My partner and I know complaining against really grim levels of service from police and Town Hall agencies is a hopeless task. Personal experience has shown us this. Frankly, we have been beaten up by the authorities and even politicians, who must have been able to see we were already traumatised through trying to get something done about an utterly disgusting, criminal and violent couple harassing us, committing crime and abusing their own children. There is no effective way to complain and we were regularly put in harm’s way by the authorities.
In one grim meeting our MP said we should move. He prefaced this by saying he would deny what he was about to tell us in the future. His actions were those of a pathetic bully. We have no doubt he should be deselected and is not fit to be an MP. He had previously told me that he was totally dissatisfied with local policing and that he knew complaining to the IPCC or Local Government Ombudsman was hopeless, but was very unhappy and aggressive about the fact I had told others he had said this. On what we know, the man is a disgraceful coward, prepared to conceal what he knows about the fate of victims of crime, preferring to threaten us knowing we had become clinically depressed than act in an honest manner. Local politicians have proved equally hapless and without integrity.
The essential problem confronting victims of crime is not that their plight is not known. The problem is that it is too well known by a fatal nexus of politicians, police and Town Hall votaries with a vested interest in covering it all up whilst pretending they are doing something effective about it. These votaries are clearly prepared to beat up on victims, knowing they have almost no access to representation or independent investigation of their problems. What victims need is for a properly investigated case to be put before a judge to ensure their protection and human rights. What they get is isolation, character assassination and exposure to harm.
There are fairly simple ways to put this right. The problem is that this runs against the interests of politicians and agencies supposedly in place to help. They have been claiming to understand, learn lessons, and to be putting the right policies and procedures in place for at least two decades. ‘Nulabour’ is now a running sore in our society. This, and years of sleaze before them, have utterly demoralised society to the point that even the word ‘democracy’ has become a deception term. It is difficult, as an academic, to trace the origin. ‘Thatcherism’, for instance, has origins long before the lady herself, set perhaps in Denis Healey at the IMF with his begging bowl and the destruction of any chance of sensible industrial relations through the imposition of ‘hard hat’ management. This dates ‘Thatcherism’ to an origin in the late 1960’s when no one had heard of her. In the same way, the dreadful blight of ‘Nulabour’ runs from much earlier times than Blair and cronyism.
The first thing needed is proper public scrutiny and this is the first thing denied. All we need in this respect is to collect and collate the actual experiences of victims. This should be very easy given today’s technology. That this isn’t happening can only be a result of a collusion to prevent it. This collusion is extensive and must be calculated. The very agencies established to form over-sight in fact prevent victims from gaining the independent investigation and support they need. The mechanism here appears to be the placing of over-paid votaries to performance manage target cultures and deny natural justice to complainants. Public Law insists that there has been a breach of the duty to act fairly if decision-makers fail to allow someone to put his or her case at all or fails to give him/her adequate facilities for making the case or does not show someone evidence it had about them, and makes a decision based on that. Yet victims, who must in common sense be known to be likely to be traumatised and hardly likely to be able to make their own case, get no representation and are not allowed to see what is being said against them, or whether what enquiries have been made have been done properly.
In our case, I have been subject to character assassination that beggars belief. Allegations were made that I had committed criminal offences (needless to say not true) and I only found out after having to demand disclosure of a Complaint Resolution Record and what I could get on the failed prosecution of our violent, now arsonist neighbour. The information only leaked to me via the CPS, as did the information of a police cover-up of bungling from which the malicious statements about me emerged. Elsewhere, I was accused of calling a housing worker a ‘drug’s baron’. I hadn’t seen the lady concerned for at least three years and liked her. I said the complete opposite. I am sure this was malicious character assassination, confirmed when a barrister hired by our Council first told me this claim was in one of my emails (it wasn’t), then said it was in a note made by another housing worker (which he didn’t have), and then claimed he had made such a note whilst interviewing me a couple of weeks before, which was a lie. A couple of weeks after this clown stated our case was not a bad one and we were not at risk, our main harasser was involved in a violent affray and threw a petrol bomb at an occupied neighbour’s house.
The situation is actually insane. Cops, housing and social workers will put your complaints to the violent, harassing intimidators, putting you in harm’s way, offering no protection, yet hide from you all kinds of material based on their own wonky decisions about you that you need to know to put it right. One of our harassers got two years for drug trafficking, having been seen dealing round the corner (where he’d been at it for years) and caught next door in possession of a substantial amount of heroin in the top pocket of his shirt and with all the paraphernalia of dealing in the house. The LGO concluded there was no evidence of drug dealing from the property and would not tell us why she reached this conclusion. When a judge saw the conviction she just blurted out ‘Why has there been no eviction’? One cock-up after another was involved, even at this early stage in our seven years of hell.
What the worthies in complaints departments really do is tell you “fuck off you worthless piece of shit”. Sure, they employ bureaucratic language, but this is even worse. In one police blog, this is described as ‘denying your human right not to be made to feel like a twat’. Part of the problem is you are dealing with jumped up pricks who are inciting you to describe them as jumped up pricks. In an old Sean Connery film, The Hill, at least as I remember (I’m not good on films), Sean plays a squaddie subject to routine torture by some bastard gaoler. Just as the worthies are about to take his complaint seriously, he beats up his tormentor, thus losing any credibility as a witness. You can spot this happening through bureaucratic bullying from the complaints people. Given that you are up to your arse with stress already because of the violent scum alligators dumped into your life already, you are hardly in any condition to deal with people suggesting you get contractors in to drain the swamp at your expense! They use all manner of patronising contempt to antagonise you.
Allcoppedout's Blog 