Arthur went to the door but was given no chance to answer it, for at this moment uniformed Police Officers flooded into his house, having used a battering ram to break-and-enter.

Arthur was immediately seized and handcuffed to the rear by several officers; he was dazed and confused by what was happening, a situation compounded by the fact that English is not his first language.

Officers began to search the premises and located the other family members, who were then escorted into the lounge to join Arthur in temporary captivity, this included Faith and the girls who had been in the process of using the bathroom/ getting ready in their bedrooms and thus were in a state of undress when the Police burst in. It was particularly traumatising for Arthur’s young daughters to see their father being held in handcuffs in their living room, like a criminal.

There are few noises more frightening than that of your house being broken into – the noise of intruders breaking not merely a physical lock or window but the psychological seal of privacy and safety which we take for granted around our family home. Muddy boot prints on the carpet can be scrubbed clean much more easily than the footprints such an experience leaves in the memory – particularly the minds of children and, sadly, it was unsurprising that long after this event was over, Arthur’s young daughters required counselling/ therapy (which I am pleased to say I was able to facilitate for them as part of their claims).

The Officers now explained that they were here to execute a Search Warrant in regards to an individual by the surname of “Jones.” Arthur explained that Mr Jones was known to him – as his next door neighbour; for Mr Jones lived at 25A, and had done so for many years.

The Officers now realised their mistake and released Arthur from his handcuffs (though not before he had suffered bruising/ marking upon his wrists). A senior officer advised the Owusu family that arrangements would be made for their front door to be repaired and the Officers then trooped out, leaving the family bewildered, shaken and upset.

Thankfully, the Police intrusion had lasted for less than half an hour, although it had felt far longer to the family whilst they were undergoing it, such was the intensity of the shock, and its effects would persist for a long time afterwards – as I have already alluded to.

Arthur and his family all suffered with anxiety, mood and sleep disturbance following the incident. Arthur felt a deep shame at being seen by his family in handcuffs – with all the stigma of criminality attached to that degrading piece of Police ‘kit’ – and his youngest daughter, aged only eight at the time, was worried for months afterwards whenever she was apart from him, for fear that the Police had come back to get him.

Getting the ‘wrong house’ with a similar number is an easy mistake to make – but it is absolutely inexcusable when the consequence is not to have a lost letter come through the door, but rather a paramilitary-style break-and-enter Police squad.

Police ‘intelligence’ which makes this kind of elementary mistake really isn’t living up to its name and calls for pushback with the full force of the law.

I was therefore more than happy to help the Owusu family when they consulted me, and I presented claims for trespass to land and breach of Article 8 of the Human Rights Act (the protection of private and family life) on their behalf against Thames Valley Police, along with associated assault and battery (which included the family’s initial fear – particularly on the part of the children – that the intruders might be something worse than misdirected Police Officers).

Although no one was arrested, all of the family were also entitled to sue the Police for false imprisonment; for the 25 minutes or so that the Police were in occupation of the house also counted as a period of detention for its occupants, who were obviously not free to come and go as they pleased. Read here another of my recent blogs in which I explain the legal basis behind such a claim made in very similar circumstances.

Despite such an obvious error on the part of the Police they prevaricated about liability, only admitted after I formally threatened legal action, and even then tried to under–settle the family’s claim for damages. However, I am pleased to confirm that I have recently concluded all of the Owusu’s claims for total damages of over £57,000 – more than twice as much as Thames Valley were initially prepared to offer.

So that is why if the Police wrongly knock down your door – I urge you to rightly come knocking on mine!

My clients’ names have been changed.

How you can help me

Wrongfully Detained for Shoplifting

For all that they wear uniforms and often behave with the arrogance and aggression of a private Police Force, the fact is that security staff patrolling retail premises, on the hunt for shoplifters, only have the same “Citizen’s Arrest” powers that everybody else does, as defined by Section 24A of the Police & Criminal Evidence Act 1984 (PACE):

24A Arrest without warrant: other persons

(1)A person other than a constable may arrest without a warrant—

(a)anyone who is in the act of committing an indictable offence;

(b)anyone whom he has reasonable grounds for suspecting to be committing an indictable offence.

(2)Where an indictable offence has been committed, a person other than a constable may arrest without a warrant—

(a)anyone who is guilty of the offence;

(b)anyone whom he has reasonable grounds for suspecting to be guilty of it.

(3)But the power of summary arrest conferred by subsection (1) or (2) is exercisable only if—

(a)the person making the arrest has reasonable grounds for believing that for any of the reasons mentioned in subsection (4) it is necessary to arrest the person in question; and

(b)it appears to the person making the arrest that it is not reasonably practicable for a constable to make it instead.

(4)The reasons are to prevent the person in question—

(a)causing physical injury to himself or any other person;

(b)suffering physical injury;

(c)causing loss of or damage to property; or

(d)making off before a constable can assume responsibility for him.

And those powers, as with Police powers of summary arrest (ie arrests made without the rare authority of a Court warrant), are contingent on reasonable suspicion. Furthermore, they do not come with the additional power to search a person or their property which Section 32 of PACE grants to actual Police Officers.

Sadly, these powers are commonly misunderstood and misused by retail security staff, leading their victims to have to turn to specialist lawyers such as myself for recompense and restitution. For whilst most of my time is spent holding misbehaving ‘official lawmen’ to account, I am also more than happy to help roundup and rectify the abuses of quasi-Police cowboys.

In September 2021 my client Michael, a medical professional and man of exemplary character, attended his local Sainsbury’s store. He had come to purchase a particular type of watermelon for his daughter’s birthday party. As he walked around the store Michael spoke on his mobile phone to his wife about what was required; after finding that no such melons were available Michael went to exit the store, having only been in there for a few minutes. This is something I’m sure we’ve all done on those occasions when we are on a ‘mission’ for a very specific and urgently required item, rather than a general ‘shop’.

As Michael approached the exit of the store, an alarm went off. As he had no items in his possession and the alarm had gone off before when he passed through the detectors, a common occurrence with these temperamental machines, Michael thought nothing of it and continued to exit the store.

At this point, an unknown man dressed in plain clothes, suddenly rushed to block Michael’s path, and immediately assaulted my client by grabbing his right arm and twisting it behind his back. Michael was utterly shocked. The man then forced him back into the store.

As Michael was marched ‘prisoner-style’ down the aisles, the man not only kept his arm twisted up behind his back, but actually threatened to break it. Due to the position that Michael’s arm was being held in, it started to turn numb.

The man now accused the Michael of being part of a ‘gang’, along with another person who had been stopped, whom Michael knew nothing about.

The man who had ‘apprehended’ Michael alleged that he had been communicating with other gang members on his mobile phone. Incredulous, Michael denied this and offered to show his phone to the man to prove that he had been simply talking to his wife; however, this was ignored.

As Michael was force-marched through the store, a female member of staff wearing a Sainsbury’s uniform and a name tag swore at him, evidently having decided he was a shoplifter. Just as private security operations generally neglect the proper rules of arrest, so they often disregard the time-honoured principle that any person is innocent until proven guilty; the staff involved behaving like judge, jury and jailer, as if supermarket aisles were an extra- territorial jurisdiction.

Michael was forced into a back office where his captor demanded that he take off the (then obligatory) Covid face mask that he was wearing, and provide his identification. Michael refused to do so. The man then claimed that he worked ‘for the government’, but when this was questioned by the Michael, his captor merely flashed a blue card at him before leaving the room.

Also present in the room was a uniformed security guard, a man with a Sainsbury’s name tag (who subsequently identified himself as the store manager), and another person who had been detained in this allegedly ‘gang busting’ operation.

Michael attempted to explain to the manager and the security guard that he had nothing to do with the other person who was detained, however they repeated the accusation about Michael being part of an organised gang stealing from the store and maintained that he had been seen on CCTV ‘communicating’ with other members of the gang. Despite Michael’s protests to the contrary, the security guard and manager maintained that they had not made an error and that his guilt was ‘proven’ by the CCTV. They then refused to allow Michael to leave the room and said that he would be held until police officers attended.

Michael provided the registration number of his car so that further CCTV footage could be checked to prove that he attended the store on his own and showed his captors his bank card with his name on, including for what it was worth his title of ‘Dr’ (although he was under no obligation to do either of these things). His cooperation availed him naught and he continued to be held.

After some time, two Police officers arrived. One of these Officers told Michael that he had reviewed the store CCTV and did not believe that Michael was involved in any thefts. The officer then told Michael that he was free to leave. However, Michael suffers from diabetes, and by the time that he was released he felt weak and lightheaded as his blood sugar levels were low. He asked whether he could purchase a soft drink with sugar but was refused.

As Michael was led out of the back office – Sainsbury’s temporary ‘Police Station’ – he was offered a bunch of flowers for his wife, which he declined. His compensation, I am pleased to say, was ultimately to be measured, not in petals but in tens of thousands of pounds.

Before leaving, Michael told the store manager that he wanted to make an official complaint. The manager said that hat he would record the complaint but refused to provide the Michael with any reference numbers for the incident or identify the member of staff that had sworn at him.

Accordingly, a few days later Michael emailed a formal complaint to Sainsbury’s customer services. In response, Sainsbury’s Executive Office first claimed that “after full investigation” they had determined that his complaint would be dismissed – only to retract this the following day (following another ‘full investigation’ we might wonder?) now stating that they accepted that Michael had been “identified in error” by a security guard employed by Mitie PLC, a well known private security company who work as subcontractors for supermarket chains and other nationwide businesses.

Sainsbury’s now somewhat improved on their bunch of flowers by offering Michael a ‘goodwill’ payment of £150, which he also wisely did not accept.

In a follow-up email Sainsbury’s stated-

“I can confirm the store have advised that you were identified incorrectly, and have mentioned, that as you were leaving our store, you were walking along side or behind those involved in a major shop lift. As a result of this, our guard wrongly accused yourself for being involved therefore you were detained in error. The way the guard handled the situation is highly unacceptable and is something that is being thoroughly reviewed with our security team. Please be assured, any action deemed necessary will be taken. Our team within the store should have handled this matter in a highly professional manner so to swear at yourself is completely unacceptable. Sainsburys take full ownership that you were detained in error and our guard and management team have been fully addressed to prevent a similar case going forward.”

As a result of the force used upon him, Michael was left with a sore arm, but far worse was the psychological damage that had been caused. Michael was deeply upset by the incident and felt extremely humiliated that it had taken place in full view of members of the public and Sainsbury’s staff, one of whom had sworn at him. Michael found that he was unable to properly enjoy his daughter’s birthday party due to the impact of the incident and he suffered sleeplessness thinking and worrying about the incident, particularly how the incident might both physically and mentally impair his ability to perform medical procedures in his job.

Michael also found himself unable to return to this particular Sainsbury’s store because of the highly distressing memories it brought back, and whilst able to bring himself to enter other supermarkets, he found himself plagued by anxiety whilst in such premises, for fear he might again be falsely accused of theft, detained, and assaulted. He also suffered from a legitimate concern that whilst he was being branded as a shoplifter, he might have been recognised by a colleague or patient, and feared damage to his professional reputation as a result.

