My abduction

When is an ombudsman not an ombudsman? Most of the time, if you live in the UK, where not tolerating corruption can now lead to an 'arrest'.

For the first week or so this post used asterisks instead of naming institutions and individuals. An inappropriate lack of response from the guilty means now that names are included. More details will follow in posts over the next few days.

As I’m about to take Kent Police to the Investigatory Powers Tribunal, if any former or current employee of Kent Police or Gravesham Borough Council knows things I can use regarding my case, it can be sent, anonymously if necessary, to: lee.wilson171021@yahoo.com

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Two officers turned up at my home at about 6pm on 15th of October, 2021. They didn’t say that this was for an arrest immediately, but mentioned the idea of ‘harassment’, which would later be elaborated as that I’d apparently been ‘harrassing’ staff of my habitually negligent social landlord Gravesham Borough Council. Within a few seconds one of the officers used the word ‘arrest’. They wanted to come in, and they had soon bagged my laptop and a hard drive. They did not take an Amazon tablet clearly visible on the floor, two Raspberry Pi computers or an MSI mini-desktop PC. They’re smallish but visible and monitor screens were in front of two of them. At the point of writing, Christmas Eve 2021, I think along the lines that they only need one machine, for whatever purpose.

As I was my usual non-confrontational self, though immediately extremely anxious, no cuffs were used. I thought, to the extent that I was capable of thinking at all at this point, that a brief bit of talk at the station would show the truth of the situation, that rationality would straighten things up - not that I’ve ever had any evidence of anything but the contrary.

In the car, more than a bit bewildered I asked the officers if they knew the background of the situation. They didn’t. I asked them if it bothered them that their job involved making an arrest without knowing the reason for it in any depth. It didn’t. Seemingly there is no line drawn in their minds as regards what they would arrest someone for, as if the law is unquestionable, as if the law grows on a tree. I didn’t labour the point or make reference to the SS argument. I felt like I was almost someone else at this point, studying what was happening, noting the responses as if in a laboratory. I’d kind of ‘dissociated’ I suppose we’d call it, slipped out of myself, a self-defensive mental process adopted in the face of trauma.

There seemed briefly to be some kind of access issue at the police station at Thames Way. The door wouldn’t open. For a moment I considered running, however useless that would have been.

All the usual expected stuff was next, being patted down, having the things in my pockets taken. One of the officers remarked that he liked my shoes. It’s just people working in a job, after all. Exploited, manipulated working people, dragged into corruption. Hopefully they’ll resign before long and find a more honest form of work. But, obviously enough, that doesn’t usually happen.

After my shoes were taken I was put in the cell, having had it explained that a switch can alter the light in the room. It later transpired that I wouldn’t find any alteration would allow sleep. Another button would allow me to speak to police or ask for the Duty Solicitor. The company, GT Stewart, has since sent mixed messages as regards their obligations, as well as being happy to state they have “no duty of care” while in receipt of public money.

I was asked to supply contact details for someone to be informed of my arrest, who’d also be present at the recorded interview. As my next of kin are 76 and 79 I didn’t feel like giving them the worry. I gave the name of a friend who it later turned out wouldn’t be available as she has had cancer and legitimate concerns about being in a room with several others, with Covid-related anxieties, which is fair enough.

Knowing that corruption was behind my arrest, that I had challenged the corrupt acts of several bodies and individuals – Gravesham Borough Council; the Housing Ombudsman; the Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman; Kent Police (including its Professional Standards department and its Office of Police and Crime Commissioner, headed by Conservative Councillor Matthew Scott) and the MP for Gravesham, Adam Holloway – I started to become quite panicked. Sitting on the bed, I considered trying to swallow my tongue or to bite off a bit of the pillow and choke on that. I considered offering to drop my complaints if we could bring the situation to a close. (The Duty Solicitor later rightly advised me not to do that, that I’d be undermining myself and the legitimacy of the communications leading to the arrest.) At the point of writing I’m intending to provide all my evidence online so that anyone reading can make their own mind up as to the reality of this corruption and what it says of the form of ‘democracy’ available in England, though I’ve been heartened to see from Twitter, a website I’d never planned to use, that much of the public know well what even The Guardian and The Independent, and to a great extent even The Canary, are unwilling to write about, for whatever reason. Though the prevalence of corruption has become more than usually visible in this last year, in national government and policing, it still feels necessary to write as if it isn’t obvious, because of the observable passivity shown towards this corruption, and the deference shown to the people guilty of it.

