Darren Grimes who along with the historian Dr David Starkey were subjected to a vexatious complaint about ‘racism’ and ‘stirring up racial hatred’ which was later dropped following public pressure, are bringing an official complaint against the Metropolitan Police about their force’s conduct. According to various press reports, Mr Grimes and Dr Starkey are submitting a formal complaint to the Met about this vexatious complaint and in particularly about the conduct of a particular police officer.
The Daily Mail reports that:
They are seeking an apology from the Metropolitan Police for causing ‘significant distress’ and exposing them to the ‘most serious risk of reputational damage’ as they investigated the pair for allegedly stirring up racial hatred.
In a copy of the complaint seen by MailOnline, Mr Grimes and Dr Starkey through their lawyer Luke Gittos also claim that senior officers in the force made ‘significant operational decisions on the basis of media commentary and social media posting’.
Personally I don’t think that they should just be seeking an apology although a public apology from the Met may be helpful in getting even more justice from the unjust Met in the future. The allegations about how senior officers made operational decisions based on leftist ire on social media is particularly worrying. This is because it implies that if enough leftists and identity politics types whine loudly enough on Twitter, then the target of their whines will be targetted for harassment by the police. This is not how policing should be run.
Mr Grimes and Dr Starkey are, again according to the Mail, alleging that bending the knee, both literally and figuratively, have played a part in the Met deciding to advance this case.
The Mail added:
The complaint adds that the Met’s investigation of Dr Starkey’s remarks, which were made in June, was ‘primarily compelled by deference to’ Black Lives Matter – an ‘organisation’, the letter claims, which had ‘overtly engaged in criminal conduct’.
Again this is worrying for anybody who wants to see honest police officers working in honest police forces. The Met have pandered so much to the BLM/Marxists that they are allowing this group to dictate operational policy.
One aspect of this complaint that is particularly concerning are the allegations against a specific officer, Detective Constable Imtiaz Shah of South Western BCU Public Protection Unit. The complaint alleges that DC Shah had in his communications with Mr Grimes’s lawyers, ‘encouraged deference to the BLM group’. Yet again we have a situation where it appears that unrepresentative leftist or identity politics groups are using the policing system as a cudgel against their political enemies. This is the end result, that many warned would happen, when police are politicised.
The complaint also manages to clear up questions that I and others have had about what part of the Met this complaint came from. Many of assumed that it would have come from Sadiq Khan’s ‘hate crime hub’ but it did not. This ‘hub’ is overtly politicised and a lot of us expected that this harassment of Mr Grimes and Dr Starkey had come from there. However what the complaint has revealed is that the situation regarding politicisation in the Met is far worse than many of us had assumed. The politicisation rot is not just present in one unit, but seems to be spread across the Met. This is because this vexatious complaint and the harassment of Dr Starkey and Mr Grimes was allegedly coming from DC Shah’s section which is noting to do with Sadiq Khan’s ‘hate crime’ vanity project.
When Basic Command Units such as that which DC Shah works in and which is managed by Chief Superintendent Elizabeth Chapple , a graduate police entryist whose previous experience was in Human Resources and banking, are so overtly politicised as to allegedly bow down to BLM/Marxists, then rest assured the Met has been pretty well hollowed out by leftist identity politics types. The fact that the Met even bothered to accept this vexatious and baseless complaint against Dr Starkey and Mr Grimes should tell us a lot about how poorly ordinary Londoner’s are being policed. The effort and resources expended by the South West Basic Command Unit on this pointless harassment of two innocent people should really have been expended on helping to keep Londoner’s safe from increasing levels of violence and crime.
I wish Mr Grimes and Dr Starkey well in their official complaint. I suspect that the end result will be that the Met manage to worm their way out of this and the case will eventually end up before the civil courts. In any event this case as it progresses may well reveal much about how corrupted the Met has become by its embracing of leftist and identity politics narratives and how much the Met are wasting on what are ‘nothingburger’ cases whilst there is much genuine policing that needs to be done.
You can read the entirety of the complaint via the Guido Fawkes site linked below:
Agree, they should be seeking costs and damages too
Can they sue individual officers and make them, not MET, pay?
I’m not sure that they will be able to make those like DC Shah pay from their own pockets, especially if they say that they that they were only ‘following orders’ from higher ups to pander to and virtually take instruction from BLM/Marxists.