Taking Action Against Sainsburys

After hearing Michael’s story I agreed to take his case on and prepared and presented a detailed letter of claim to Sainsburys.

In response to the claim, and contrary to their earlier assurance to Michael that they “took full ownership” for the error, Sainsburys prevaricated and delayed to such an extent that it was necessary for me to issue an application for Pre-Action Disclosure in the County Court to get them to hand over all relevant evidence.

In advance of the hearing of my client’s application, Sainsburys agreed to disclose the CCTV footage of the incident and then subsequently sought to pass the blame for what had happened onto the “reputable security services” whom they had employed i.e Mitie PLC.

The Mitier They Are, the Mitier They Fall…

In the circumstances, I now presented a claim to Mitie, with whom I have crossed swords on previous occasions, alleging both false imprisonment and assault and battery on behalf of Michael. Following investigation, Mitie admitted that their security guard had had no reasonable grounds to detain my client. I obtained medical evidence to quantify the full extent of the psychological impact which this incident had had upon my client, and in response Mitie put forwards an initial offer of £8,500 damages, which Michael rejected on my advice.

I am pleased to announce that I was ultimately able to negotiate a settlement of £12,000 damages for Michael , plus his legal costs; fair recompense for all he had gone through – and a lot more than a halfhearted bunch of flowers.

I think it is highly unlikely that either the big retail chains or security firms like Mitie will change their staff recruitment or training policies any time soon, and incidents like this will keep on happening.

Three Key Points To Remember When It Comes To Shoplifting Arrests

Retail staff and security staff, no matter what uniforms they are wearing, nametags or attitude they are displaying, have no more powers to effect a “citizen’s arrest” under Section 24A of PACE than do the rest of us.

Section 24A of PACE empowers citizens to arrest others whom they “reasonably suspect” to be committing an offence – see Section 24A 1(b) and 2(b) of PACE. Very often when an innocent person is stopped and accused by staff of shoplifting there will, practically speaking, be an absence of reasonable suspicion – just as in Michael ’s case, where an aggressive security guard appears to have negligently grabbed the wrong person. If you are innocent and have been detained by security staff, even if only for a few minutes, you should always seek legal advice to establish if you have a right to compensation.

Retail and security staff in shoplifting cases, utilising Citizen’s Arrest powers, can only detain you until the Police arrive and use only reasonable force to do so – they are absolutely not empowered to interrogate you, hold you prisoner without contacting the Police or to search you or your belongings. A “Citizen’s Arrest” does not entitle a “Citizen’s Search” of the detained person.

Commonly, however, Retail Security staff ride roughshod over these important rules and safeguards designed to protect a person’s liberty and property. Contact me if this has happened to you, and together we’ll hold them to account.

My client’s name has been changed.

Read more about this matter in the case report: Man wrongfully detained in Sainsburys agrees out of court settlement

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Failing the Test: An Unnecessary Arrest

This week’s blog post is intended to highlight the crucial importance of “necessity” in any lawful arrest. The vast majority of arrests carried out by the Police are “summary arrests” under Section 24 of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 (PACE) i.e arrests carried out by the Police under an Officer’s individual authority, and without the authorisation of a Court Warrant.

For the Police to deprive you of your liberty in the absence of a Warrant, they must not only honestly and reasonably suspect you of a criminal offence (a relatively low bar if another person has made an accusation against you, even if it is false) but also be able to rely upon one of the 10 justifications set out in Section 24, and expounded in Code G of the Police & Criminal Evidence Act, as to why the suspected offence requires your arrest in order to be investigated, arrest being only a means to an end, not an end in itself (it is not an interim punishment, an early incarceration if you like):

24Arrest without warrant: constables

(4) [The power of summary arrest]… is exercisable only if the constable has reasonable grounds for believing that for any of the reasons mentioned in subsection (5) it is necessary to arrest the person in question.

(5)The reasons are—

(a)to enable the name of the person in question to be ascertained (in the case where the constable does not know, and cannot readily ascertain, the person’s name, or has reasonable grounds for doubting whether a name given by the person as his name is his real name);

(b)correspondingly as regards the person’s address;

(c)to prevent the person in question—

(i)causing physical injury to himself or any other person;

(ii)suffering physical injury;

(iii)causing loss of or damage to property;

(iv)committing an offence against public decency (subject to subsection (6)); or

(v)causing an unlawful obstruction of the highway;

(d)to protect a child or other vulnerable person from the person in question;

(e)to allow the prompt and effective investigation of the offence or of the conduct of the person in question;

(f)to prevent any prosecution for the offence from being hindered by the disappearance of the person in question.

It is important, therefore, that when Police officers default to ‘arrest mode’ without sufficient critical thinking, failing in their duty to consider the necessity question and alternatives to arrest – that they are held to account. Suing the Police in such circumstances may not only bring you compensation and some peace of mind; it may help to ensure that fewer people in the future are subject to unnecessary arrests.

The test for determining whether an arrest was necessary under PACE Section 24 was summarised by the Court of Appeal in Hayes v Chief Constable of Merseyside [2012] 1 WLR 517 [at paragraph 40] as follows:

“(1) the policeman must honestly believe that arrest is necessary, for one or more identified section 24(5) reasons, and

(2) his decision must be one which, objectively reviewed afterwards according to the information known to him at the time, is held to have been made on reasonable grounds”.

The Court of Appeal then cited with approval a passage in Alexander and others [2009] NIQB 20 [2009] NIQB 20 at paragraph 19:

“Given the scope of the decision available to a constable contemplating arrest, we do not consider that it is necessary that he interrogate a person as to whether he will attend a police station voluntarily. But he must, in our judgment, at least consider whether having a suspect attend in this way is a practical alternative. The decision whether a particular course is necessary involves, we believe, at least some thought about the different options. In many instances this will require no more than a cursory consideration, but it is difficult to envisage how it could be said that a constable has reasonable grounds for believing it necessary to arrest if he does not make at least some evaluation as to whether voluntary attendance would achieve the objective that he wishes to secure”.

In Commissioner of the Police for the Metropolis v MR [2019] EWHC 888 (QB) [at paragraph 47], the High Court stressed that the “test of necessity” for summary arrest is more than what is simply desirable, convenient or reasonable. It is, quite rightly, a “high bar, introduced for all offences in 2005 to tighten the accountability of police officers”.

Failing the Test: An Unnecessary Arrest

At all material times, my client Stevie was in an on/off relationship with a woman whom I will identify for the purposes of this blog post as “Samantha”.

Following a report which Samantha made to the Police in mid- January 2022, Stevie became aware that Cambridgeshire Police wanted to speak to him.

Sensibly and proactively, Stevie phoned the investigating Officer, PC Dickinson, and advised that he would voluntarily attend Peterborough Police Station at 10.00am on 8 March 2022 .

By this time, Stevie had been back in his relationship with Samantha for around three to four weeks. Sam advised him that whilst they were broken up she had reported him to the Police for alleged harassment, and this was evidently what they wanted to speak to him about.

The crime report was therefore several months old, and significantly stale by the time my client attended Peterborough Custody Unit as arranged. To his shock however, matters did not unfold as amicably as he had reasonably anticipated.

PC Dickinson met Stevie in the waiting area and led him into the Custody Unit whereupon, the Officer told Stevie that he was under arrest for Harassment and cautioned him, for allegedly having pestered Samantha with messages and for turning up at her house unanounced.

Stevie was then taken before the Custody Sergeant, PS Hallam.

The reason arrest was ‘necessary’ was said to be for a “prompt and effective investigation – to interview – as thought unlikely person would attend voluntarily. PACE Code G 2.9 (e)(i)(a). To protect a child or other vulnerable person from the person in question. PACE Code G2.9(d)”

At 10.16, Stevie’s detention was authorised. The grounds for detention were said to be “to secure or preserve evidence, to obtain evidence, to obtain evidence by questioning.” That, of course, would be the questioning which he had shown his full willingness to participate in by reaching out to the Police in the first place.

Stevie then faced the indignity of being searched and having his possessions seized.

PS Hallam then completed a Risk Assessment of my client, in which he recorded the following observations to the pro forma questions-

Does the detainee appear injured or unwell? NO

Does the detainee need First Aid or medical treatment? NO

Does the detainee appear to have taken or be under the influence

of alcohol, drugs or any other substance ? NO

Does the detainee have any indications of self harm? NO

PS Hallam then sought to obtain Stevie’s own answers to the risk- assessment. In response, and in protest at the way he had in effect been ambushed with an unnecessary arrest, Stevie exercised the ‘right to silence’ which he had just been informed was his post-arrest (“You do not have to say anything…”) and refused to respond.

The form of Police misconduct which Stevie was experiencing – unnecessary arrest – now collided with another form about which I have written before – the draconian misuse of strip search powers, not to ensure a detainee’s safety but to punish them for being perceived as disobedient or disrespectful by the Custody Sergeant (most often in a basic refusal to answer questions). For PS Hallam now threatened Stevie that should he fail to answer the risk-assessment questions, or to provide his name (which of course, the Police already knew) he would be taken to a cell and have his clothing forcibly removed.

Stevie protested that this was uncalled for as he was no risk to anyone, and he would not remove his clothes. Throughout his dealings with PC Dickinson and PS Hallam, Stevie had remained calm and polite. He was in good health, physically and mentally and clearly not a risk to himself and/or others. His reticence at answering the Sergeant’s pro-forma questions was, I would say, perfectly understandable given that he should not have been arrested in the first place.

Unfortunately, this cut no ice with the Custody Sergeant, who carried out his threat. Stevie was escorted to a cell by at least five officers and ordered to strip naked.

An Unnecessary Strip Search

Lest we forget, this was a man suspected of a relatively low-level offence, who had contacted the Police himself and voluntarily attended the station to be interviewed.

Stevie was understandably shocked and upset by this degrading treatment, but did remove his hooded top, belt, trainers and socks and shoes. This was not enough to satisfy his captors however, and nor would it be if the purpose of the exercise was not to protect Stevie from self-harm (its ostensible justification) but in fact to punish him for disobedience and assert power over him. Perhaps the words of the Police caution should be amended to: “You have the right to remain silent, but if you do, you won’t remain in your clothes.”

Stevie was told to hand over the rest of his clothes, or they would be taken from him by force.

In addition to the five officers in the cell with him, Stevie was by this time aware of other officers gathered in the hallway outside, including a female officer.

Again, Stevie asserted that he was no risk to anyone and ‘locked’ his hands together to try to protect himself from being stripped, whereupon multiple Officers took hold of him and pressure was applied to his thumbs and his arms were forced apart and behind his back. He was then handcuffed to the rear.

Stevie was then forced face down on the floor of the cell – remember that this was supposedly to ‘safeguard’ him – whereupon an Officer kneeled on his back and his t-shirt and then jeans and pants were forcibly removed.