I was given time in the courtyard, a section of the ‘custody suite’ where you can see the sky, or deduce that the sky is in other circumstances visible. It’s about 5x5 square metres in size. (A few days later I’d find the Van Gogh painting The Courtyard, which now seems grimly accurate and not something I’d want on my wall, but ironically portrays just as well the mental state of anyone who wouldn’t stand up for themselves.) After a short period there a nurse arrived to check my blood pressure. I don’t remember exactly but I may have said that I felt a pain in the heart area, prior to this, and I may have mentioned having been to A&E before, in relation to anxiety and fear caused by Gravesham Borough Council’s handling of earlier aspects of my case. My blood pressure was extremely high, I was told now, and so there was mention of a hospital visit. It was explained that I could be held for a set number of hours legally, but that the clock stops for any hospital time, as if having extremely high blood pressure induced by wrongful arrest was some kind of holiday. I was keen to avoid the hospital visit therefore, but was told that my blood pressure meant there was risk of cardiac arrest. The police are keen to not have people die in custody of course, but – as many news stories show - not especially keen. Surviving the custody period seems to be regarded as a bonus.

A different pair of officers took me to the hospital. I asked them also if they knew the background to my arrest. They didn’t. The officer driving seemed a few hairs short of being a bit shirty about this. After all, who was in charge of the situation here? As before, I was warned that anything I said could be taken down as evidence. That didn’t bother me at all. I’ve done nothing wrong and would be speaking consistently at all times, consistent with the contents of my own allegations – stated in a letter sent to Kent Police in 2016 - and my many letters and emails and pointedly the statements I’ve made during complaints procedures with the two ombudsmen and the IOPC.

In the hospital I needed the toilet at one point and was told I could use it, but that the door would need to be ajar to an extent. While in there I considered forcing the door shut, smashing the mirror and using a piece of it to cut my throat. In the waiting room one of the officers asked me if I was married. It came out that he was 25 and had stopped thinking about that area of life. Making conversation, Darent Valley waiting times being what they are, but he seemed a bit chippy, for 25.

The waiting room was packed as usual and I sat wondering whether people were thinking the worst. When I was being examined the officers were having a laugh and a joke with the nurses. I was thinking about how twisted this was, how again people attending to me didn’t know the background of the arrest. Everything proceeding smoothly, everything hunky dory, people just ‘doing their jobs’. You think of Sociology material about the ‘organic society’ and division of labour. It would be wrong to have anything against the customer-facing staff working in a branch of HBSC, for example, just paying their bills and helping the public. But then higher up HBSC aren’t so innocent are they. People defending the police undiscerningly could do with dwelling on this split. We can be supportive of the minority of police officers who join up with good intentions and who keep to them, without endorsing the institution, which is parapolitical and a vessel and facilitator of systemic corruption. It is a minority of officers who are good and honest, also – to an extent the nature of policing, its division of labour, prevents many officers from seeing what their employer is; but if the majority of police officers were not corrupt or amenable to corruption there would be a ‘critical mass’ that prevented corruption from being practical and possible.

I was allowed a second stint in the courtyard but wasn’t too fussed about it. It’s an annoying illusion more than anything. Maybe it makes police officers feel a bit better about themselves. It dilutes the disgrace a bit I suppose, the disgraceful nature of policing when it involves abducting a member of the public and subjecting him to their will. (I suppose the existence of the courtyard is one way a police officer can tell himself he is unlike Wayne Couzens.) The third time I went back to the cell they forgot to ask for my shoes. I considered trying to choke on a lace. I spoke to the Duty Solicitor at about 3 a.m. although it was a different man from the first I’d spoken to, which would become a trend.

