Dear Chief Superintendent,
Thank you for your email dated 19th January 2013 and your kind words. I have
spent the intervening days considering your offer and my thoughts and concerns
are set out below.
Please note that I have used the word ‘we’ to indicate my association with Mr. Elwyn
Bryant and please accept my shorthand of ‘you’ to indicate Bexleyheath police as
an organisation rather than yourself personally. I fully accept that the investigation
was well on the road to failure before your tenure at Bexleyheath. Nevertheless, some of
the events that took place subsequently are deeply disturbing and where you were directly
involved I have noted the fact appropriately.
The following are the events which will be taken into account when determining
my future intentions, some of them you may not have fully appreciated hitherto:-
1) In April 2011 I was threatened with arrest if I repeated the ‘crime’
of criticising councillors. The subsequent IPCC investigation revealed that you had
instinctively reacted to a false claim by the Leader and Chief Executive of
Bexley Council (and several Bexley councillors most of whom are as yet unnamed)
that I was about to commit arson and worse. The council’s report went straight
to the CPS without any investigation and only when they recommended prosecution
did you look into the case at all. Fortunately DI Keith Marshall carried out
some basic research and found no crime had been committed. He was pressurised
into or felt obliged to issue a 9993 notice in a manner that broke all Standard
Operating Procedures. (IPCC report refers.)
2) When I initially complained to the DPS about the unjustified threat of arrest
and your refusal to discuss the issue they asked CI Tony Gowen in his capacity
as Head of the local Professional Standards Unit to reply and he said that the
only witness he could find was the Chief Executive of Bexley Council and, in
effect, his statement was worth more than mine. My complaint was therefore
dismissed. A clear case of bias towards a council Gowen knew had lied in their
attempt to silence a critic. No action was taken against the dishonest
complainants and Gowen was temporarily promoted.
3) Only when the IPCC ruled in my favour did I get confirmation that the
Harassment warning was invalid. I am still awaiting that confirmation from you.
4) When I reported a hate crime in June 2011 it was obvious to all that the
culprit must be a Bexley council associate. Persuading you to accept the report
as a crime took more than two hours.
5) DC Neil Thomas and DCI Alison Funnell took their investigation to Bexley
Council in July 2011 and told Chief Executive Will Tuckley that they considered
my crime report to be a mere counter allegation for the illegal Harassment
arrest warning. That could not be true of Mr. Bryant’s complaint, he had not
been accused of harassment. Your officers accepted an assurance from Bexley
Council that it had checked its own computers and was satisfied it was not
responsible for the crime. As it happens Bexley Council was correct but the
emphasis at the meeting that I was making a fuss over nothing and Bexley Council
was a trusted partner did nothing to assure me that your investigation would be unbiased.
6) In August 2011 you wrote to me to say your investigation was at end. The
letter was in part technical nonsense and in other ways factually incorrect. It
was unsigned but your predecessor told my MP that no officers’ names could be
revealed to me because he believed I was a violent man. Much later at a meeting
with my MP present, CS Stringer revealed that his information had come from the
highest levels of Bexley Council. Bexleyheath police always listens to Bexley
Council and has little interest in the truth.
7) In September 2011, faced with a closed case, I sought information via a
Freedom of Information request. I asked for the dates on which various of
the checks referred to in the August letter took place. I was formally advised
that it was not in the public interest to tell me. I suspected at the time that
no computer related investigation had ever taken place and recent revelations
have confirmed those suspicions, there was only an assurance from Bexley Council
that no check was necessary. Not only were Bexleyheath police prepared to lie to
me they were also prepared to lie to your FOI department to cover those lies.
8) Because of the pressure exerted by Teresa Pearce MP and James Brokenshire,
Mr. Bryant’s MP, your investigation was reopened in September 2011. That
investigation made a little more progress. The most recent DPS report revealed
that the first one had fallen victim to silly mistakes by police officers who
admitted to not understanding the technicalities, although as the DPS report was
also technically illiterate I am not convinced that is entirely true. The name
of the DPS investigating officer will be included in my list of those accused of
perverting the course of justice. She had been asked to look into the events up
to late August/September 2011 but interviewed DS Paul Mackintosh who was
appointed to the case later and who was in a position to bring the DPS officer
right up to date. She failed to discover or possibly deliberately withheld
information and provided an explanation of IP address allocation which was
technical nonsense designed to conceal the truth. I consider that finding no serious fault in
the investigation is to be complicit in it. In February 2012 your predecessor
said the investigation had been reopened because he had been given more
evidence, implying it came from outside and causing me to believe the
information came from another councillor. The DPS report provides no support for
CS Stringer’s stated reason for reopening the investigation.