Throughout this degrading ordeal, Stevie experienced significant pain and discomfort.

Once Stevie was naked, a pair of shorts were dropped on top of him, and the officers vacated the cell. This was later described in the Custody Record as Stevie being “covered with safety clothes to protect his dignity.”

Stevie put on the pants which he found were dirty and too large and kept falling down. He had nothing to wear on his top. He felt humiliated and disgusted, and was experiencing pain in his hands and arms, particularly his right thumb. He requested the attention of a medical professional; once again it was Police ‘safeguarding’ that proved to have been the real threat to one of my clients, and shorthand for an unjustified assault.

Stevie’s ordeal was now about to escalate further, however, as the Police having used one set of powers to humiliate and injure him, would now use another to criminalise him.

An Unnecessary Drug Test

Whilst Stevie waited in his cell for the interview which he had voluntarily presented himself for hours earlier, Temporary Inspector Jackman authorised a drugs test upon him. His grounds were said to be that – “the detainee has been arrested for stalking and harassment (DA related). He has a history of drug offences. I suspect the use of drugs contributed to the commission of the offence. Drug use can cause paranoia in many cases, stalking behaviour is exasperated by paranoid thoughts towards the victim and relating to the following non-trigger offence(s) Other – not listed – PNC recordable, harassment, PNC recordable.”

For the record, Stevie has no “history of drug offences”.

For the time being, and unaware of this bizarre decision, Stevie was interviewed by PC Dickinson and DS Thind and then returned to his incarceration. The interview lasted only 20 minutes, after which the Custody Record was noted to the effect that the Police were aware that Stevie and Samantha had now reconciled and there had never been any violence or assaults between them.

Approximately three hours after this interview, Stevie was brought out of his cell and obliged to give fingerprints and to be photographed.

It was now that he was informed that an Inspector had authorised the taking of a drug sample from him; morally outraged at this latest insult after all the other mistreatment which had been piled upon him from unnecessary arrest, to strip search and physical injury, Stevie refused to provide a sample. He was, of course, entirely ‘clean’ but this was a point of principle which he wanted to hold on to, an act of resistance against any further shredding of his dignity.

Finally therefore, at 17.34 that day, Stevie was charged with failing to provide a sample for the purpose of ascertaining whether he had a Class A drug in his body. He was granted police bail to attend Peterborough Magistrates’ Court in April.

And the other offence – the stale report of harassment which Stevie had originally attended in order to address and clear up? He was “refused charge” for that, i.e it was dropped. His property was returned and he was allowed to leave the Police station.

Winning Compensation

Stevie subsequently attended Peterborough Magistrates Court where he proudly pleaded not guilty.

The case was adjourned for Trial. Then, just weeks before the Trial, Stevie was advised that the Crown Prosecution Service had discontinued the proceedings against him. I can only presume that this was because the prosecutors on reviewing the evidence had strong cause to doubt the bona fides of the Inspector’s decision to ‘drug test’ Stevie and suspected, as I did, that like the strip search it was just another excuse to humiliate a recalcitrant detainee with one of the many uses of power Police have in their bureaucratic arsenal.

He was at last the free and innocent man he should have been within a short time of his voluntary attendance at the Station. Instead, one act of Police abuse of power in the form of an unnecessary arrest had kicked off a catalogue of others, causing Stevie emotional stress and physical injury. Had the Police proceeded with a voluntary interview with Stevie, he might have been out of the Station as early as 10.30am that morning, with the matter cleared up and the Police able to devote their resources to far more serious matters; instead considerable Police energy was spent on, effectively, tormenting Stevie with one act of humiliation after another for over 7 hours, before he was released with the threat of a criminal conviction hanging over his head for months.

Stevie’s determination to stand his ground against Police abuse of power led him, after his exoneration in the criminal proceedings, to instruct me to bring a civil claim against Cambridgeshire Police, in which I was more than happy to act after analysing the facts of his case.

I am pleased to confirm that after receiving my detailed letter of claim on behalf of Stevie, whilst they did not admit liability, the Police did agree to compensate Stevie in the sum of £15,000 plus his legal costs – a considerable settlement which speaks for itself.

An absolutely necessary settlement, in fact.

“Giving Us Evils”: Know Your Rights When It Comes To Police Stop & Search

Detained and searched for looking at a Police Officer the wrong way? Sadly, that was what happened to my client Allen Norman.

Police Officers live in a world of ranks, uniforms and chains of command and unfortunately often bring that mentality to the everyday world, behaving as if they ‘out-rank’ ordinary citizens.

One afternoon in June 2022, Allen was shopping in the heart of London and passed a Police carrier that was parked up, close to a Boots store.

Having completed his shopping in the store, Allen returned outside and went to retrieve his bicycle, which was locked to a nearby lamppost.

At this time, two male Police Offices – now known to be PC Laurie and PC Minnerthey of the City of London Police, approached Allen and asked if he was “Alright” and what he was up to.

Allen was immediately apprehensive, as many of us would be if stopped by the Police in such circumstances. He asserted that he was fine, but that he would not be answering any questions.

PC Minnerthey then began to accuse Allen of “Giving us evils” as he had walked past their Police carrier and then of allegedly “Fiddling around with a lot of stuff” in the Boots store (whatever that was supposed to mean).

PC Minnerthey announced that he was going to search Allen under Section 1 of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act (PACE), produced his handcuffs and reached out to grab Allen’s arms. Allen felt threatened and sought to clarify upon what grounds the Officer wanted to search him, asserting that the Officers’ actions were unlawful. He knew his rights under the Police Codes of Practice – the ‘GOWISELY’ procedure, which Officers are supposed to adhere to, but in fact routinely abuse.

Ignoring this, the Officers now grabbed Allen’s arms and forcefully handcuffed him.

Again, Allen demanded to know on what grounds the Officers were asserting a legal power to search him. PC Minnerthey repeated his bizarre accusation: that Allen had been giving him and his colleagues “Evils”, before then going into a shop and “Fiddling around”.

PC Laurie then stated that as Allen walked down the road, he was seen “eyeballing” the Police carrier, “paying a lot of attention” to the Officers within, and had then gone into a shop where he was seen to be “fumbling around” and “potentially up to no good.”

Numerous other officers now attended, it obviously being a slow day in the city of London…

The Officers continued to hold Allen – although he was not resisting them, or attempting to leave – and searched him, including removing his wallet and mobile phone from his possession.

Apparently having polished his script a little more, PC Minnerthey now advised Allen that – “You’ve appeared to be concealing yourself in the shop while you appeared to be fiddling about with things, okay, we’ve come over to have a chat with you and straightaway you’ve been very very “anti”, not letting us get a word in edgeways. You’re extremely nervous, your breathing rate is up there, we think you’ve got something to hide. We suspect you might have been involved in something in the shop and therefore we’ve searched you under section 1 PACE for any stolen items.”

Section 1 of PACE (with irrelevant sub-clauses omitted) provides as follows-

1 Power of constable to stop and search persons, vehicles etc.

(1)A constable may exercise any power conferred by this section—

(a)in any place to which at the time when he proposes to exercise the power the public or any section of the public has access, on payment or otherwise, as of right or by virtue of express or implied permission; or

(b)in any other place to which people have ready access at the time when he proposes to exercise the power but which is not a dwelling.

(2)Subject to subsection (3) to (5) below, a constable—

(a)may search—

(i)any person or vehicle;

(ii)anything which is in or on a vehicle,

for stolen or prohibited articles; and

(b)may detain a person or vehicle for the purpose of such a search.

(3)This section does not give a constable power to search a person or vehicle or anything in or on a vehicle unless he has reasonable grounds for suspecting that he will find stolen or prohibited articles.

Allen correctly denied that the Officers’ had any grounds to detain and search him under this legislation; of course, this did not stop them.

It was in fact quite apparent that, no matter how they attempted to dress it up, the reason that the Officers were searching Allen was because they didn’t like the way he had looked at them as he passed their vehicle. Somewhat unsurprisingly, PACE does not in fact grant Officers the power to search someone because he is suspected of ‘giving them the evil eye’ and the Officers had no legal grounds for interfering in Allen’s business that day.

To be entirely clear, no member of the public or member of staff from the Boots store had made any accusation of shoplifting against Allen whatsoever, and at its highest all the Officers could apparently say was that they had seen Allen ‘fiddling about’ with things in the store – but just as with looking at Police Officers, ‘fiddling around with things in a store’ is not a crime; in fact it is shopping.

The search having proved negative, Allen’s handcuffs were removed after a period of about 7 minutes.

Allen was outraged by the incident and felt as if he had been mugged, although at all times he kept his temper under control and spoke respectfully to the squad of Police Officers now assembled around him.

Aware of his rights, Allen asked PC Minnerthey for a Stop Form. He was at first (wrongly) told that a Stop Form could not be provided because he had not given his personal details (which he was under no legal obligation to do). Allen asserted that he was entitled to a Stop Form whereupon the Officers told him that he would have to subsequently attend Bishopsgate Police Station, in order to collect it.

His phone was now returned to him, and he was told that he was free to go.

Throughout their conversation with Allen, as evidenced on their own body camera recordings, PCs Minnerthey and Laurie had, in effect, confessed their improper motivations to him. It is quite clear that they had detained, manhandled and searched him simply because they thought he was looking at them ‘the wrong way’ as he went past, compounded by his ‘failure’ to smile and engage with them when they approached him. Allen was in fact doing nothing wrong, and was in no way behaving in a criminally suspicious manner – but sadly the Officers’ mindset was obviously such that they immediately considered the slightest display of a ‘anti-police’ attitude tantamount to being a crime in itself.

Such, indeed, is the mindset of the very many Police Officers who fall into the trap of believing that they outrank ordinary civilians and that, accordingly, acts of insubordination from those ‘lower down’ the rungs need to be punished by some muscular exercise of Police powers. In this way, the boundaries of Police Officers’ egos very frequently exceed the boundaries of the law.

This attitude is at the heart of a huge proportion of all acts of Police misconduct and oppression.

A few days later, Allen duly attended Bishopsgate Police Station, required them to give him a copy of the Search Form and lodged a formal complaint. That complaint was summarily dismissed by Inspector Mackenzie (which is the knee-jerk Police reaction to most complaints).

Allen therefore turned to me for assistance, and when the City of London Police continued to maintain their denial of any wrongdoing, I instituted County Court proceedings on behalf of my client, suing the Police for false imprisonment and assault and battery on the basis that the Officers had grossly misused their Stop and Search powers under Section 1 PACE because they did not honestly or reasonably suspect that Allen was in possession of “Stolen or prohibited articles”.

I am pleased to confirm that through those Court proceedings I was able to win for Allen compensatory damages of £8,500, plus his legal costs and a letter of apology from the City of London Police in the following terms –

“The Commissioner admits liability for false imprisonment and assault and battery as set out in your Particulars of Claim.