I didn’t sleep at all. I was offered breakfast, although some of the things listed on the menu were not available. I didn’t imagine avocado on toast or a bacon and mushroom toasty would be available, but hopefully it’s not ‘self-entitled’ to expect the police to not take the piss. It’s not food anyone would choose to eat on a regular basis, if at all – you think of someone on indefinite remand living on the worst ready meals available, who as I now very vividly know may not have done anything genuinely wrong, may just be in the process of being fitted up, in 2021, in a country which has ‘taken back control’.

There were several hours to wait till the recorded interview, which took place at about 1pm on the 16th. They provided an ‘appropriate adult’ and the Duty Solicitor I’d spoken to also came. We had a brief private chat first.

When we sat down for this interview the male officer present announced that I was now arrested again, this time for ‘stalking’. He gave a warped paraphrase of an email I’d sent to the council that made it sound as if I’d said, “I know where you have coffee.” I’ve re-read the relevant email since and it is demented how much distortion of what I’d said had to be achieved to arrive at that interpretation. To be perhaps overly generous I think police officers often develop a kind of policing-specific kind of paranoia that makes them see criminality in everything, warping things to a police-specific interpretation. In a sense police officers soon acquire a kind of PTSD which they become partly desensitised to – maybe that partly explains how Dalian Atkinson was tazored to death. But, I’ve been a regular at a particular coffee shop for over a year; former Director of Housing Kevin Burbidge was sitting outside once, and council staff unrelated to my case are sometimes present at that shop, which is why I had started to go there less, as I’ve told one staff member. They weren’t involved with my situation as far as I know, but their presence after nearly six years of misconduct from that council is triggering. At this point in time Kent Police have not spoken to any staff at that shop, which does make you wonder how much of an ‘investigation’ is actually occurring. They are, at best, mounting a biased case to victimise someone who has had the integrity to challenge provable corruption. It’s clever stuff, isn’t it – escalating corruption to cover up corruption. A British trademark. But in short, a staff member at that coffee shop could say in thirty seconds how the second idea of ‘stalking’ is drivel. I was there first. If Kevin Burbidge (whose salary was £92,000) started playing golf on my balcony would that make me a stalker? Interestingly the paperwork says ‘harassment’ twice instead of ‘stalking’, making me wonder if the police had belatedly realised how daft the idea was. I have not been de-arrested though in relation to either would-be charge.

The female officer present read what purported to be excerpts from my letters and emails. I’ve thought about this quite a bit since. As I’ve said, I didn’t sleep, had been to A&E and was highly anxious, enough to have thought many times of suicide. One or both of those excerpts, almost certainly both, are total fabrications. I have no way of knowing who faked them and don’t feel any need to be saying more than I know. I had taken my complaint to the Home Office three days before the arrest, with an email whose subject heading was ‘a matter of life and death - corruption’. I would think ‘safeguarding’ concerns meant it was read very soon. I believe it’s not unlikely that the Home Office instigated my arrest and then got Gravesham Borough Council to get in synch with them and the police. At any rate, I have still not had a reply from the Home Office two months later, when they say we should receive a reply within twenty days. In my view the arrest was the Home Office’s way of dealing with my very firmly worded email, which I will make publicly available. I’m not asserting that the Home Office was the instigator in absolute certainty, but that the timing, and that things that don’t add up regarding the council’s supposed allegations, mean the Home Office’s input seems more likely, especially when you consider its normal and long-term role in co-ordinating the corrupt parties in this situation and the increasingly aggressive treatment of dissent and protest. The Housing Ombudsman, the Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman and the police watchdog the IOPC are not independent bodies, they’re not freelancers, and their staff don’t merely take a bung on an individual and case-by-case basis – they exist deliberately and purely to contain situations, even when they’re sacking a police officer for stealing Jaffa Cakes as a bizarre PR move, a way of trying to show that Wayne Couzens was an anomaly. Apart from my documents and evidence, you’ll find links nearby and, if interested, more from your own googling that corroborate what I’m saying regarding the ombudsmen and watchdog. You pay for these. You pay to be potentially abused or for your family and loved ones to be abused and victimised. Additionally the Office of Police and Crime Commissioner is funded from Council Tax. Whether or not it’s true across the country, the OPCC at Kent Police is corrupt, and I’ve witnessed that this is true directly – they rubber-stamped an incompetent and dishonest contribution from Professional Standards with no effort or thought whatsoever in relation to my four pages of criticism. Stonewalling, as always. It’s what I’ve had to contend with for nearly six years, blatant corrupt stonewalling.

