West Yorkshire Police complaints are rubbish. Sgt Jo Beecroft gets away with it, Sgt Al Perry is a plonker who threatened to sue me

So, a run-down of what happened when I complained to West Yorkshire Police about Sgt Jo Beecroft, the blonde police woman / Greenbelt Site Manager mentioned in several previous blogs.

I made my first police complaint in August 2012. It took this long (11 and a bit months) to get round to it because I was in hospital, and then too traumatised to talk about it, then Greenbelt wouldn’t tell me Jo Beecroft’s name and force (and she refused to show me any police ID when I’d asked for it at the time), and I wanted to wait until after the mediation with Greenbelt, and after I had written a letter via Greenbelt to Jo Beecroft suggesting alternative ways of dealing with this (e.g. her doing a Mental Health First Aid course).

So in August 2012 I filled in the official police complaints form on the website on West Yorkshire Police. They didn’t at the time have any alternative means given of making a complaint, and when I clicked the button on the form, the website seemed to accept it, so I waited to hear back from them. I never did, and West Yorkshire police claim to have no record of this, and despite circumstantial evidence like a copy of my statement which I emailed to a friend for proofreading in August 2012, won’t accept that this complaint ever existed. How very convenient for them.

By November 2012, I hadn’t heard back from West Yorkshire police, so I put another complaint in. The outcome of this was a laughably bad record of an interview by Police Sergeant 1870 Al Perry with Sgt Jo Beecroft, where everything was presented as ‘You claim… but Sgt Beecroft states that…’. Lots of things that Jo Beecroft said which were provably untrue were accepted as fact, for example ‘I would not have used terminology such as “has no insight”‘, when this was recorded on my mobile phone, and saying she’d called the mental health crisis team as I’d asked, when the NHS records have no record of such a call ever being made (and I asked them to check three times). There were very many of these discrepancies, but when I replied to the letter pointing this out, it was ignored.

In February 2013, I made another complaint to Sgt Al Perry, politely pointing out that his ‘investigation’ was pants, and nothing like the very good investigation done by Gloucestershire police complaints (which ended in September 2012 with a 20 page report containing an ‘unconditional apology’ for my ‘wrongful arrest’). I listed the most glaring lies by Jo Beecroft, highlighted the biased nature of Al Perry’s writing, and asked for another police officer (not Al Perry) to conduct a ‘local investigation’ like the one by Gloucestershire police. There was some back-and-forth, and in March 2013 I wrote the following to Al Perry:

My second complaint should not have been treated as ‘a dissatisfaction issue’, because it was about a police officer discriminating against a vulnerable person from a minority group, to an extent which may be hate crime. I was given no information nor choices about the procedure, and there was no clear mechanism for me to challenge the unacceptable response.

Sgt Al Perry (still, despite my request that it not be him) started off by asking me for contact details of people named in my statement, then said that he wasn’t going to investigate it because more than a year had passed between the event and my complaint. This was sent off to the IPCC, and despite my telling the IPCC that I had reported inside the time limit but West Yorkshire had ‘lost’ my initial report, and that I could not have reported any earlier because of being sectioned, trauma, and Jo Beecroft refusing to show ID / Greenbelt not telling me who she was, the IPCC ruled that my complaint was ‘out of time’. Police complaints have to be made within a year of the incident to ‘count’, apparently. I was very upset by this, and it was the catalyst to setting up this blog, because I felt that I’d tried everything else and there was never going to be any accountability.

In July 2013, I was thinking about it and remembered that I’d said before the initial IPCC decision that what Jo Beecroft said and did might count as a hate crime / hate incident, which don’t ‘run out of time’ in the way that police complaints do. I went back to West Yorkshire police complaints, and despite my request, I had to deal with Sgt Al Perry again. I asked why it hadn’t been investigated as a hate incident / crime. I reproduce the resulting email exchange below.

Sgt Al Perry 1870:

What you have described in your complaint letter is not a hate crime and Inspector Beecroft is not going to be investigated regarding this matter. Your complaint has been discontinued by the IPCC and City and Holbeck police will not be taking any further action in your case.

Me:

From the Association of Chief Police Officers:

‘What is disability hate crime?

Hate crimes and incidents are any crime or incident which is targeted at a victim because of the offender’s hostility or prejudice against an identifiable group of people.

