-----
This complaint is about actions by members of the Met Police's legal department, specifically Natasha Dunn and Sarah Heron (I understand that Heron is Dunn's line manager).
There is a huge 'back story' to this complaint but for now I will just give a bare outline and will leave it to the person investigating to tell me if they have specific things they need to know.
To cut a long story short, in February 2018 I wrote to the Met Police's legal department as I needed evidence that the Met Police held in order to take private legal action against a suspect. They refused to send me what I needed without a court order.
I tried taking legal action but, as a member of the public, it failed. In a hearing at Wandsworth County Court, the Met were represented by a barrister.
One key thing I needed was some video footage that a member of the public had taken of the initial incident (which occurred on the 23rd December 2015).
Despite not having a court order, in January this year the Met Police sent me a copy of this video footage. (It was very low quality and I suspect that Met Police personnel deliberately saved it in a lower-quality file. That's a separate issue though.)
So despite having said for almost a year that they had to have a court order before they could send out this video footage, in the end they just sent it out anyway.
My complaint is this: either the police didn't need a court order in which to send me this video footage, in which case they could have sent it to me in February or March last year; or, they did need a court order and so they broke the law by sending it to me without a court order.
Perhaps a third option is that the Met Police have a policy that dictates when they are to send out evidence, for example, not for private prosecutions but yes for personal injury claims. However, if such a policy exists - and if it does then considering that the Met Police are a public body then it should be in the public domain - then it wasn't clearly communicated to me. This resulted in a huge waste of my time, a huge waste of the police's time, a huge waste of public funds, including in paying for a barrister to attend court, and most of all, the ultimate result has been to deny me justice against the thug who assaulted me.
The reason why this huge delay really, really matters is because to take out a private legal claim against the suspect, in other words a personal injury claim for the injury he caused me on the night in question, I had a three-year time limit. If I had received the evidence within a month or two of asking then I would've been able to launch this private legal claim. As it is, these Met Police personnel have denied me any realistic chance of ever having justice against this thug.
-----
Dismissal for Natasha Dunn and/or Sarah Heron for their approach to a completely reasonable request for the Met Police to send me evidence that I needed in order to take out a private legal claim, and the resulting virtual legal impossibility of me now ever being able to gain justice against the thug who assaulted me.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: only a member of this blog may post a comment.