I Take On The Police And Win!

I Take On The Police And Win!

It was then I decided that I had had enough and that I just didn’t want to take any more of it, and so I again contacted the Commission for Racial Equality and informed them I was now ready and willing to proceed with taking the Metropolitan Police to court for their illegal racial discrimination. The C.R.E. then duly appointed a firm of solicitors to take on my case. The whole legal process dragged on and on, and in fact the case took 3 years to reach its conclusion, for each time a court date would be fixed, the Police would then ask for an adjournment for whatever reason and this happened a few times. You would prepare yourself mentally for a life changing court case against the might of the Metropolitan Police Force and then you would be informed at the last moment that the court case has been postponed and that we ‘will be informed of a new court date’. Of course my family’s life and mine was now totally full of stress and worry as in taking on the Metropolitan Police Force, I was in effect taking on the British government as the Police Service is funded and controlled by H.M. Home Office, and losing this case would in effect warrant me leaving my job and giving up our Police provided house in Wembley and we would be homeless, and I’d have to resign with my tail between my legs, for I considered that I would have no future in the Police force after this case had been concluded.

I had no other support from anyone. Not even the Jewish communiity supported me and they seemed to just want to bury their heads in the sand and not make waves, and they never offered their vocal support or other support to me in any shape or form. I think that after the case had been concluded, there were a few lines in the press from the Jewish Board of Deputies congratulating me on my victory but that’s the only time I heard from them. I later learned that most believed that I had no chance of winning my case, and luckily for us the Metropolitan Police must have shared the same opinion for this wasn’t a high profile and media case about a ‘black Police officer claiming racial abuse’, this was about a white Englishman who had converted to Judaism from Christianity making the claim, and the police side’s approach to the court case was amateurish to say the least.

I had presumed that the Police would make an out-of-court settlement offer to me to avoid taking the case to court as they had done in a number of previous racial abuse case, but in my case this didn’t happen.

Three weeks before the trial was due to begin the C.R.E. appointed firm of solicitors who had been handling the case on my behalf suddenly withdrew from my case leaving me without legal representation. The Commission for Racial Equality was subsequently asked by the Industrial Tribunal why they withdrew their legal representation for me, and they replied that it was done because they were advised that I had no chance of winning the case. I wonder who ‘advised’ them and who put pressure on them to take this course of action?

My only recourse was to approach the Police Federation and ask them to provide me with legal representation which was my right as a paid up member of the Police Federation to do so, and they duly provided me with a Barrister who took the case on.

On 6 June 1995 (on the anniversary of the Yom Kippur War) my wife and I went to the Industrial Tribunal in Woburn Place, London with a talented Barrister provided by Police Federation funding and facing the best that the Metropolitan Police could muster, and to be honest I felt embarrassed for the Police! The witnesses the Police called were all Police officers I had worked with and each time the Barrister for the Police asked them, ‘Did you call PC Thomas a ‘Yid’ or other racially abusive names’?  The answer was always ‘Yes’. The case went on like this until 9 June 1995 with the Police bringing witness after witness who turned into witnesses for me, we brought no witnesses ourselves and the Police side really had no defense to the allegations, which begs the question why did they allow the case to come to court without settling out-of-court as they had done in previous cases? The answer can only be that they really did underestimate the strength of my evidence and also our commitment to see it through. There were times when it got hard to carry on and their tactics in delaying the case was to try to break me, to break us as a family, and there is no doubt that all that I was going through brought me close to the edge and maybe I fell over at some point, I’m not sure but it’s highly probable.

The unanimous decision of the Tribunal was that ‘the Respondent (the Commissioner of Metropolitan Police) unlawfully discriminated against the applicant (me) on racial grounds’ (court case No. 2785/94/LN/B). In winning my court case I also changed the English racial discrimination laws to now include converts to a religion under its scope. I also made medical history in the Metroploitan Police when their Chief Medical Officer decided that although I had resigned from the Metroplitan Police and had suffered an ‘Injury on duty’ as a result of being a serving officer, as a civilian I was fit for duty but I would become unfit for duty if I returned to work in (the racist atmosphere of) the Metropolitan Police Force, if that makes sense!
I was happy to discover after the court case that none of my fellow officers had faced disciplinary charges, but all had just been given ‘words of advice’, as I previously stated, we didn’t call them to give evidence at court, the police did.
Read how a recent incident highlights how the Metropolitan police fails to deal with its officers that suffer from PTSD HERE.