On behalf of the Commissioner I accept that on 22 June 2022 you should not have been detained or searched by the Commissioner’s officers. The officers’ grounds for stopping and searching you were not objectively reasonable in the circumstances. I unreservedly apologise to you on behalf of the Commissioner and confirm that the officers involved will be notified of this decision. I trust that this apology will go some way to restoring your trust and confidence in the City of London Police.”

A healthy scepticism of Police authoritarianism is essential in any democratic society; indeed it is the first bulwark in the defence of our civil liberties. Police Officers who baselessly pull rank on ordinary citizens – in this case with only the shameless excuse of having been ‘looked at the wrong way’ – need to be taught a lesson in good manners, in respect for individuals’ privacy, dignity and integrity of person, and in the limits and purpose of their powers.

That the Police still won’t properly police themselves, is amply demonstrated by their mass rejection of legitimate complaints. Perhaps when the letter of apology I have quoted above comes as a prompt and heartfelt response to a person’s initial complaint, then we will know that things have really changed for the better.

Until they do, it is up to brave citizens such as Allen Norman to take on the system, and teach the Police how to be better.

Since the conclusion of his case, Allen has sadly passed away. His son has given me permission to publish this blog post, telling me that his father would have wanted this story told. I am proud to give Allen Norman the last word against overbearing and unconstitutional Police bullying.

Update

Rob Warner at Crimebodge has produced a video about Allen’s case. Watch it here:

Hard Fought Win Against GMP results in £30K Damages Payout

Earlier this month, I wrote about the sense of satisfaction that can be achieved by a Claimant in a Police action through a well-deserved but hard- fought win in collaboration with your lawyer, and a case in point is the one which I will describe in today’s blog post, in which my client eventually prevailed – but only after Greater Manchester Police (GMP) had fought him tooth and nail through the Magistrates and County court systems – and literally so in the living room of his girlfriend’s house.

My client faced Police brutality and a robust defence from GMP , but his determination to achieve justice saw him through to victory; and this is how he did it.

In the summer of 2019, Ben was in a relationship with a woman who lived in Greater Manchester.

One afternoon, whilst Ben was at his partner’s house, the couple had an argument, as couples do, concerning the behaviour of Ben’s partner’s teenage daughter. Although voices were raised inside the house, there was no violence involved and nobody called the Police.

Unfortunately, Police Officers including PC Day and PC Hassan were in the vicinity investigating an unrelated matter, and overhearing the argument, took it upon themselves to intervene. The officers entered the garden of the house and PC Day opened the back door, where he was met by Ben and his partner.

PC Day said that the officers “Wanted to come and speak to you and see what the shouting.”

Ben considered that the presence of the officers was unnecessary and replied “Well, I don’t want to speak to you.” His partner said that there had been an argument and that she wanted Ben to leave. Ben wholeheartedly agreed, telling the Officers “Which I am doing when I’ve got my stuff.”

Nevertheless , PC Day stepped into the house, uninvited, and referred to the “shouting and screaming” (although this was certainly no longer ongoing).

Whilst Ben’s partner went upstairs, PC Hassan pushed my client into the front room (placing his right hand upon Ben’s chest) and was followed by PC Day.

Ben walked into the kitchen, where he again said that he would collect his stuff and go, to which PC Hassan replied “That’s sound”.

Ben made it clear that he just wanted to “Get out of this situation” and “Get my stuff and go.” PC Day said “Right, well get your stuff and go and we’ll supervise it.”

But then – without warning – PC Hassan then grabbed Ben’s left arm, announcing that he was unhappy with his behaviour.

Maintaining a firm grip on Ben’s arm, PC Hassan then pushed Ben out of the kitchen and back into the living room.

PC Hassan now announced that Ben was under arrest for “Breach of the Peace” and simultaneously applied a handcuff to his left wrist, whilst PC Day took hold of Ben’s right wrist. PC Hassan told Ben to put his hands behind his back.

Ben was bewildered at the Officers’ unnecessary force, and sought to remonstrate verbally, but without any physical resistance.

However, his complaints fell on deaf ears, as without warning, and whilst Ben was talking to PC Hassan, PC Day sought to pull Ben to the ground – but lost his footing/grip as he did so, causing both he and my client to fall towards the floor. Ben was shocked, but managed to steady himself and stood back up.

Unfortunately, his shock was only just beginning, as Ben then felt a blow to his face from PC Hassan and was then grappled by multiple officers. Ben attempted to defend himself from this assault by pulling his arms free, and shaking the officers off, but was unsuccessful. The officers delivered multiple blows to Ben’s face and body and forced him back against the wall, and then onto the floor in the corner of the room.

In effect, Ben had been ‘mobbed’ by the officers, the two male officers having been joined by one of their female colleagues. He was completely overwhelmed.

Whilst Ben was lying on his front on the floor, with other officers holding down his body, PC Day then gripped Ben’s neck, pushed his face into the carpet and sprayed him in the face with CS gas from ‘point blank’ range. Ben was in agony and struggled to breathe.

This type of ‘spay-painting’ of an already subdued victim is a sadly common feature of this type of Police brutality case, in my experience – irrespective of sex or age.

Ben’s ordeal had not finished there; PC Day now punched him in the face and PC Hassan delivered further blows with his hands to Ben’s back, all whilst Ben was being held face- down on the floor.

Ben’s arms were then taken hold of and he was handcuffed to the rear whilst still on the floor, with multiple officers applying pressure to various parts of his body, including his torso and legs.

Ben was immediately aware of significant pain and discomfort in his face and body from the blows, and of burning sensations to his face and in his mouth and blood coming from his mouth. He was also struggling to breathe and genuinely feared that he might die. Extremely frightened, Ben called out for an ambulance , begging the officers with the words “I’ll do whatever you want.”

Ben was then marched out of the house, the prisoner of the Officers, and placed in a van. Before being taken to Custody, however, Ben had to first be transported to hospital for the injuries which the Officers had inflicted upon him to be ‘patched up’, and there he underwent a facial x-ray and it was noted that he had a loose tooth, which subsequently fell out.

To quite literally add insult to injury, whilst at the hospital, Ben was further arrested for the alleged offence of assaulting the three Police Officers who had in fact assaulted him. Again, this is another sadly typical feature of such cases – that the innocent victim of Police violence faces charges that could result in his criminalisation and imprisonment, all for the ‘crime’ of having been beaten up by the Officers in the first place, as if they feel such charges now need to be laid to justify the level of force they have used.

Thereafter, Ben was taken to a local Police Station, where he was processed and incarcerated.

Early the following morning, Ben was interviewed under caution and then yet further arrested for assault with the intention of resisting arrest. Once again, I view this as the Police trying to bury their own wrongdoing in a shallow grave of false charges, showering their victim with the ‘dirt’ of criminal offences. This is a sadly common tactic by the Police, and I can think of many occasions when it has been utilised by GMP in particular.

Ben was eventually released ‘under investigation’ after a period of 14 hours in custody.

Even this was not the end of his ordeal; some six months later, in February 2020, a Postal Requisition was sent to Ben charging him with the following offences –

a. Assaulting PC Day thereby occasioning him actual bodily harm contrary to Section 47 of the Offences Against the Person Act 1986.

b. Assaulting by beating PC Prudence, an Emergency Worker, namely a Police Officer, acting in the exercise of the functions of such a worker, contrary to Section 39 of the Criminal Justice Act and Section 1 of the Assault on Emergency Workers (offences) Act 2018.

c. Assaulting PC Hassan with intent to resist or prevent the lawful apprehension or detainer of himself, contrary to Section 38 of the Offences Against the Person Act 1861.

Ben of course pleaded not guilty to these trumped-up charges, but had them and hence the real prospect of being wrongly convicted and being sent to prison hanging over him for well over a year, all against the stressful backdrop of the Covid pandemic and our national lockdowns, until the case was eventually listed for trial in June 2021 at Manchester Crown Court (a trial actually conducted at the Lowry theatre, owing to the continued restrictions of the pandemic). The stress which Ben felt at the thought of imprisonment was made all the worse by the fact that in the interim, he and his partner had had a baby girl and Ben was tormented at the thought of being separated from his daughter by incarceration. All of this played havoc with Ben’s mental health, causing him to become extremely anxious and withdrawn, and devastating his faith in the inherent justice of ‘the system’ and the Police in particular.

Then, at Court, the Crown Prosecution Service chose to offer no evidence and Ben was found not guilty on all three counts.

That decision indicates the objective weakness of the evidence against my client – the incident was caught in detail on multiple officers’ body cameras and clearly the CPS lawyers had realised that they were on a hiding to nothing pursuing it.

Why had Ben been charged in the first place and had to wait all this time for his innocence to be secured? As I have said above, I strongly feel that the decision to charge was, perversely but precisely, because of the level of force the Police had used against him.

It might now have been hoped that when I presented a civil claim for compensation to GMP on behalf of Ben, that they would see sense and do the right thing; but instead, they denied liability, giving us no choice but to issue County Court proceedings against the Chief Constable of Greater Manchester Police, which were met with an apparently robust defence.

GMP failed to take this further opportunity to admit their culpability, and instead threw buckets of time and money at this case, apparently determined to bring all resources to bear to deny Ben’s entitlement to civil redress for the wrongs he had suffered, including serving statements from all the officers involved and fighting the case almost all the way to trial.

Ultimately, my determination and Ben’s courage in pursuing the case, saw him through to victory and GMP cracked in the ‘home straight’ a few months before trial, agreeing to pay Ben £30,000 damages plus his legal costs (which will be substantial).

I would like to think that GMP and its officers will learn a valuable lesson from this case, and curb future practices of attempting to hide Police brutality and wrongful arrests behind the smokescreen of meritless prosecutions… but like someone who’s just been sprayed with CS gas at point-blank range, I won’t be holding my breath.

My client’s name has been changed.

The Enemy Within: Police Sexual Harassment of Domestic Violence Victims

No matter how often we read about it in the news today, the form of Police corruption which probably has the greatest power to shock us is that of the Officer who seeks to sexually exploit victims of crime, malevolently targeting women who have suffered domestic violence.

There is something particularly sinister about this form of ‘toxic masculinity’, for the Officers who perpetrate this behaviour are exploiting the Police vantage point of intimate observation into the lives of people who have called for help in a moment of crisis, for their own sexual gratification. Such an Officer is turning the special powers of protection with which he has been trusted, into those of predation.

One person who avoided becoming the physical victim of such an Officer, but who was still emotionally scarred by the experience was my client ‘Julia’.

Between 2014-19, Julia was in a physically and emotionally abusive relationship with a male partner. She was obliged to contact Cambridgeshire Police for help on multiple occasions and ultimately secured a Non-Molestation Order against her (now ex) partner. Notwithstanding this Non-Molestation Order, Julia’s ex-partner continued to harass, threaten and intimidate her.

In April 2020, Julia received message on social media from a ‘Mike Latty’ asking her “Hey, how are you x”. Julia had no idea who ‘Mike Latty’ was and did not respond.

