Well That's One Job Done.

I've just finished with my scheduled 12:00 (local) telephone call to the Officer In Charge (OIC) of the investigation known by the codeword "Sarastro." As is routine he began by expressing frustration that my decision to answer bail in Westminster rather than Croydon totally screwed up his plan. He then insisted that I return to Croydon so we could get things sorted because I quote; "This has been dragging on for a long time now." When I pointed out that the delay is entirely his fault he became annoyed and demanded that I attend the police station or "He would send people round at dawn to have me dragged out of bed." After I told him that if he thought he had legal grounds to do that he should jolly well get on with it he suddenly became more co-operative.

He was though still insistent that I would be charged no matter what. This obviously led into a brief discussion of what offence exactly he intended to charge me with. He suggested Section 1.1 of the 1971 Criminal Damage Act so I pointed that begins with the phrase; "A person who without lawful excuse destroys or damages any property belonging to another." He then sort repeated the sentence "Without lawful excuse, without lawful excuse." over and over again. So I then asked him if he'd bothered contact Croydon Magistrates Court or the Safer Neighbourhood Team (SNT) to investigate the question of lawful excuse which needs to be absent for the offence to occur. When he replied that he hadn't I suggested that he did and told him I'd been phoning him back on Thursday (11/7/13) to check his progress.

This again agitated him and he told me that I don't get to tell the police what to do because; "I've committed a crime." I then pointed out that assertion rather goes against the innocent until proved guilty principle and highlights the problem with his investigation - that he had decided I was guilty of a crime rather then first investigating to see if a crime had been committed.

Anyway the long and the short of it is he will now check with the SNT and I will email him copies of the Magistrates papers and I will call him back on Thursday. I hope he has the correct answer by then otherwise his charge sheet will have to read; Attempting to pervert the course of justice, false imprisonment, attempted false imprisonment and the attempted theft of one hammer.

11:30 on 9/7/13

Edited at around 20:00 on 9/7/13.

At around 17:00 I emailed Sarastro copies of the initial application to Croydon Magistrates Court regarding the Statutory Nuisance offence including the supporting witness statement. I also email copies of the summons, the judgement and the explanation of the judgement. For good measure I also threw in copies of letters from the then local MP (Malcolm Wicks - Labour) regarding the situation.

Feeling charitable I also included an explanatory email. This pointed out that while the Court was extremely vague in the reasons for it's ruling they along with Croydon Council, the then local MP and I believe the then Croydon borough police commander had conceded that multiple agents of the property owner had engaged in a campaign of harassment and nuisance against residents of my property and others. However a closure order was not imposed because the Court felt that vicarious liability could not be argued in a case such as this. That is a ruling that contradicts around 200 years of precedent and case law.

This is obviously important to Sarastro's investigation because it raises the question of whether the current occupants of the address are lawful occupants entitled to make complaints to the police about damage to the property. It also raises the question of whether any complaints they or their associates make are in fact genuine or just the latest round in the harassment campaign. It also raises the question of whether the criteria laid down in Section 2 of the 1971 Criminal Damage Act have been fulfilled. This is important because if the Section 2 criteria have been fulfilled the offences listed in Section 1 of the act could not have occurred.

I finished by requesting that Sarastro takes this new information to his superior officer and asks him to review the decision to charge me. That is because if they do proceed to charge the first question any Judge or lawyer will ask is; why?

If you've been reading my Twitter feed you would know that all this caused my home Internet connection to mysteriously fail. Anyway since making my Tweets about this the occupants of the address have been engaging in their usual practise of sending their children into the garden to shout abuse at me. On this occasion the children were very excited about a DVD of CCTV footage their parents had given to the police. Not half as excited about it as I am though because normal people don't put their neighbours under covert surveillance on the grounds it's illegal. So with this paperwork and that DVD Sarastro's next move is going to have to be contacting SO15's crimes against humanity team