So any incident or crime, which is perceived by the victim or any
other person to be motivated because of a person’s disability or
perceived disability will be recorded as such.’

So at the very least, it is a disability hate incident, because Jo
Beecroft used disability-related slurs (which were not true) about me.
…
So: are you going to act on my report of disability hate by a serving police officer? Is this report going to be attached to Jo Beecroft’s
police record? Remember, what she said was recorded.

If not, how do I put in a formal complaint?

Sgt Al Perry 1870:

My understanding was that you have already put in a formal complaint and the IPCC have discontinued it. That is the end of the process I am afraid. Unless you have any new information or evidence other than you have already presented then I feel that any further communication would not be useful.

Me:

I have put in a complaint, and under your rules the IPCC said it was out of time for recording complaints against a police officer.

However, there is not a time limit on recording hate crime / hate
incidents, so it is not too late to have it investigated and put on
police records that Sgt Beecroft committed a hate crime / hate
incident.

Are you going to record the hate crime / hate incident by Sgt Beecroft?

If not, how do I put in a complaint to the IPCC about your failure to record hate crime?

Sgt Al Perry 1870

There is insufficient evidence to record a hate crime against Insp Beecroft.

Me:

That is ridiculous. There are many witnesses, and she recorded hate speech onto my phone.

Please tell me how to complain to the IPCC, about Insp Beecroft’s hate speech, and about your failure to investigate her.

Sgt Al Perry 1870:

I think you know how to complain to the IPCC as you have done it before. However  here is there website address www.ipcc.gov.uk .

I would remind you that you have already done this and they did not allow your complaint. I must tell you that I do not intend to continue this conversation as I as do not believe it is constructive to do so. I realise that you are upset about this matter but the IPCC have made their decision.

Me:

It is simply not true that I have complained to the IPCC before. As you well know, you referred the case to them yourself, because you did not want to investigate Sgt Beecroft. The IPCC then found that your initial response to my complaint was not adequate. You did not say sorry for this.

I have now put in two separate complaints to the IPCC, one about you, one about Sgt Beecroft.

I am going to be taking part in national campaign in the autumn about how people with mental health problems are treated by the police, with a major mental health charity. I shall make sure to name you and Sgt Beecroft specifically, and West Yorkshire police generally, for their appallingly bad practice, which stands in such contrast to Gloucestershire police where a thorough investigation offered me an ‘unconditional apology’ for my ‘wrongful arrest’. My recording of Sgt Beecroft using disablist abusive hate speech towards me may even get played on national radio and TV.

Thank you for your supportive and helpful attitude throughout, which has certainly contributed to re-establishing my faith in the Police.

Sgt Al Perry 1870:

This is the last communication I will have with you over this matter unless directed by my supervisors otherwise. I have to warn you that if you name me publicly and accuse me of wrong doing I will personally seek legal advice with regard to defamation of character. Please do not expose yourself to legal action by saying something you may later regret.

So, I hereby name Police Sergeant Al Perry 1870 of West Yorkshire Police. I believe that he has carried out an appallingly poor and biased investigation into my second complaint, and has messed up any accountability of Sgt Jo Beecroft by not launching a proper investigation at that point when he very clearly should have. I believe that Sgt Perry has not taken responsibility for his own poor practice, by refusing to provide information about the IPCC alongside his clearly unsatisfactory reports. I believe Sgt Al Perry to be a rubbish police officer, and unpleasant person.

I will not speculate on Sgt Al Perry’s state of mind, or the health of the complaints department of West Yorkshire Police – the motivation behind losing my first complaint, making a mess of the second, refusing to investigate the third, and ignoring a clear report of a hate incident by one of their own officers, I leave as an exercise to the reader.

I would remind Sgt Perry and anyone else who would like to take legal action against me that it would be counterproductive to do so. I would suggest they familiarise themselves with the Streisand effect, whereby trying to suppress information on the Internet has the paradoxical effect of making it more widely known. I would also remind them that it would cost them a considerable amount in legal fees, to no purpose, since I live mostly on disability benefits with negligible savings, so they would have no prospects of even getting their costs back, and I have nothing they can take away anyway.

I am angry that no-one, not Greenbelt, and not the police complaints department, will hold Sgt Jo Beecroft accountable for what she did. Suggestions as to how to take this further are extremely welcome. Thank you for reading.

Published 24th August 2013, as usual ignore the dates on WordPress.