A few weeks later, a terrifying incident occurred when Julia became aware of her ex-partner attempting to force entry to her home. She made an emergency call to the Police and the following information about her was shared over the Police radio –

“It’s [address provided]. We’ve had a call from [name provided] at that location reporting that a male by the name of….bear with me, [name provided] is at the property trying to bang the door down….. Apparently there was a non-molestation order in place, but that has run out and now he’s trying to get into the house. […] we had a report saying that he is armed with a weapon, a blade. He is saying he has a knife although no one has seen the knife at this time. […]

Response Officers then attended Julia’s home, but by the time they arrived, her ex-partner had left the scene.

Shortly after this event, Julia updated her profile to state that her ex-partner had tried to break into her home. She did so in fear of what her ex-partner might do next (knowing that he had not been arrested) and so that there was record of this, should the worst of her fears materialise.

Several hours later, Julia received a second, unsolicited message from ‘Mike Latty’, which directly referred to her home address.

Julia was shocked, and confused as to who this individual was. Indeed, initially, she suspected that ‘Mike Latty’ was in fact her ex-partner, as he had previously tried to contact her using a fake profile.

When she cautiously replied to the message, asking how the sender knew her address, she received the following response – “Saw your status – heard the job. Don’t worry obviously won’t say x”.

From the content of this message, Julia began to (correctly) suspect that ‘Mike Latty’ was a Police Officer. ‘Mike’ messaged asking Julia if she was okay. She replied that she was scared and upset and disclosed to ‘Mike’’ that she had a Non-Molestation Order against her ex-partner which he had breached multiple times, and that she was now in the process of obtaining another Non-Molestation Order.

‘Mike Latty’ continued to engage with Julia through, asking her details about her life and signing off the majority of his messages with the kiss symbol ‘x’.

Furthermore, ‘Mike’ paid Julia various compliments, including the following-

“It’s weird I’ve always found if you get an average looking couple, no problems. Yet a really attractive girl will either be with or be having problems with an ex that’s an arseholes xx”

“Wow. So as well as being ridiculously attractive you also seem pretty cool and clearly smart”.

“At least you know you’ll dead easy get another fella if you haven’t already”

All in all, some 38 messages were exchanged between ‘Mike Latty’ and Julia over the course of 2 days – with the majority of these messages coming from ‘Mike’ and Julia responding to less and less of them, as she became more disturbed and upset by this unsolicited contact from a stranger, and the ulterior motive behind his apparent care and concern dawned upon her. During these messages, ‘Mike’ had provided his personal mobile number and encouraged Julia to contact him.

Julia, already scared and vulnerable by reason of her ex-partner’s campaign against her, came to the horrible realisation that a Police Officer was apparently now trying to prey upon her as well. She knew that his sending these messages was very wrong and she turned to her mother for help.

Around a week later, two Police Officers attended at Julia’s home address to discuss the incident involving her ex-partner.

During this attendance, Julia told the Officers that she had received personal messages from a person she believed was a Police Officer who had heard the incident she had reported over the radio. She explained how she had come to realise that the Officer was preying upon her vulnerability at that time, and then showed the Officers the messages that she had received. From the Officers’ reaction, Julia formed an immediate impression that ‘Mike Latty’ was known to them. As it would transpire, he was, indeed, Police Constable Mike Latimer of Cambridgeshire Constabulary.

Julia had been put into a terrible position by reason of the Police Officer’s attempted exploitation of her. She felt a mix of emotions in making the report – guilt knowing that her actions could lead to the Officer being dismissed; insecurity that Cambridgeshire Police as an organisation might now ‘close ranks’ against her, and fail to properly protect her from her ex-partner, given that she was now a ‘complainant’ against one of their brother Officers; and, worst of all, fear that PC Latimer might seek retribution against her for her actions.

A misconduct investigation was launched by the Independent Office of Police Conduct (IOPC) although, shockingly, PC Latimer was allowed to withhold his personal phone and deleted information held on his work phone. During the course of the investigation, Julia learned that she was only one of at least three vulnerable women whom PC Latimer had sought to exploit. She felt very angry about what had been done to her and these other women.

Following the IOPC investigation, it was recommended that PC Latimer face misconduct proceedings, in response to which he promptly resigned from the Force.

A misconduct panel subsequently concluded that had PC Latimer not resigned, he would have been dismissed for gross misconduct. He was placed upon the Police “barred list”, meaning he can never again work for the Police service in any capacity, but, disappointingly in my opinion, escaped criminal prosecution.

Julia’s trust, confidence and faith in the Police significantly deteriorated by reason of the Officer’s exploitative actions. She no longer felt able to report anything to the Police, other than the gravest emergency situations.

After all, what had happened when she turned to the Police on the night when her violent ex-partner attempted to break into her home, possibly intending to do her terrible harm? The man had not been arrested, and instead her emergency call had, sickeningly, been treated as if it were a ‘lonely heart’ advert, or a profile on a dating website.

Already suffering from anxiety and depression, Julia’s lack of trust in authorities and other people generally became heightened to a marked degree, causing her to become ever more isolated and vulnerable.

The Officer’s selfish and sickening actions towards Julia were a gross abuse of the public trust placed in him, and the harm that he could potentially have caused went far beyond the emotional damage that would have been caused to Julia had his ‘grooming’ of her succeeded; in single-handedly turning the Police into a source of distress rather than comfort for Julia, ‘Mike Latty’ was callously stripping from her a level of protection whose loss might potentially cost her her life if, because of his sordid and shocking behaviour, she hesitated in the future to call for help when she needed it.

The seriousness of this form of Police ‘sexploitation’ simply cannot be underestimated.

On Julia’s behalf I pursued a claim against the Cambridgeshire Police for Harassment, Misfeasance in Public Office and Breach of the Data Protection Act.

I am pleased to confirm that I was able to negotiate a significant settlement for Julia, in the form of £14,500 damages, plus her legal costs, from Cambridgeshire Constabulary.

Actions such as this, brought by victims of Police harassment, exploitation, and grooming, are essential in order to counter-act the harm that has been caused to them, redressing the balance of power as the victim becomes the agent of accountability.

Civil claims for compensation are therefore a crucial prong of attack against this most insidious form of abuse of power, with the modern determination of Professional Standards Units to drive the Officers who commit this form of misconduct out of Policing being another, and increased media scrutiny and attention to these cases being a third.

However, it is essential that we keep the pressure up on all three of these fronts and do not allow any relapse into the old Policing culture of semi-toleration of this form of behaviour by Officers, as it is quite clear that despite all the energy being expended in fighting this problem in multiple ways, there remain all too many ‘enemies within’ amongst the ranks of our Police Forces.

My client’s name has been changed.

What I Can Do For You (And What I Can’t)

Often one of the first things that clients who have suffered wrongs at the hands of the Police will say to me, is that they are in pursuit of justice for what happened to them, and that it is “not about the money”.

Whilst I absolutely understand and applaud that sentiment, one of the first things that I will say in response is that as far as the civil courts of this country are concerned, it is about the money. Money is what makes the world of civil justice go round. A claim for loss of your liberty, for trespass to your person or to your property will be treated by the County Court or High Court as ultimately an exercise in assessing which party must pay the other damages and/or costs, monetary restitution as assessed within the parameters of the case law which has been set by the judiciary of England & Wales over the decades.

When the ‘right amount of money’ is on the table, I have to advise you to take it, because the law does not, in fact, want people to ‘have their day in Court’ and penalises those who turn down what the Judge deems to have been the right amount of money offered at an earlier stage, by making even a winning Claimant pay the losing Defendant’s legal costs – if at Court the Claimant’s final award of damages is not greater than an earlier settlement offer made by the Defendant.

In some respects, this is exactly as it should be, of course – because the Court cannot turn back the clock and all that can be done in a civil context for injuries, losses and other wrongs committed against a person, no matter how severe, is to award monetary damages which the Claimant can then put towards future financial security, therapy/ rehabilitation and, frankly, the kind of pleasures and amenities of life that can be bought with money, so as to balance out the previous harm.

To be entirely clear: whilst I fully appreciate the strength of your feeling and understand that your desire for justice and accountability from the Police is not primarily about money, the fact is that we have to operate within the rules of the civil court system which have been set, and with those legal tools which are available to us. The only legal remedy the Court can ultimately provide is financial compensation; the civil courts cannot order criminal charges to be brought against the Police Officers involved, nor make disciplinary findings against them, nor order the Chief Constable to fire them. A judge cannot even order the Police to apologise to you, no matter how heinous the Judge concluded their actions against you were.

So, I have to advise you in terms of money (damages and legal costs) and that is all that I can promise to recover for you using the mechanisms of the Court, if we win.

But that isn’t actually the end of the story, because although those are the tools and rules that we have, there are, as an indirect but nevertheless potent part of the process, other moral goods which can be achieved through bringing a civil claim, which do get us closer to that unquantifiable sense of justice that I know is at the heart of most people’s motivation in this matter.

It’s Not About The Money: The Other Benefits of Bringing a Civil Claim

Acknowledgment: Although no Defendant can be ordered to apologise, it is not unusual for a formal apology to be negotiable as part and parcel of a financial settlement, and precisely because of the money claim which not only gives you a voice the Defendant has to listen to – it also gives the Defendant an incentive to satisfy you emotionally so as to avoid mounting legal costs (its own as well as yours).

Understanding: In response to a civil claim, the Defendant has to hand over all relevant pieces of documentary evidence for you and your lawyer to review. This enables you to gain understanding into the motivations of the Police and the reasons why they acted towards you in the way you did. You are, in effect, investigating them, and searching through Police documents – reversing the interrogatory process to which you were probably subject if you were arrested.

Publicity: There is no ‘confidentiality clause’ inherent in either a negotiated settlement or a Court judgment. The greater the monetary award made in your favour, the greater publicity your case is likely to attract, if you then go on to share your story in the media. Media scrutiny generated by successful claims against the Police is one of the best ways to make those organisations change for the better and to help ensure that the same thing doesn’t happen to other people in the future. I am proud to play my part in that process through this very blog, in which each week, with the gracious permission of my clients, I am able to highlight Police wrongdoing, reinforce the public’s knowledge of their civil rights and make my clients’ voices heard.

Accountability: Police Forces do not have a bottomless pit of money to allow them to constantly ‘buy off’ claims. The public scrutiny generated by a successful claim accompanied by a sizeable financial settlement (including the legal costs of the claim) create external and internal pressure on the Police that can lead to cultural change, the curbing of bad behaviour and unlawful practices and the tightening of Police vetting procedures, so as to reduce the number of rogue officers who are costing the Force ‘an arm and a leg.’

Privacy: A successful money claim, which may be accompanied by an admission of liability or Court judgment in your favour, would greatly assist with any subsequent application made to the Criminal Records Office for deletion of the data relating to your wrongful arrest and the (literal and metaphorical) removal of your ‘thumbprint’ from the criminal justice database.

