Any large organisation is likely to contain some wrong’uns. Employees who are lazy, corrupt or just plain nasty. Luckily for us and the for the organisations in question, such dodgy employees are few and far between.
Unfortunately for the people of London, their police force, the Metropolitan Police seems to contain a disproportionate amount of wrong’uns. There are officers who are indolent and lazy, those who are unnecessarily violent, those who eschew impartial policing in order to promote particular brands of politics, officers who are dishonest and corrupt and so on and so on.
Some of these bad officers have been or are in the process of being exposed to public view. But every time a bad or corrupt or lazy officer is revealed it also creates a question in the minds of the public and that question is ‘how many more like this are there’?
Sadly, the answer to that question appears to be ‘a lot’. Following on from the revelations that Met officers and civilian staff failed to properly handle a missing persons case, which tragically ended up with the murders of the two women reported missing, two officers who were involved in this case have appeared in court. They were accused of misconduct in public office for sharing pictures of the two women victims in the murder case mentioned above in a Whatsapp group for other Met officers.
The two officers who had been tasked with standing guard over the area where the bodies of Bibaa Henry, 46, and Nicole Smallman, 27 were found but left their posts in order to take unauthorised images of the bodies. These images, one of which was doctored to show an officer’s face superimposed on the head of one of the dead women, were then sent to other officers for entertainment purposes.
GB News said:
Two Metropolitan Police officers accused of sharing photos of the bodies of two murdered sisters on WhatsApp have pleaded guilty to misconduct in a public office.
Pc Deniz Jaffer and Pc Jamie Lewis were assigned to protect the scene after sisters Bibaa Henry, 46, and Nicole Smallman, 27, were found dead in bushes in Fryent Country Park in Wembley, north-west London.
Instead, they breached the cordon to take “inappropriate” and “unauthorised” photographs of the bodies, which were then shared on WhatsApp.
Jaffer took four photographs and Lewis took two and one of the images sent to a female colleague had Lewis’s face superimposed onto it.
The murderer of Ms Henry and Ms Smallman, Danyal Hussain, was eventually apprehended and convicted of the murders and sentenced to a life term with a minimum of 35 years to be served. Jaffer and Lewis could have endangered this conviction by entering into what was a forensically sterile area and taking the pictures. Thankfully this did not happen but there is the distinct possiblity that they could have disturbed or destroyed evidence that might have been vital to the case.
As someone who earlier in life worked closely with the police when I was a court reporter and photojournalist, it was and is still apparent to me that there has always been a form of gallows humour among police officers. As in any profession that deals with tragedy or death this form of humour is a way of coping with what police officers see. However what Lewis and Jaffar did goes way way beyond gallows humour or anything like that. This is a world away to what I was told used to go on, such as when physical photographs of gruesome crime scenes were pulled out of filing cabinets by more senior officers and used to both scare and prepare police probationers for what they might see as part of their jobs. That served a purpose. It both prepared junior officers to see bad stuff and helped to weed out those who might not be psychologically capable of police work. What Lewis and Jaffar did was nothing like this. This was abusing the bodies of the dead for entertainment purposes and is in my view completely unacceptable.
What makes this case even more egregious than it already is is that Lewis and Jaffar were ordered by senior officers to guard the crime scene, they were told to not move from the positions that they had been placed in so as to preserve the forensic evidence for later examination. The disobeyed that direct order from superiors and entered the bushes in order to photograph the corpses of the murder victims.
There is no mention of any court imposed punishment on Lewis and Jaffar in any media I can find which means that they will most likely be sentenced at a later date. It is to be hoped that the punishment that they receive is exemplary in order to discourage other officers from behaving in this manner. Not only did they humiliate the victims post mortem and distress the victims families and friends, their actions could also have negatively affected the case against Hussain and could even have led to this murderer walking free.
I conclude this piece by again asking the question that many others must surely also be asking and that question is: How many other wrong’uns like Jaffar and Lewis are still employed by the Metropolitan Police?
Could it be that the whole system is in a mess? The ordinary decent types, often ex services, have been replaced by graduate entrance schemes where people are rapidly promoted to high rank and often having no idea how the job really runs go on to recruit those like themselves. Whatever happened to the solid, sensible and respected Dixon of Dock Green type officers we saw so much of in years gone by?
Sadly, I have seen the Met in Brent and Harrow degenerate over the last 30yrs from a reasonably trusted police force, to an absolute travesty and it’s NOT about “the Tory cuts”, is a change in the culture from policing by consent, to an almost universal contempt for the public who pay their salaries.
From personal experience, they fail to turn up to crimes, when they do, rarely seem to act unless there’s an easy nick or a fine involved. Serious crimes deemed not worthy of investigation or “no crimed” with no explanation, despite hard evidence, CCTV, witnesses.
They lie, conconct fake “complaints from a member of the public” and make up or “interpret” bad laws to target anyone who they don’t like or asks too many awkward questions.
The are prepared to close ranks even with dozens of independent, impeccable community witnesses present, to try and fit up and take down those who challenge their authority.
They tried that stunt with me and kept me in limbo for months.
They called it a “hate crime” yet nothing happened, even going so far as to try and get witnesses to doubt their own recollection to change their original testimony.
After it all collapsed, “insufficient evidence”, the senior officer, highly commended, who had it in for me, “retired for personal reasons”. The clown of an “investigating officer” even admitted in another forum, attended by several of my acquaintances (unknown to him), that he’d been told to “revisit the witness, preferably ones who were opponents, to get them to “reassess their recollections”. Fortunately, they all told him to effectively get stuffed, but equally, it could’ve gone the other way and I could’ve ended up in prison, a permanent smear on my reputation, to “keep me quiet”.
Fortunately it all collapsed, but not before the egregious bastards had data-raped me, prints, DNA, the lot. The really sick joke was the officer to did the raping, was present at that meeting where I didn’t say what I was alleged to have said in the presence of 200 people, plods, priests, rabbis, imams, councillors, the mayor, children, local worthies.
If I had said what I was alleged to have said, I would have been chucked out and cautioned there and then.
As I said, the Met are corrupt, the rot so entrenched, the leadership so piss-poor, that they are now a danger to the public, having transformed under their Common Purpose doctrine, from policing by consent into just another brutal, corrupt Eurostyle gendarmerie.
I now avoid them at all costs. Call me of you want to publish this
Your experience of the Met is I’m afraid all too common, some of your experience is also all too familiar to my own personal situation.