9) By October 2011 the investigating officers received good intelligence from
the appropriate department (MIB) which would lead them to the culprit (DPS
report refers) and from that flowed his IP address. You confirmed you had it by
February 2012 - maybe earlier. From there it was just a short hop to a real
address but three months went by before you proposed obtaining a search warrant.
I appreciate that this period coincided with your own arrival in Bexleyheath and
you may have been instrumental in initiating that much delayed step.
10) In May 2011 you were warned that obtaining a search warrant from Bexley
Magistrates Court was tantamount to notifying Bexley Council of what was to
come. The warning went unacknowledged and more than three weeks elapsed before
the warrant was executed. During that period you personally told Mr. Bryant that
it was “unfair” of him to be critical of what by then was a whole year of
reluctance and procrastination.
11) During the following four months I was contacted three times to be advised
of progress. That advice was that there wasn’t any. Not a single useful piece of
information came my way. If it had not been for the local newspaper I would have
known nothing. When I asked to be given even “the tiniest indication of the
reason for a 15 month delay” having read the recommended hate crime procedures
on line, I was told in no uncertain terms that I would get no information.
(Email from DS Mackintosh.)
12) In August 2012 I was able to see another example of Bexley police taking
sides with Bexley Council in another joint effort to criminalise a critical
resident. DS Alastair Vanner remained silent when Bexley councillor Melvin
Seymour concocted a story about dog faeces and letter boxes and repeated it from
the witness box at Woolwich Court. It was an outrageous lie which the
documentary evidence did not support. Mr. Vanner signed his own accurate
statement of the facts on 6th October 2011 but countersigned councillor
Seymour’s false statement on the same day. He knew what Seymour had written was
a falsehood but apparently went along with the conspiracy to frame a man then and at
subsequent court hearings. DS Vanner was temporarily promoted and recently put
in charge of the Craske related investigation. Councillor Seymour was not
charged with perjury. Vanner is not fit to uphold the law at all and certainly
unsuitable to be appointed to a case where his proven allegiance to Bexley
Council is likely to pervert justice.
13) Also in August 2012 the CPS contacted Bexley Council Chief Executive Will
Tuckley. The victims were denied access to the CPS several times and Mr. Bryant
was told more than once by your officers that the CPS had not been involved. You
advised my MP that they were involved. Who authorised a third party, the
suspect’s employer, to be taken into CPS confidence is not yet clear but I do
know that your then deputy Tony Gowen condoned it. In late August 2012, five
months after your appointment, he was busy arranging a meeting with Will Tuckley
who had correctly assured you earlier that Bexley Council had no involvement in
the crime. Tony Gowen’s intent is clear for he says so. His stated aim was to
resolve the Craske situation once and for all.
14) In November 2012 after councillor Peter Craske had been released from bail on the
orders of a senior officer - not the investigating officers, both Elwyn Bryant and
I separately requested a meeting with yourself so that we might learn a little of what
was going on and to conform with police guidance on the support of victims of crime.
You personally refused Elwyn’s request and ignored mine.
15) In December 2012 you wrote to a third party that you considered the case had
been investigated, “expeditiously and with vigour and speed”. This simply isn’t
true and adds to my concern about the way the station is run under your command.
16) When Mr. Bryant and I met DS Xxxxxx in December she was a breath of fresh
air confirming several of our suspicions but when I revealed some of what she
said to you it was clear from her response to me that honesty is frowned upon in
Bexleyheath police station. She is however the only police officer among the ten
encountered so far in which I have any confidence.
17) Very soon after your arrival in Bexley you were given a brief history of the
unhealthy relationship between the police and the council and how your
predecessors had turned a blind eye to their criminal propensities. A close
relationship with Bexley Council is a poisonous one and likely to prove
traumatic for all caught up in it. I cannot know whether that advice was ignored
or whether corrupt politicians are impossible to resist. To those who suffer as
a result it makes little difference either way.
The past 20 months have amply demonstrated that Bexleyheath police at every
level will lie, deceive and procrastinate in their endeavour to protect Bexley
Council whatever the consequences. Almost exactly a year ago your predecessor CS
Stringer and his then deputy Tony Gowen implored me to trust them. Look where
that got me. I said to my MP as we left that meeting that if the two of them
were lying they were going to be in big trouble. She agreed. They were lying and
I believe the time is right for the next step to be taken.
I doubt that Mr. Bryant or I will have anything significant to add to the
foregoing at a meeting but we would be happy to listen to what you have to say,
perhaps you would wish to address each of the points noted above? We believe it
would be appropriate for any meeting to follow our negotiations with the CPS.
Ms. Pearce has previously said that Xxxxx or Xxxxx xxxxxxxxx are her preferred times.
Yours sincerely,
Malcolm Knight
This email was copied to Teresa Pearce MP
and the various subordinates of Victor Olisa to whom he had copied his invitation.