22 February (Part 3) - Gowen, gowen, gone
You know how dog owners are said to grow to look like their pooches, old
married couples can sometimes get to be like peas in a pod completing each
others sentences etc? Well I have a theory the same is true of policemen. They spend
so much time in the company of crooks that it becomes hard to tell one from the other.
There was always a certain irony in Chief inspector Tony Gowen being in charge
of Bexley’s Professional Standards Unit for it was him who told me that if Will
Tuckley and his cohorts said I was harassing them that was good enough for him,
there was no need to investigate whether or not the allegation was true. It was
Gowen who repeatedly told me I could trust him to investigate Bexley council’s
obscene blog properly when we now know that at that time he must have known the
case he had put to the CPS was time expired and would go nowhere. Then it was
Gowen who was at first given the job of investigating his boss Dave Stringer
after I made a complaint about him to the Directorate of Professional Standards.
They are all as bad as each other and the whole system is geared up to them protecting each other.
I
very recently discovered from the father of the
beaten up schoolboy
that the minutes of some police meetings are available on line and there I discovered that CI Tony Gowen was asked
to set up an anti-corruption strategy in April 2011, him being the acknowledged
expert in that field.
Three months later there was still no strategy and the issue was not discussed on the
record again. The aforesaid father, the period in question spanned the incompetent and
corrupt investigation into his son’s injuries, failed in his mission to find out what
was decided. Gowen and Stringer sorted it out between them.
However,
seven months later the bad boys and girls were, subject to the approval
of the Senior Management Team (SMT) severely punished by being transferred
to other stations. Chief Superintendent Stringer and Chief Inspector Tony Gowen
left not very long afterwards and DCI Funnell retired; prematurely according to some.
During the remainder of 2012 at least two police officers who had failed to satisfactorily
conclude the obscene blog investigation also went to other London boroughs. One might surmise that
those incomers involved in the exchange programme were similarly tainted.
Bexley police minutes are indexed at
http://www.met.police.uk/foi/boroughs/bexley.htm.