Empowerment: A claim for damages is a very different way to access justice than through the criminal courts – in which you are either the Defendant responding to a case brought against you or a witness in a case brought against, say, an abusive Police Officer, but which case is controlled by a third party (the Crown Prosecution Service) rather than by you and your lawyers. Likewise, in the Police misconduct system, even as an active ‘complainant’ you do not have direct access to the levers of the system or the evidential material, and you are often reduced to the role of a ‘bystander’, frozen out of key decisions or kept in the dark about crucial evidence. In a civil claim, however, you are the agent of your own justice: in bringing the claim you are calling the shots and the Defendant must respond to you, explain its actions, hand over all relevant evidence and answer to Court orders and directions. The Defendant must listen to you, whether it wants to or not. Although it can be stressful, the experience of collaborating on a hard-fought case with your lawyer and winning can also be an immensely rewarding and cathartic one in and of itself, bringing a great sense of personal satisfaction and empowerment.

Monetary awards, in terms of damages and costs, are the sinews of our civil law; they make the world of the Courts go round, just as muscles move the body. Without such systems, the body could not function – but now step back and look at the bigger picture. Muscles and money are both just mechanisms in a far greater and less easily defined whole. Whilst one system powers the human body, the other powers democratic justice.

Section 19 of PACE does not give Police power to stop you filming them

It is not illegal to record your interaction with a Police Officer in a public place on a mobile phone; indeed, as I have pointed out before, the ubiquity of mobile recording devices in modern society is a major reason why Police accountability for wrongdoing is increasing.

(An important caveat to the above is that I am generally assuming that the interaction you are filming is one which has been initiated either by the officer approaching you or the behaviour of the officer towards a third party in your presence. If you initiate the interaction for the purposes of trying to get a rise out of officers and film their reaction, that is not something which I morally condone and indeed you might be treading a fine line in such behaviour between legality and a public order offence).

Mobile phones can be shields of our civil rights and Little Brother’s eyes upon Big Brother, both at once; new technology to help preserve age-old rights to liberty and integrity of person.

They are the mirrors of the body cameras which Police Officers now themselves ubiquitously wear – but in this case, you crucially control the ‘on’ and ‘off’ buttons!

Plenty of scandalous cases reveal that Officers themselves cannot be trusted to police their own recordings – either not turning their cameras on in the first place, or seeking to delete incriminating footage.

In this context, it is important to highlight people’s rights in the face of what, experience tells me, is an increasing trend of Officers snatching phones and even arresting people who are filming them, their thuggish behaviour given a cynical veneer of legality by manipulation of the law, or a false conflation of powers.

There is nothing honest or legitimate in officers trying to stop people simply filming them. The officers’ motivations are almost always out of a desire to avoid scrutiny, or negate evidence that could impact on their latter ability to control the narrative of an arrest, stop-search or other potentially adverse encounter with the public.

As there is no law to stop the public from filming them in public, Police Officers with ill-intent or too much ego, or sometimes a lack of basic understanding, try to twist such a power out of a law designed to allow the seizure of evidence of crime – this being Section 19 of the Police & Criminal Evidence Act (PACE).

A classic example of this, is a case in which I currently act. Because it is at an early stage, I will only provide an outline of the key details without identifying either my client or the Force in question; but in a way these generalities are appropriate, because this is the type of ‘play’ which Officers up and down the country are regularly making – or attempting to make.

In June 2023 my client, a law-abiding woman of entirely good character, was at home, when she saw her sister being arrested by the Police in the road outside, following her sister having been involved in a dispute with a neighbour.

My client went outside to investigate and began recording events on her phone, whilst keeping her distance from the Officers.

Suddenly and without warning, a male Police Officer grabbed my client’s left wrist and left upper arm and said “I’m seizing that phone under Section 19 of PACE, I believe its got evidence of an offence, pass me the phone”.

Shocked, my client resisted this ‘Police mugging’, whereupon the Officer told her that she was “under arrest for resisting arrest”.

Other male and female Officers now ‘piled in’ and my client was forcefully handcuffed to the rear, whilst being forced face-down onto the bonnet of a Police car, and her mobile phone was wrenched from her grip.

A bystander asked if filming in public was not allowed, to which one of the male Officers chillingly replied, “We seize any mobile device that’s being used to record, it’s capturing evidence, an offence”. My client quite reasonably responded to this by telling the first Officer that she could have sent him the video, pointing out “All you had to do was ask”.

My client was then escorted to a Police carrier van, where the first Officer asked her if she understood why she had been arrested. My client told him that she did not at all understand, and again asserted that if the Officer wanted her phone footage, he could have just asked for it. The Officer threateningly replied “If you’re going to be difficult, I’ll take you to Custody”.

Unsurprisingly, however (because in reality, no offence had been committed), my client was now advised that she was being de-arrested and her handcuffs were removed.

However, when my client asked for her phone back, the Officer who had arrested her replied “It’s ours now” and said that she might get it back in six months. The Officer showed no compassion or concern at all for the disruption this would cause to my client’s work and personal life.

It was not until the following month, and after my client had proactively raised a number of complaints, that she was ‘allowed’ to come and collect her phone from a local Police Station.

Upon collection of the phone, my client noted that she had over 30 voice messages, one of which was from a local Walk-in-Centre where she had attended for treatment following her being manhandled by the Officers as described above. The message was now several days old. When my client belatedly made contact, she was advised that following a review of an x-ray which had been taken of her wrist and which had initially been thought to be clear, a fracture had in fact been identified and she now needed to go to hospital for further advice.

It will be noted that the Officers in this incident claimed the power to do what they wanted to do to my client’s person and property under Section 19 of PACE; a law which in my opinion is being as badly twisted by bully-boy Officers as are the limbs of those they unlawfully arrest whilst purporting to rely upon it.

Section 19 PACE actually provides as follows-

19 General power of seizure etc.

(1)The powers conferred by subsections (2), (3) and (4) below are exercisable by a constable who is lawfully on any premises.

(2)The constable may seize anything which is on the premises if he has reasonable grounds for believing—

(a)that it has been obtained in consequence of the commission of an offence; and

(b)that it is necessary to seize it in order to prevent it being concealed, lost, damaged, altered or destroyed.

(3)The constable may seize anything which is on the premises if he has reasonable grounds for believing—

(a)that it is evidence in relation to an offence which he is investigating or any other offence; and

(b)that it is necessary to seize it in order to prevent the evidence being concealed, lost, altered or destroyed.

(4)The constable may require any information which is [stored in any electronic form] and is accessible from the premises to be produced in a form in which it can be taken away and in which it is visible and legible [or from which it can readily be produced in a visible and legible form] if he has reasonable grounds for believing—

(a)that—

(i)it is evidence in relation to an offence which he is investigating or any other offence; or

(ii)it has been obtained in consequence of the commission of an offence; and

(b)that it is necessary to do so in order to prevent it being concealed, lost, tampered with or destroyed.

Section 19 is in a part of PACE which is specifically designated “Powers of Entry, Search & Seizure” and the proceeding sections are all about Police powers of entry into premises either with or without search warrants, in certain defined circumstances. It is clearly therefore a piece of legislation (drafted in 1983/4 let us not forget) which is designed to allow Officers investigating a crime to gather evidence of the crime, or the presumed proceeds of crime (such as stolen goods) whilst they are searching premises.

“Section 19” therefore does not give Police Officers the power to confiscate mobile phones in order to prevent filming. It was never intended to be used in this way, and Officers purporting to use it in this manner are doing so illegally. This becomes even clearer when the wording which I have highlighted in the legislation, above, is analysed-

“Exercisable by a Constable who is lawfully on any premises” – Although ‘premises’ is a word which is not necessarily confined in its meaning to ‘indoors’- it can include a place in the open air – that place must be a distinct piece of land in single occupation/ ownership. The middle of the street (where my client’s encounter with the Police took place) can clearly not be defined as “premises.” If you are on a public highway, you are not “on premises” and thus Section 19 is irrelevant and inapplicable.

Even if the encounter took place “on premises”, the Constable can still only seize “evidence in relation to an offence.” Filming in public is not itself an offence. Filming an officer talking to you is not an offence. Filming an officer searching or arresting somebody else is also not an offence.

Even if a Constable can clear the above statutory hurdles, and does have legitimate grounds for believing that an offence has been ‘captured’ on your mobile phone, and you and he are currently “on premises” where Section 19 is exercisable, note the crucial caveat – “that it is necessary to seize it in order to prevent the evidence being concealed, lost, altered or destroyed.” In encounters of this nature, the person recording the Police is doing so precisely in order to preserve a record of what is happening, and it is nonsense to assert that there is an imminent danger of that evidence being destroyed. Indeed, what the Police really want to do through their intervention in this manner is not to preserve existing evidence, but to prevent the accumulation of further evidence – for the first thing they will do is to switch off the phone. They know this, and so do we, and it is a travesty of the law for them to pretend otherwise. Even if the Officer genuinely wanted to see, rather than stop, the recording – then the correct and lawful first port of call is simply to ask the person filming to send the officer a copy of the recording, as indeed my client pointed out to the Police in the incident described above “All you had to do was ask…”

Mobile phones are an intrinsic, even intimate, part of our lives today – as crucial to the person of the modern day as the wallet, diary, post-box, photo album, computer, and home and work landline phones were to people of the recent past; indeed, the phone is quite literally a device which is all of those things rolled into one!

It is quite correct in my opinion, for teachers to ban mobile phones from the classroom, and confiscate them from school pupils if they find them. What is totally wrong is for Police Officers to treat the world like a classroom they rule over and our personal privacy and property as fair game for the ‘adults’ to control. We are not children, and they are certainly not our teachers.

So for a start, let’s teach them what Section 19 of PACE actually says.

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To Convict A Copper?

A lot of attention was grabbed recently by Channel 4’s ‘fly on the wall’ documentary series, “To Catch A Copper”, which followed the trials and tribulations of one of our country’s Professional Standards Departments – in this case that of Avon & Somerset Police.

‘Catching a copper’ can be hard enough, given the sclerotic state of many PSD units, but what is even harder is getting the criminal conviction of a serving Police officer at trial in the Magistrates or Crown Court. A report in the Mirror newspaper this month highlighted that 158 Police Officers/ Police Staff were convicted of criminal offences in the 12 months to April 2023, but in my opinion this is really only the tip of the iceberg – as it remains far more difficult than it should be to get the Courts to convict a criminal in uniform, as opposed to one in civilian dress.

A case in point is that of PC Alan Kirkwood of Lincolnshire Police, who just this month walked free from Nottingham Crown Court, despite admitting kicking a defenceless man in the face. To make the situation even worse, the man he kicked was not the man he was attempting to apprehend – but in fact a ‘Good Samaritan’ who had come to PC Kirkwood’s aid, as the officer struggled with two suspected robbers, and who for his effort got a boot in the face and a broken nose.