 

 

  Newspaper announcements of my case result

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Doctors of the Mind

After our victory which was reported in the national press, we had to prepare for the next stage of our battle which was the compensation court hearing that was scheduled to take place 2 days later, but unbeknown to us, it would take another year to come to court for the Police having lost the case now wanted to minimize the amount of compensation that I would be awarded by doing all that could be done to besmirch my character. They decided that they wanted me to be examined and analysed by 2 of their chosen psychiatrists and that our side would also have ‘our’ psychiatrist analyse me, bearing in mind that ‘our’ psychiatrist’ would be paid for by the Police who I had just defeated, via the Police Federation and Home Office!

I had never dealt with this profession before, with these doctors of the mind and I had no idea what to expect and perhaps I should have been more suspicious and not so forthcoming with information as I was, but these people are experts and if they want to they can get information from you without you realising it and they can twist and make something you say into what they want it to mean for their own uses. I stopped going to see one of these experts as I really felt it to be a complete waste of time, as I would walk into his darkened surgery and he would just sit there not saying a word and not changing his facial expression, but every few minutes he would look at his watch and you would think, ‘hang on, I’m here for 20 minutes, are we going to sit like this for 20 minutes, what’s the point’? I would then say something like, ‘Are you going to say anything? And he would then start writing and then say something like, ‘Would you like me to say anything’? And it would go on like this, and I still to this day have no idea what that was all about! After attending 2 different psychiatrists, if that’s what they were, I actually don’t know what their titles were but one was working for the Police and the other was supposedly on our side, although he was paid for by the Police Federation funded by the Metropolitan Police.

They would suggest things to me, and I remember that they both seemed to inject the same idea into my head at around the same time, which in hindsight should have suggested things were going on here. They started to suggest that there was nothing wrong with me even though I was off sick with my family doctor’s certificate stating that I was suffering from stress and depression the cause of which was the Police’s racially discriminatory practices against me, and that in their opinion I should return to work. Return to work?? How could I return to work in that environment and after I had beaten them in court and proved them to be racialist?? I started to panic and didn’t know what to do and what they subtly suggested was that I should really start to open up to them and that I should reveal to them my true inner thoughts about things as, according to them, being called racist names was child’s play and it shouldn’t have caused the reaction it did. Again in hindsight, I realise that they were attempting to minimise the blame that could be placed upon the Police for any pain and suffering that I had endured and in lessening this effect it would attract lesser compensation at the court hearing. But hindsight is a wonderful thing and at the time I was in the hands of what I consider to have been manipulative experts instructed by their paymasters to get results, and I was under enormous stress in spite of having won the case to see it through to the end and I felt that being forced back to work among those who had caused me so much pain and hurt would be the end of me, I really did and maybe not physically or/and mentally – there would be no reason to believe that on returning to work things ‘could be arranged’ to show me in a bad light (I avoided the expression, ‘I would be ‘fitted up’ but most know what this means). There was no way that that I could return to work as a Police officer for I believed that my career in the Police force ended with my court case victory over them, but I was still in their pay and was still a serving Police officer albeit that I was off sick, but if these experts said that I wasn’t ‘sick’ and then they ordered me back to work, then what?

They started to lead me into theoretical situations and down avenues I hadn’t really fully explored before, and I tried as hard as I could to think on my feet, for I had to think about what I was saying to them but I also had to give them enough to agree that I was in fact sick and was not in a fit state to return to work, and all in all they spun me around in circles and it became that I didn’t know if I was coming or going. Of course, growing up in the circumstances that I grown up in and my periods of teenage depression were just the triggers and explanations that these psychiatrists needed to show that the Police, although guilty of racially discriminating against me, were not wholly culpable for my reactive depression, in other words, they would press hard during the upcoming compensation hearing that they should pay me reduced compensation for my pain and suffering and for sure they would reveal to the court all that they had found during their experts examinations of me!

So, I had won my court case against the Police, but now we would have to face another 2 day court hearing in a battle to gain some financial compensation for what I had suffered at the hands of the Metropolitan Police, and to be honest I had very little fight left in me, they had drained it all out of me and waiting a whole year while all of these constant visits to the psychiatrists were going on and not knowing what would be had left its toll on us all and we really decided that we had had enough of it all. To further break our resolve, the very night before our compensation court hearing the Barrister provided by Police Federation funding informed us that he wouldn’t be representing us as the Police Federation had withdrawn their funding and that we would have to face the Metropolitan Police on our own in court the next day, and this time there really was no time to find a legal replacement for our barrister! In the corridor outside of the courtroom, we made contact with the Police barrister and agreed to settle the case before the court hearing and we accepted compensation from them which would enable us to take the course we had decided was best for us as a family, and that was to leave England and return to live in Israel which we did after I had resigned from the Police in July 1996.