It’s time we were dealing with police accountability in an open public forum with evidence made properly available. Wiltshire (Ruralshire if we are to believe an old slip of blog) police arrested a woman asleep in her car for refusing a breath test. She’s pretty clearly assaulted in their custody and there was enough evidence to convince magistrates. CCTV from the custody suite shows her being manhandled by Andrews. I’d want to see the real thing, but on the U-tube stuff he starts pulling her along, then seems to smack her in the face, she falls and he drags her along the floor, at some point getting back to her feet, before being pushed hard to the floor in the cell. In a long video you can see the cell floor is clean before this and the woman not moving on the floor for a couple of minutes. She gets up and their is blood where her face was lying and then she’s bleeding all over. No charges are eventually brought against the woman. She looks like what I would have called a fairly harmless drunk, who might have annoyed me, but whom I would have treated with respect as far as I could.
From what I’ve seen her treatment was appalling, and cops present should have tried harder than they did to stop what she got. Presumably, magistrates saw and heard the evidence and convicted – cops and CPS clearly thought there was a case to answer. The sentence was more or less the maximum magistrates can deliver. I think they were probably right, but I’d want the evidence in full, and we should remember any number of bastards treat their women and kids worse than this and cops/CPS can’t even get them to court, and derisory sentences are handed out when they do. Evidence against Andrews included police evidence.
Judge Bean overturned the conviction so Andrews is an innocent man in law.
This case and responses to it on Ghastly Gadget and the like should lead to new thinking on police accountability and wider issues in our legal system. I doubt Gadget is a cop, though he or she must at least be close to the job. I hardly meet anyone, including a few senior officers who now think basic policing is being done right, or that we have proper control of it. Gadget has stated Andrews is due and apology – if he is a cop, I think this is enough for him to have to leave. He must be passing such attitudes on to fellow officers, and this is intolerable, very much rotten orchard. What goes on on his blog, apart from wrist bangle sales, won’t do. It’s evidence, at least to start with, of serious attitude and culture problems. The issues are much wider than this, not least where the IPCC have been and why they weren’t called to start an investigation with the woman bleeding, and officers with as little time as possible to collude or destroy evidence.
If Andrews is genuinely innocent, even bigger questions need to be asked – surely none of us are safe from wrongful conviction if this is the case, and magistrates can’t be trusted at all.
I’d like our cops to be tougher, better protected and have more power on the beat. What they seem to be doing reeks of incompetence and lack of grace. The case also reeks of the need to get legal help most of us can’t afford, if in trouble. Andrews was banged-up before his lawyers came along, which only suggests scrote who plead not guilty and go to Crown Court aren’t as stupid as their low IQs suggest.
Andrews claimed the woman was the worst prisoner he’d come across. Against my experience, he needs to get out more. I dealt with much worse, and suspect this was typical of police CPS attacks on credibility, which begin to look like scrote ploys in making counter allegations against those they have just committed crimes against. One wonders what use CCTV can ever be against criminals on the basis of what is publicly available so far in this case.
If Judge Bean thinks the public accept this sort of thing, he’s not with it. He should be subject to scrutiny in public like others in this case. It increasingly seems our laws and legal system only work marginally.
Allcoppedout's Blog 
Absolutely spot-on! Well said.
What you state is agreed. All the same we cannot envy those rural Wiltshire police whose job it will be to command a tsunami heading for them, to halt.
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I disagree for once Banksie – I think we should be sitting in judgement on Andrews and what is clearly a travesty of justice whether he’s the violent prick he looks like in the CCTV footage or innocent. The problem is we don’t get the full evidence put before us and this is what should change. Either the district judge who seems to have heard the case at magistrates’ court is a donkey (plus Wiltshire hierarchy) or Judge ‘Roy’ Bean.
I would generally agree we haver to rely on courts to do judging, but something is going very badly wrong. Had her partner inflicted these injuries we would have charged him – I shudder to think I was a cop seeing that kind of behaviour, which I always stopped when I was. That the woman had been drinking makes it even more impossible for a decent person to treat her in that manner.
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