PC Kirkwood’s own body worn camera recorded the Officer – apparently mistaking his heroic helper for one of the suspects – training his taser on the man, ordering him to lie down on the ground and then, quite deliberately and apparently vindictively, kicking the shocked but completely compliant man in the face. In his defence, the Officer claimed that the kick was a “distraction strike” designed to protect himself and gain “compliance.”

PC Kirkwood it seems to me, had taken it upon himself to be judge, jury and executioner – issuing with his boot some ‘summary justice’ to the man he thought was a robber; this was a gross distortion and abuse of his duty as a Police Officer, but the real Judge presiding over Kirkwood’s trial for Actual Bodily Harm seemed to want to give the Officer a medal rather than sanction him for this. After the Jury delivered its ‘not guilty’ verdict, Judge James Sampson declared-

“This [prosecution] was never going to not fail and is a decision which proves a failure to understand the instruction of an English jury by asking them to convict a man of exemplary character with 43 years serving in the police or the military acting in good faith and doing his public duty but who made a mistake. It is simply not fair play.”

Thus, do experienced Judges seem to turn into gushing cheerleaders when it comes to Police Defendants, and the attitude of the Judge naturally has a very strong influence upon the Juries hearing these cases of Police violence. This is not at all an unusual outcome: see my blog post about a case in which the Police Officer who drove his car over a man’s head was ruled to have ‘no case to answer’ at Leicester Crown Court in 2019.

Judicial sympathy for Police Officers in these cases is only half of the story, however. Also upsetting the scales of justice, in my opinion, is the attitude of the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) which often seems ‘torn’ when it makes a decision to prosecute one of its criminal justice system colleagues in this way, resulting in half-hearted or lukewarm prosecutions of the Officer. This can lead to some strange decisions being made: notably, in the case of PC Kirkwood, the man who he assaulted was not called to give evidence, thus depriving the Jury of seeing and hearing the other half of the human story in this case – that of the man of good character who bravely helped a Police officer, only to become the victim of the Officer’s unprovoked attack. In this way, the victim was effectively rendered faceless, and the Jury’s focus and sympathy was naturally concentrated upon the long- serving ‘Copper’ in front of them.

Such attitudes are long- ingrained in our judiciary and amongst Crown prosecutors, and change will take a long time, but the good news is that we have other mechanisms for justice in such cases, principally the ability to sue the Police for assault and battery in the Civil courts of our country. This is what I did on behalf of the victim in the Nottingham case I referred to earlier, at the conclusion of which the Chief Constable and his officer were found to very much have a ‘case to answer’, in terms of significant damages.

Because in the civil compensation claims in which I specialize, you and I are the prosecutors.

£8,000 Damages After Court Summons goes to Wrong Address

The purpose behind the Constables Protection Act of 1750 is one which carries the ring of common-sense down the centuries; that Police Officers should not be liable for enforcing an arrest warrant which has been issued by the Court, in circumstances where they are only acting as agents of a judicial direction, rather than making their own decision.

However, the Constables of the 18^th century did not also have responsibility for administering that vast databank of personal records known as the Police National Computer (PNC) and nowadays, many times that the Police invoke the “Constables Protection Act” to avoid liability in civil claims they are doing so notwithstanding the fact that it was a Police error involving use of the PNC which caused the warrant to be wrongly issued in the first place. A Constables Protection “Act” indeed, we might say.

Thus do the Police shamelessly hide behind the archaic Act to avoid liability for their very modern mistake: but fortunately, there are ways around this, as Gwent Police found out when I pursued a claim against them on behalf of my client Claudia.

In September 2022, Claudia was involved in a road traffic accident, which was attended by Officers of Gwent Police. Those Officers determined that she should be subject to a roadside breath test to establish whether she was in charge of a motor vehicle whilst over the prescribed alcohol limit. Regrettably, she failed that test.

Claudia was then arrested and escorted to hospital to have a blood sample taken for the further investigation of this offence. After the blood sample was taken, she was de-arrested and allowed to leave.

Upon arrest, a police officer had asked Claudia for her home address, which she provided. The police officer accordingly used this address in paperwork relating to the driving offence.

Following analysis of Claudia’s blood sample, a Postal Charge and Requisition was sent to her in January 2023. The Postal Charge stated that Claudia was required to attend her local Magistrates Court later that month, and that the court might issue a warrant for her arrest if she were not to attend.

Unfortunately, the summons was sent not to Claudia’s current address, despite her having provided this to the Police, but to her old residential address, which appeared on the PNC and had not been updated.

Furthermore, the member of Police staff who prepared the Postal Charge had failed to identify the discrepancy between the address on the Police National Computer and the correct address which appeared on other electronic systems.

Naturally, Claudia did not attend Court as required and accordingly, the Court issued a warrant for her arrest. The fact that the Police had, all along, had Claudia’s correct address was evident from the fact that it was to her current address that the Police came to arrest her one evening in February. Claudia received a phone call advising that the Police wanted to speak to her about the road traffic accident, but the officer she spoke to gave no warning of their true purpose in coming to her house, and thus she suffered the shock and shame of being unexpectedly arrested in front of her 14-year-old daughter and her partner.

Claudia was detained in Police custody for over 14 hours before being taken to the Magistrates Court in handcuffs and further detained in the Court cells. On being brought before the Magistrates, Claudia pleaded guilty to the driving offence, as she would have done in response to the Postal Summons, had she received it. She was already on medication owing to a history of anxiety and depression, and this was considerably inflamed by her traumatic experience of Police arrest as a ‘wanted’ person and the long hours she spent in custody. She felt stigmatised by her experience, became socially withdrawn and suffered from over-eating.

When I first presented a claim on Claudia’s behalf, Gwent Police denied liability and as expected, invoked the Constables Protection Act, arguing that they thereby had immunity against any legal suit for false imprisonment (notwithstanding their undeniable moral culpability for the obvious mistake they had committed). The arrest and detention were “at the behest of the court”, despite the admitted ‘human error’ by Police staff. It was further denied that the Police owed Claudia any duty of care in negligence for their error.

Fortunately, there were other avenues of attack in which I was well versed, and I was able to raise a compelling argument that the Police were liable for Claudia’s loss of liberty as a result of their breaching of the Data Protection Act 2018. Thus, could a defence almost 300 years old be legitimately outflanked by legislation which more accurately reflects the complexities of modern law enforcement.

After I threatened to issue Court proceedings, Gwent Police quickly came to the negotiating table and after initially offering £3,000, ultimately settled Claudia’s claim for £8,000 damages plus legal costs.

‘School-boy’ errors such as using the wrong address should be confined to the classroom, and there is no excuse for them in today’s data-rich modern era, particularly when people’s liberty, privacy, family life and mental health are at stake.

My client’s name has been changed.

Cards On The Table: The Police Duty of Disclosure (Part 2)

This is the second of a two-part blog post by my colleague and fellow solicitor John Hagan. Read part one here.

This week, in the concluding part of my blog post addressing the remedies for Police failure to disclose documentary evidence in civil claims, I will explain how the rules governing ‘Specific Disclosure’ have been brought to bear against a Police Force which failed to conduct a thorough search of its records, apparently so that it could advance a defence based on the absence of sufficient evidence…

Where a party feels that the other has not provided full disclosure of documents after Court proceedings have been commenced, a mechanism exists in the Court rules to compel that disclosure, as set out in Civil Procedure Rule 31.12–

Specific disclosure or inspection

31.12

(1) The court may make an order for specific disclosure or specific inspection.

(2) An order for specific disclosure is an order that a party must do one or more of the following things –

(a) disclose documents or classes of documents specified in the order;

(b) carry out a search to the extent stated in the order;

(c) disclose any documents located as a result of that search.

The most serious breach of disclosure obligations with which I am presently dealing, is one which has been committed by a Police Force in regards to a claim brought by a woman who, whilst she was a suspect under investigation for a fraud offence, was groomed and impregnated by the very Officer who had arrested her.

As the events in question took place in 2004, the initial Police response to the claim was that they were ‘prejudiced’ in defending it because of the passage of time and hence, they claimed, an inability to determine the proper facts.

However, although my client’s legal claim was only brought in recent years, the fact is that she did bring a complaint about what had happened almost 20 years ago, and the matter had, at the time, been the subject of an investigation by the Force’s Professional Standards Department. It being a different era then, although my client’s complaint was upheld, the Officer – who in the present day would probably face a criminal prosecution for misconduct in public office for his sexual exploitation of my vulnerable client – in fact faced no criminal or disciplinary sanction other than a “Don’t do it again, lad” type of formal warning.

My client’s present claim against the Police for misfeasance in public office is at this stage disputed by them on a number of grounds – including an argument about how many times the Officer had sexual relations with my client (he claimed it was only once) and whether or not he was on duty at the time.

The fact that he is the father of the child she subsequently gave birth to, is not in dispute however – this was confirmed by a DNA test.

Nevertheless, a legal battleground remains to be fought over, and it is therefore crucial that the parties both provide full and frank disclosure of all relevant documents – all the more so because of the passage of time since these events took place.

My client had done her best to assemble as much evidence as she could prior to commencing Court proceedings, through making a Subject Access Request (SAR) under the Data Protection Act to the Police Force in question, and also a Subject Access Request to the Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC).

In their Defence to the claim, the Police argued that they were “prejudiced in their ability to establish the facts” because of the passage of time and the fact that they only had “limited documents” about what had occurred. When this case recently reached disclosure stage, the Police produced a List of Documents (i.e a formal statement of all relevant evidence in their possession or control) which only contained four items – limited indeed one might think – but I knew that there was more than met the eye to that list.

The Police had included as a single item in their list the ‘bundle’ of documents which they had earlier provided to the Claimant in response to her Subject Access Request under the Data Protection Act. However, no attempt was made to separately identify/ itemise those documents or to offer unredacted copies of them.

Documents obtained by people making Applications to institutions under the Data Protection Act, are often significantly redacted because such a request only entitles the person to see information that is specifically about them and references to other people will be heavily edited – effectively rendering the document unusable in Court proceedings because the context of the data about Subject Access Applicant cannot be fully understood, and key evidence about other people involved in the case is hidden behind the redactions.

By way of a practical example of this – included in my client’s Subject Access Request bundle was a copy of the Complaint Reinvestigation Report relating to the material events, which had taken place following an appeal by my client to the IOPC (which in those days was known as the IPCC). Huge swathes of that report were redacted in the copy that had been provided, although it was self-evident that for the purposes of a Court claim which overlaps entirely with the subject of the complaint (i.e. the Police Officer’s sexual exploitation of my client) the entirety of the report was relevant and not just those sentences which contain my client’s name. As matters stood, however, the copy of the report provided was predominantly ‘blanked out’ because, of course, its subject was not really my client – it was the conduct of the Police Officer she had complained about. For the Police to impose such redactions on the document in response to Subject Access Request was one thing – but it was completely unacceptable in the context of the duty of open disclosure in civil Court proceedings.

