Every single working day of the past year; every Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday – and come to that – most Saturdays for good measure, a senior and specially trained police officer of the gender requested by the ‘victim’, will enter a carefully selected suite of rooms, decorated in ‘calming’ hues, with comfortable seating, ambient temperature, and ensure that refreshments are available.
He, or she, will ‘adopt a posture of active listening‘; being careful not to interrupt the tale of cadaverous cavorting they are about to hear. Yes, every single working day our wonderful Police who are mandated to protect the public and ensure the safety of children, will have to go through the charade of applying the full rigours of section 93(4) of the Police Act 1997, (whilst bearing in mind every last nuance of the Ministry of Justice’s 2015 Code of Practice enhanced entitlements for adult victims)…..knowing that a disciplinary hearing awaits them if they forget so much as one requested toffee doughnut….
There will be two of them, naturally, one to listen attentively, one to write down every last enthralling word from the ‘victim’s lips’.
It must be a soul destroying job – no chance to ‘protect the public’, nor rescue a child from international sexual slavery. No chance to do anything apart from fill in a mountain of paperwork describing the ‘partnership organisations’ they have put the putative victim in touch with, the ‘special measures’ they have ordered on behalf of their ‘victim’, the letters dictated or handwritten informing the ‘victim’ of their rights, of the progress of their ‘incident’.
Knowing from the first few minutes, that there can be no progress, no job satisfaction in this ‘incident’ – for now, they are just a glorified group therapy session with free coffee.
Why? Because every single day of the week, and most Saturdays, last year, someone walked into a police station and reported a ‘serious sexual offence’ carried out by a perpetrator safely a’mouldering in his grave.
A corpse; a cadaver; a carcass; a stiff. All 298 of them.
Actually, it is worse than that, for we only have the figures for those of some ‘celebrity value’. The media only report those of clickbait value – the Ted Heath’s, the John Inman’s – we think they are bad enough, but those senior policeman have had to sit through another 296 of them, keeping the same neutral expression on their face, whilst noting the alleged perpetrator – an Elvis impersonator in Durham? – died all of 20 years ago.
No matter, the ‘victim’ has entitlements and they must be observed.
No wonder that virtually every force has scurried away to hire a fleet of flat-footed ex-policemen, cushioned by their pensions, on £21,747 per annum as ‘Civilian Investigators‘. It is they who will apply for the search warrant under Paragraph 16 of Schedule 4, part 2 of the Police Reform Act 2002 – to enter the corpse’s old home and seize the computer from his widow.
Who knows, there might be a picture of necro-nonce’s nephew falling off a surf board with an unknown 8 year old struggling out of his bathing suit in the back ground – all in a file marked ‘Dick’. In vain will the widow cry ‘But Dick was his nephew’s name’ – that will be for the CPS to decide! They will take the Teddy Bear from his daughter’s bed – perhaps it was used to lure other youngsters? – whilst pointing out that they will need to interview the daughter when she gets home from her job as a trustee of Age Concern….’Did Daddy ever say it will be our little secret’? – even though she stopped calling him Daddy 50 years ago….
There is no time limit to investigating the newly popular historic sexual offences; there is no requirement that the alleged perpetrator still be alive; in fact there is no requirement that the victim still be alive – for the full range of deferential requirements under the 2015 Code of Practice applies to anyone reporting a crime, even on behalf of someone else.
Perhaps you don’t think those 298 celebrity shroud wavers are enough to worry about – but consider this. They represented 10% of the 2,328 ‘celebrity sexual offenders‘. Overall, there were 99,609 sexual offences recorded in Britain over the same period.
Given the frequency with which we are told that no ‘victim’ would lie about a sexual offence in order to gain compensation from a celebrity offender or his estate, we should find a similar percentage of reports being painstakingly recorded by senior police officers amongst the ‘99,609’ should we not?
Perhaps its not the cost of the ambulance chasers we should be worrying about – but the cost to the public purse of Hogan-Howe’s Hearse Harriers.
The mind boggles! 9,000 cadavers being read their rights?
Hogan-Howe has had his tootsies held to a fierce flame this week, and as a result is planning to apologise to Lord Bramall, as he did to Lady Brittan. Do the partners of the other corpses not deserve an apology? The other families who have had to endure rabid vitriol from commentators immune from libel law? The grieving widows, mothers, sons, and daughters who have also had their lives turned upside down with narry a chance of contesting the truth of allegations by virtue of their loved one’s departure from this sainted isle of justice?
It is not the investigations of serious offences that is offensive – it is the manner in which it has been done that deserves apology.
The careless manner in which police stations have leaked information; the glee with which an underclass of professional sex trolls have dissected that information and been allowed to publicise their theories of ever more exotic crimes; and the curmudgeonly way in which some have finally been exonerated – ‘insufficient evidence’.
Given the case which emerged yesterday of Mark Pearson who had the misfortune to be sharing the same London railway station, along with several thousand others, with an anonymous allegator for a brief half second – and yet still the CPS thought that sufficient evidence to air her claim that he had ‘sexually penetrated her for two or three seconds’, you have to wonder what ‘insufficient evidence’ actually means?
Not every family affected will be able to muster the sort of support that Lord Bramall and Lady Brittan had access to – yet they have been just as abused by Hogan-Howe’s Hearse Harriers.
Wot abaht the others?
Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe was last seen on Thursday, praying with the Met’s personal chaplain, the Rev Jonathan Osborne, who has been heard to voice his ‘concerned’ opinion of the current state of the Met’s reputation.
Do you think he was praying for Inspiration? Deliverance? Or Forgiveness?