The police have forgotten what they're for

 

 

The Police: not so much a blue line as a black hole.

Content of an email sent to the great and good a fortnight ago

Gentlemen 

As we used to say in the communications business, it’s all in the headline.

Mr Swire is on this email as he is my MP. He has so far written me one letter asking if everything is going ok; I’ve replied by phone to say no it isn’t. This is the only exchange we’ve enjoyed to date.

Mr Letwin is included because he very kindly wrote emails and made phone calls to the Devon & Cornwall Chief Constable three months ago. Please offer your sympathies to Oliver, as he has been reading about this tale of incompetent dereliction with hard labour for quite some time now. His big mistake, you see, has been to do his job.  

Mr Grayling, as the man with the hospital pass come next May, you’re also going to be involved from here on. Be very afraid.   

And Alan Johnson is there because, well, it’d be odd if he wasn’t really, he being the Home Secretary. He will never read this of course, but a stable culture is based above all on good manners: think of it as my way of staying with that principle.

Absent from the list are the Trading Standards Authority and the Police Complaints Commission. This is explained by my concern for the environment, as one or both of these black holes might print out this email, and I could not envisage a more predictable (and criminal) waste of paper.

Also missing is the Devon & Cornwall Chief Constable Stephen Otter, a fugitive currently holed-up behind his website, which has no email address. I’m sure you will all, however, join me in concurring with CC Otter’s statement thereon ‘I am confident that this dynamic and highly capable team of chief officers will lead the Constabulary to be a top performing force. A force which delivers excellent services across all areas of policing so that the people of Devon and Cornwall will be safer and feel safer because of the work we do’. The site did allow me to rate the force on a five-star basis, but unfortunately there was no ‘minus 56’ option.  

I could go on for several days about this, but instead I’ll give you the bare facts and then wait to see what comes back.

  1. In the four years since arriving in Seaton, Mr Les Kinch has put a fellow-retailer in hospital, gone bankrupt, and then set up again (this one was his third bankruptcy). He also stole some sensitive emails off my pc. He also sent abusive emails to both myself and my neighbour. He is now busily engaged removing SO funds from customer bank accounts tied to his insolvent last company….while issuing the same contracts in his new one. He has swindled four partners in three years, and left staff unpaid. He remains an undischarged bankrupt. He has threatened local Councillors on several occasions.
  2. To date the Seaton constabulary has done nothing about this situation at all….bar cautioning him for the mails sent to my neighbour. Neither the local TSO nor the banks concerned are prepared to act either. None of this, I should add, is due to lack of evidence: all of it has been provided and presented to Seaton force et al.
  3. On 1st October this year I wrote and signed a formal allegation to this effect, a statement witnessed by PS Gary Philips – now working in plain clothes for Exmouth police. I think this career move may have been Gary’s desperate attempt to get rid of me, but I couldn’t swear to it.
  4. The statement was sent to Detective Insp Munday for review. After being hassled by me via the Seaton main desk three times, Munday finally reviewed the case last week and passed it back to Philips’s successor PS Stonecliffe.
  5. Stonecliffe waited a week to tell me the result of this. This is my polite way of saying he did nothing, until I rang him this morning.
  6. Stonecliffe took some time to trace. I was reduced to him as a source, because Munday is on annual leave - and the case reference number given me by Philips is wrong. It’s a Dorset case number. Seaton is in Devon. At first, the police call centre insisted I live in Dorset. I don’t. Tuesday, Marble Arch, fish etc etc.
  7. Stonecliffe informed me that Munday had reviewed the case, and the detective had opined that there were no charges to answer. I suggested he ask Munday to try again, as email abuse requires only two mails for a caution to be issued. Stonecliffe said a caution cannot be issued without the offence being admitted. I told him Kinch had already been cautioned about the case involving my neighbour – which involved the exact same emails. He told me Kinch couldn’t have been. To avoid carrying on until 3019 (as my neighbour had already confirmed the caution to me) I suggested again he tell Munday to rethink, and bade him good-day.

What particularly galled me about this latest conversation was PS Stonecliffe’s complete bafflement as to why I was being somewhat aggressive. He didn’t strike me as the sort of chap with those sensitive antennae one expects to be nestling beneath a policeman’s helmet; more to the point, it only served to confirm what the general public decided years ago - that an obsession with diversity skills and pc-brown nosing has replaced the plot as far as our UK police are concerned. The simple reason New Labour can record a one-third fall in crime is because nobody is ever charged with anything. ‘It’s an old trick’ thinks Lord Mandelson, ‘but it just might work’.

My neighbour (himself a former policeman) has wisely advised me time and again to avoid ranting and sarcasm in my dealings with authority; on the whole, so far I have done so. But the end of my lengthy and threadbare tether has now been reached. So I am going to start being a bully and pulling some strings. I hate to do it, because it is antithetical to my beliefs – but you leave me with no choice. 

I am a journalist and successful website owner concerned primarily with social injustices. Usually they’re other people’s, but now I think it’s my turn.

I will give you all until the end of November to do something substantive about this, as opposed to penning gesture sympathies and loud protestations of intent. If Mr Kinch has not been cautioned by then, you will be reading about this case on a large scale in at least one national newspaper - it all depends on how the bidding goes.

Sincerely

John Ward

Thus far Mr Letwin has responded (he always does). None of the others have. This is digital interactive democracy in the age of bullshit.

The email has been hawked round the media. So far the phone hasn't started ringing. Maybe I should've put some MAOI anti-depressants in there.

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