The Chief Constable and his legal team appeared to have given no thought to the difference between the disclosure obligation which was owed as a party to civil proceedings and the much more limited duty which was owed to data subjects who pursue a Subject Access Request.

Yet further, it was quite clear from the documents which had been provided to my client (albeit, also in redacted form) by the IOPC in response to her separate SAR to that organisation, that not only had the Police provided incomplete civil disclosure in the form of their seeking to hide behind the heavily redacted versions of the documents released by their own SAR team (as described above), they had also failed to include in either their List of Documents or their SAR bundle, numerous other documents of relevance, the existence of which was revealed by the IOPC response.

These documents, which would manifestly be in the possession/ control of the Police if they were in the possession of the IOPC, included such obviously relevant evidence as –

The statement of the Officer who exploited my client, made in relation to her arrest (which is when she says his grooming of her began);

An “Information from member of the public” memo regarding my client’s complaint;

An “Allegation involving PC” memo also produced by the Police Force regarding my client’s complaint;

Handwritten notes taken by the Detective Sergeant who first interviewed my client in regards to her complaint;

Correspondence from the Professional Standards Department to the Officer involved, regarding the complaint;

A detailed written record of the Officer’s interview by the Professional Standards Department in regards to the complaint;

Correspondence between the Police and the IPCC;

The original Complaint Investigation Report itself.

These documents, as received from the IOPC, were inadequate for the purposes of the claim because they contain the standard SAR redactions – but the original, unredacted documents which must be in the possession/ control of the Police Force and should, therefore, have been included in their disclosure list, but were not.

And all of this brings us back to the central importance of disclosure in civil proceedings – and, specifically, the Defence advanced by the Police in this particular case: that the Claimant should not be allowed to succeed in her claim because owing to the passage of time and the ‘limited’ amount of documents available, the Police are prevented from mounting a proper Defence and a fair trial cannot take place.

In my opinion, the Police’s prejudice argument can be characterised as akin to that of a fighter claiming prejudice because he has chosen to tie one of his hands behind his back, or has blindfolded himself; I think it is clear that the Police have, in this case, wilfully failed to search for material evidence in its possession, because the ‘less’ documentary evidence there is, the more that suits their defence.

I consider this to be a cynical exploitation of the rules governing ‘time limitation’ defences and have now commenced an application for Specific Disclosure against the Police to force them to properly search, catalogue and account for all of the relevant evidence. I am as confident of success in that application as I was in the other matters discussed in Part 1 of this blog.

These then, are some of the ways, in which Defendant Police Forces can delay, hamper and obstruct claims by failing to comply with disclosure rules; by seeking to keep their cards close to their chest (…or even up their sleeve…) – but experienced actions against the Police lawyers such as myself know how to read those cards, call their bluff and win the game.

Cards On The Table: The Police Duty of Disclosure (Part 1)

This is a guest post by my colleague John Hagan, solicitor and fellow specialist in civil actions against the police.

In order to ensure a fair and efficient litigation process, and to increase the prospects of an early settlement, the Civil Procedure Rules (CPR) which govern the Courts of England and Wales, lay a heavy emphasis on a ‘cards on the table’ approach to the disclosure and sharing of evidence between parties involved in a legal dispute.

Indeed, the duty to provide the other party with relevant documentary evidence arises even before Court proceedings have been commenced.

The Practice Direction on Pre-action Conduct provides that each party, the Claimant and the Defendant, should set out concise summaries of their case to one another in correspondence and disclose “key documents relevant to the issues in dispute”, whilst the Pre-action Personal Injury protocol specifically requires that the Defendant provide with its letter of response “documents in their possession which are material to the issues between the parties, and which would be likely to be ordered to be disclosed by the court, either on an application for pre-action disclosure, or on disclosure during proceedings.” (And no charge must be made for the provision of copies of those documents)

The duty of disclosure on the parties increases further once Court proceedings have been commenced and generally the first Case Management step that will be ordered by the Court will be for the parties to carry out a search for relevant documents (documents in this sense also including audio and video recordings, as well as written records, of course) and then to provide the other party with a list of all relevant material in relation to the case that is not subject to legal professional privilege (i.e. communications between solicitor and client).

The parties are certainly not allowed to pick and chose what goes in the list simply to suit their case. The requirements for standard disclosure are laid down by CPR Part 31 as follows –

Standard disclosure – what documents are to be disclosed

31.6 Standard disclosure requires a party to disclose only–

(a) the documents on which he relies; and

(b) the documents which –

(i) adversely affect his own case;

(ii) adversely affect another party’s case; or

(iii) support another party’s case; and

Duty of search

31.7

(1) When giving standard disclosure, a party is required to make a reasonable search for documents falling within rule 31.6(b) or (c).

(2) The factors relevant in deciding the reasonableness of a search include the following –

(a) the number of documents involved;

(b) the nature and complexity of the proceedings;

(d) the significance of any document which is likely to be located during the search.

(3) Where a party has not searched for a category or class of document on the grounds that to do so would be unreasonable, he must state this in his disclosure statement and identify the category or class of document.

This duty of disclosure extends not only to documents which are physically in the possession of the party or their solicitor, but also those documents which are held by third parties but which the Claimant or Defendant has a right to obtain (such as, for example, medical records held by a person’s GP, or financial records held by their accountant).

Thus, the duty of disclosure is defined as extending to documents which are in a party’s “possession or control”.

Disclosure is therefore a crucial phase in any Court case, and without proper compliance by the parties with the rules governing disclosure, a fair trial is ultimately not possible – just as the chance of an ‘out of Court’ settlement recedes if parties are kept in the dark about crucial evidence.

Sadly, experience has taught me that, despite the considerable resources at their disposal, the Defendants in most of the cases which I handle – our country’s regional Police Forces – are frequently poor at providing full and frank disclosure of evidence in civil cases. Considering the technologies and methodologies which the Police have available to them as law enforcement agencies, we are bound to consider whether inadequate disclosure on their part is as a result of laziness, incompetence or, – more cynically – is designed as a spoiling or delaying tactic in the litigation.

Thankfully, however, there are mechanisms available by which Claimant lawyers can hold the big Policing institutions to account when it comes to breaches, or apparent breaches, of their disclosure obligations and in this two-part blog post I am going to give some examples of how this works in practice.

CPR 31.16 Pre-action Disclosure Applications.
CPR 18.1 Requests for Further Information.
CPR 31.12 ‘Specific Disclosure’ Applications

In this week’s blog I will address the first two methods.

Pre-Action Disclosure – Vanishing video footage & Missing Dog Bite Reports

In one claim against West Midlands Police, brought on behalf of an innocent student who had a Police dog set upon him, I found the Police denial of liability was inadequately accompanied by relevant documents – in particular, they had only released the body camera footage filmed by one of the many officers involved in the incident and they had not provided all of the training records, operational licence forms of dog bite reports for the animal in question.

After the Police lawyers failed to hand over this material voluntarily, I issued a pre-action application to the Court i.e a stand-alone application prior to the commencement of full blown proceedings, limited in its scope to obtaining the missing evidence.

My application was successful, and the Chief Constable was ordered to provide all of the Police dog’s relevant records, along with photographs which officers had taken of my client’s injuries. During the application process, the Police also formally confirmed that all body camera footage other than that which had been disclosed had already been deleted; which at least allowed us to rule out the possibility of being ‘surprised’ by unexpected footage later in the proceedings. Finally, West Midlands Police also had to pay my client’s legal costs incurred in bringing the application, a measure of the Court’s disapproval of their conduct.

On the back of obtaining that evidence I was able to draft and issue a comprehensive Court claim against West Midlands Police, in response to which they filed a defence reversing their pre-action position and now admitting that my client had been wrongfully detained.

A Request for Further Information Reveals ‘Incriminating’ Emails

Another case which I am currently handling involves Norfolk Constabulary and the Ministry of Justice (MOJ) itself (on behalf of the Magistrates Court). In this case my client was wrongly arrested for alleged breach of a bail condition which in fact had been rescinded at a Court hearing several weeks previously. The Police and the MOJ filed Defences effectively blaming one another for the mistake; the MOJ claimed that its staff had correctly updated the Police as to the removal of my client’s bail conditions (albeit after a delay, but prior to the day she was arrested), whilst Police denied all knowledge of this and asserted that accordingly their Officers had carried out a legitimate arrest based on the information available to them on the Police National Computer (PNC). Clearly their contradictory positions did not add up, and, after receiving their respective Defences, I therefore raised a series of Requests for Further Information under Part 18 of the Civil Procedure Rules, which provides as follows- .

Obtaining further information

18.1

(1) The court may at any time order a party to –

(a) clarify any matter which is in dispute in the proceedings; or

(b) give additional information in relation to any such matter,

whether or not the matter is contained or referred to in a statement of case.

The purpose of my questions was to closely interrogate the positions which were being adopted by each of the Defendants, because the documentary evidence they had disclosed to date did not fully substantiate either of their positions and it seemed to my client and I that each Defendant was only telling the parts of the story that served their purpose.

I am pleased to confirm that in response to my formal requests, the Police handed over a series of previously unadmitted emails which revealed that senior Police Officers were aware that my client’s bail conditions had been lifted – but that they had failed to properly communicate this to their colleagues and, specifically, failed to update the PNC prior to the day my client was arrested.

Accordingly, Norfolk Constabulary have now held their hands up and admitted liability for my client’s loss of liberty.

Had the Police properly complied with their pre-action duty of disclosure, however, then the need to involve the Ministry of Justice in these proceedings would probably have been avoided – whereas now Norfolk Constabulary will need to pay not only my client’s legal costs in bringing this claim, but also those incurred by the Government Legal Department on behalf of the MOJ.

The questions which I raised under the Part 18 procedure were thorough and meticulous – but the simple fact is that the Police lawyers should have been raising them of their own client long before I had to prompt them to do so; the shape of the ‘missing pieces’ in the evidential jigsaw puzzle of this case where there to be seen, had they bothered to look.

Next week, in the concluding part of this blog post, I will explain how the rules governing ‘Specific Disclosure’ were brought to bear against a Police Force which had failed to conduct a thorough search of its records, apparently so that it could advance a defence based on the absence of sufficient evidence…

Stop & Search Excuses

The ‘Field Impairment Test’

A Litany of Abuse: Police Misuse of ‘Street Powers’

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“Not Had A Bite For Weeks”: A Case Study

Police Dogs & Misuse of Force

How you can help me

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How you can help me

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24A Arrest without warrant: other persons

Taking Action Against Sainsburys

The Mitier They Are, the Mitier They Fall…

Three Key Points To Remember When It Comes To Shoplifting Arrests

How you can help me

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Failing the Test: An Unnecessary Arrest

An Unnecessary Strip Search

An Unnecessary Drug Test

Winning Compensation

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Update

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It’s Not About The Money: The Other Benefits of Bringing a Civil Claim

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How you can help me

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Pre-Action Disclosure – Vanishing video footage & Missing Dog Bite Reports

A Request for Further Information Reveals ‘Incriminating’ Emails

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