After I was falsely arrested for the very first time, over two years ago, we initiated the official police complaints procedure.... This is the email we have just sent back to the 'independent inspector' in response to her outcomes. The short version is that, as expected, the system is engineered specifically to never find fault:

"Michael has asked me to respond to your mail of 10 October. You will appreciate that the outcome of your review merely confirms our understanding that the process is not fit for purpose. In any other environment where an internal review of a complaint has been regarded as unsatisfactory it is possible for an external process to re-examine the whole complaint as a new issue. In other words a formal appeal is regarded as essential.

In what you are doing and have said you are doing you are in fact only confirming that there is no appeal at all for the police internal review process and that your sole function is to validate that process and not examine the unfairness of the outcome.

On top of that you have said that you 'are not a lawyer' and 'are not there to interpret the law' and yet the whole basis of your refusal to consider our complaint is on your interpretation of section 32 of PACE which you have got wrong in exactly the same way as police officers get it wrong. As a lawyer of almost 60 years standing, I can tell you that the words

"(1)A constable may search an arrested person, in any case where the person to be searched has been arrested at a place other than a police station, if the constable has reasonable grounds for believing that the arrested person may present a danger to himself or others.

(2)Subject to subsections (3) to (5) below, a constable shall also have power in any such case— ..."

in section 32 mean that the following provisions of section 32, rather than s 19, on which the police rely can only be used where the arrest had taken place because of a fear of imminent danger to either the victim or the perpetrator.

Categorically that provision should not be used in order to fish for evidence to justify an arrest which had already taken place for a totally different reasons.

At no stage was there ever any pretence that harm was being prevented, but instead a set of spurious self-serving reasons ranging from the failure to attend a non-existent interview, to unproven allegations of stalking and harassment where no harm had been established or threatened. I strongly advise you to take proper independent legal advice on this. You have watched the bodyworn evidence, and know that I am correct.

Had you inquired further you would have found out that none of three complaints on which Michael had been arrested none of which were proved as valid despite the arrest and search and were eventually dismissed by the CPS for the ludicrous case that it was (and which the prejudiced OIC followed up with an equally doomed civil injunction case at great cost to the force).

By comparison despite our having provided over 700 (Yes, 700!) separate items of video evidence showing the stalking and harassment being carried out by the perpetrator against Michael, the perpetrator has only been arrested for odd individual actions which even the police could not validly ignore and so that at the most a slap on the wrist or caution would ensue. Even now the perpetrator will be facing the magistrates in December on a single event even they could not ignore, perpetrated against me rather than Michael.

The medical evidence cannot be ignored either. During the years of abuse Michael has suffered at the hands of both the SNT and the aggressive stsnker, he has been hospitalised three times, Ambulances have had to have been called both by myself and the police on numerous occasions, he has suffered a broken arm, and has been diagnosed with a serious stress induced medical condition, Barrett's oesophagus, which is directly related to prolonged stress. During this time the stalker has suffered nothing. I should add that I now suffer almost instantaneous back spasms when one of these events occurs because of what has been done to us as much by the officers as the original perpetrator whome you are all indirectly protecting.

The overwhelming imbalance of the treatment handed out to Michael as opposed to the perpetrator of many proven crimes against michael has been completely ignored by you and you have merely parroted the police line that effectively each party was equally guilty. It is now beyond doubt that the treatment meted out to Michael by the police over the last three years has taken effect as punishment without trial for his temerity in challenging their failure to carry out their duty in respect to the stalking and harassment he has suffered.

The support you and the investigator have given those officers has ensured no learning takes place, and their supervising officers can wash their hands of it.

You have also not commented either on the very specific complaints about the factual misstatements and omissions in the original outcome each of which was fully supported by evidence that was available had you asked for it, nor have you commented on a process which is fundamentally unfair because the original investigator had no obligation to crosscheck any of the facts given to her by the officers before treating them as true.

The reality is that the process you have underwritten by your review breaches all of the following Human Rights:

Article 5: Right to liberty and security

Article 6: Right to a fair trial

Article 7: No punishment without law

Article 8: Respect for your private and family life, home and correspondence

Protocol 1, Article 1: Right to peaceful enjoyment of your property

AND prevented any 'learning' to take place to prevent

1) Such excesses of authority by junior officers in the future

2) Removal of the mantra that the 'officer in the case' can proceed without interference from those who should be supervising and controlling them

3) The fallacy that all neighbour disputes are 50/50.

Finally, nothing in your review, let alone the initial complaint handling, has sought to understand why the complaint was made, and what could be done to prevent further complaint on the same grounds.

Remember, ALL disability related complaints are to be looked at from the point of view of the victim, not the perpetrator - it is completely irrelevant in law that the perpetrator did or did not know what they were doing was wrong.

I need your assurance that this email will be referred to someone higher up in your organisation with the power to review how complaints are handled in future so that these points can be seen to be taken seriously and that the answer I get will be framed from the point of view of the organisation as a whole and not yourself as investigator with limited powers. "