Still Hounded
The Police were determined to have another go at getting me after the case had finally finished. I had resigned from the Police Force and we were busily making the final arrangements to leave the UK, when I suddenly received a summons through the post to attend Brent Magistrates Court to answer a charge of ‘keeping a dangerous dog’! At first we tried to laugh it off, but then we realized that they were serious, I had just beaten them in court and they were trying to get back at me through my dog, how pathetic! Apparently Major, our lovely German shepherd dog had escaped from our garden after some local kids had broke the fence and he ran to the park and began fighting with another dog, as dogs sometimes do, and the owner had made a complaint at the local police station. Well, as a former serving police officer, I had never ever been called to court to prosecute a ‘dangerous dog’ case where 2 dogs had fought each other and these are rare events indeed!
Though and behold, when I got to court there was a Police Sergeant as well as a constable both chomping at the bit to get me in court and convict me for keeping a dangerous dog – a dog in fact so dangerous that our 2 cats, Pandy and Tiger often used to both jump out of my son’s first floor window onto his back while he was in the back garden to scare him and he used to run shaking into his dog kennel! Anyway, I had a quiet word with this sergeant and told him that he should take advice on whether he really wants to proceed with this case as I would have the press and TV down to the court very quickly to show how vindictive and petty minded the Police are in having lost the case trying to get back at me through my dog! Well, needless to say, the Sergeant and his constable took my advice and were never seen again and I received a letter informing me that the case of keeping a dangerous dog had been dropped!
I loved my work in the Metropolitan Police Service, it was my life and some have asked me why I worked as I did, particularly with my high crime arrest results in 1991? I think back to that moment in the canteen at Lavender Hill/Battersea when I was told my an older PC that ‘I was showing them all up because of all the work that I was doing’! I made the decision then that I didn’t want to spend what remained of what I thought would be my long police career in wearing a uniform trying to avoid work waiting for the time of my retirement and police pension to arrive. I was determined that no-one was going to stop me working, and perhaps because I was ‘different’ in my beliefs from them, they then used my different beliefs to try to get to me and stop me. I had decided in 1991 that ‘I would go for it’ irrespective of the consequences and, as we know, there were consequences that, by hook or by crook would soon end my police career.
I do not bear a grudge against the Metropolitan Police Service as the problem was, and perhaps still is the level of supervision from ‘supervisory officers’, who as indicated in my description of some of the racist abuse directed at me by my fellow PC’s, these supervisory officers not only did nothing to stop what was happening but they actually joined in the laughter at the racist remarks, as was highlighted by the adjudicators at the Labour Court hearing against the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police Service that proved unanymously in my favour. I then became the only serving police officer to have won a case of racial discrmination against the Metropolitan Police Service in court, and most people agree that they should have settled this case out-of-court, but for whatever reasons they blindly carried on despite the overwhelming evidence in my favour, so much so that we didn’t call one witness to give evidence as there was no need, our claim was watertight as proved in the court’s written verdict.
I am saddened and dismayed by the decline in the public’s support and respect for the police brought about by a number of factors, including recently a number of high profile court cases and convictions, and in some cases imprisonment of officers, by the reluctance of the police to deal effectively with demonstrators often because of obvious political pressure not to act as they should, the rise since I retired, of the internet and the subsequent ‘instant news on your screens’ phenonomen when even if you were not present at the scene and are only given a brief outline of the events, you are expected by the images shown to you to act as the jury and judge, but most of all by the lack of support shown by senior officers for their subordinates who often have to police in unbelievably difficult and trying circumstances where the norm is, at the drop of the hat, to complain about police actions, and there are active forces that seek confrontation with police officers in order to lodge complaints against them, and as a police officer ‘under investigation’ you are deemed to be guilty first and perhaps might be found innocent after a usual long investigative process, sometimes lasting many months or years and sometimes where you might be suspended from duty not knowing if you will ever return to duty and even if you know that you are innocent, you cannot be sure that.
The only ever complaint that I had lodged against me was when I went with a junior female officer to effect a ‘failing to appear arrest warrant’ on a local man that I had originally arrested for driving whilst disqualified where he had actually said to me, ‘It’s a fair cop’! Even though I knew that he had a violent drug fulled past, I knew that he lived locally with his girlfriend and after we had politely knocked on his council flat door, he opened the door and let us in saying that he had, ‘forgot all about his court appearance date’, a sentence that many of them mutter. Although things were calm at that moment, I decided to place him in handcuffs as it was the first thing in the morning and he might turn grumpy and uncooperative and also because of his violent background. He faced the narrow hall’s wall and I had managed to put one of his hands in cuffs when his hysterical girlfriend suddenly came out of the bedroom screaming and shouting, ‘No babe, don’t let them take you’ as she walked up and down a few inches from my back into which she could have easily plunged a knife if she was so inclined to do so! On hearing her shouts, the suspect then started to struggle, and even though he was still facing the wall he tried to move his head back and forth a few times trying to headbutt me in the face, and I was staring to lose my grip on him. He wouldn’t calm down and so I punched him from behind on the side of his face which temporarily stopped him struggling and I then managed to get the other handcuff on his other hand and then managed to take him outside and place him into the back of my police car. Later, ‘on the advice of his solicitor’ he lodged a formal complaint against me for assault and eventually when it came for me to be interviewed by officers from ‘5 Area HQ’, I openly admitted that I had punched him in self-defence and to prevent me or my fellow PC from being seriously injured. I wasn’t really worried about the investigation (bearing in mind that this was in the 90’s and not today), and after a number of months I was informed by the investigative officers that there would be no further action, but they gave me ‘words of advice’ in that I ‘shouldn’t have punched him’, which is an observation that is easy to make whilst sitting in a comfy air-conditioned office and not having to actually deal with the type of persons on the street that we have to deal with, and I would have hit him again and even with my truncheon if I had managed to get it out, in fact I would have hit him with anything that was to hand in order to prevent him breaking free and assaulting or even murdering my colleage and I, who knows what he was capable of, well actually I did know as I knew his criminal past!
In writing my account of my service in the Metropolitan Police Force/Service, I have endevoured not to name the officers proved to have acted unlawfully according to police regulations and England’s racial discrimination laws by the Labour Court as it was never my intention to have them appear in court in the first place, but they did so as witnesses for the Metropolitan Police, which still puzzles me as to why to this day? I have also removed the names of arrested persons from any reproduced report as well as the names of those members of the public that appear in such reproduced reports.
Paul Robert Thomas, updated 11 August 2024
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