I explained in the interview that the situation had begun after a petty but very antisocial criminal was installed in the block of flats where I’ve lived since 1995. He was in fact the third antisocial criminal put in the same flat, the centre flat in a nine flat block, meaning that antisocial behaviour was broadcast to the most number of tenants. At that point we didn’t know he had eight convictions – newspaper reports on the ninth conviction established this. This neighbour had made a threatening approach of myself with his friend in June 2016, due to a second clumsily worded letter from the council, at a point where I’d been getting three hours’ sleep a night for fourteen months. With pre-existing depression and anxiety and suicide attempts in my late 20s which the council knew of from much communication, I had gone to London later that day with the intention of committing suicide. There will be a blog entry elsewhere about the police’s chaotic input at this stage, which in brief involved forcing entry to my flat and leaving a laptop switched on under piles of clothes, causing a fire hazard. The Duty Solicitor seemed to become extra alert to my situation then, once we’d spoken of this neighbour, which should have been something everyone in the room already knew about. I’d been arrested, for utterly half-arsed reasons. The solicitor remarked that it was “disgusting” that the council had endangered me – which also involved negligence from Kent Police - and portrayed the entirely believable scenario in which I’d get stabbed as retaliation for my part in the continuum of events leading to his eviction, an eviction which didn’t come for another few months. Absolutely nothing came of this situation for my neighbour – they didn’t approach let alone arrest him. And yet here I am on bail for defending myself with English words. Strange priorities.

After the interview I was put back in the cell. Despite my delirious feeling, it was clear to me that the officers present either knew nothing about the history of the situation, the context of my supposed ‘harassment’, or knew of it but were intent on conducting the interview for the purpose of creating a document supporting the allegations. I can just about believe that the way policing is structured means that it may be possible that neither officer really knew what they were doing, that they were fulfilling a role blindly. If the Home Office requested my arrest it would have been someone higher up they spoke to. Policing somehow actually ‘works’ by making sure the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing. It’s quite clever really, isn’t it, quite shrewd. One officer was in his early to mid-30s, the other, female officer her mid-to-late 50s. It seems equally hard to imagine that they were proceeding naively. How can you work for the police for any real length of time without becoming aware of corruption and bent coppers? It seems impossible to me, and from time to time whistleblowers appear, to suggest this. Brave and conscientious officers of that kind are incredibly rare though, and seldom seem to achieve visibility and traction from what they reveal, often because pointedly they’re female or from BAME backgrounds. Undiscerning supporters of the police usually have an interest in the perpetuation of misogyny and racism.

It seems odd that I was put back in the cell. Things had come to light that should have shown that I’d been wrongfully arrested. Would it have hurt to let me sit in a room, even with a guard? Why do you think I was arrested? Did the Home Office instigate it? Did the Council instigate the arrest? Am I a stalker? Am I a rabid lefty who doesn’t deserve to be listened to?

The solicitor secured for me to be let go ‘pending investigation’. Before I left I had to state whether I had ‘come to harm’ during custody. You feel you have to say no because you were not assaulted physically in the Sweeney/ Life on Mars fashion. I did come to harm though, didn’t I – I went to A&E because of the risk of cardiac arrest. I came to harm because of wrongful arrest, the latest instance of institutional abuse used against me for defending myself against corrupt individuals and institutions. Am I being ‘a snowflake’? Is my anger reasonable or not reasonable? Is public money well-spent on an ‘arrest’ like this? Are you glad I was ‘arrested’? I regard my ‘arrest’ as an abduction. Is that unreasonable? The interview showed that the context of my complaints, described as ‘harassment’ by a criminally negligent council that had endangered me in several ways, was not understood by the officers. The document the council supposedly supplied is a devious edit of the reality, a fraudulent account to achieve an arrest or at least police involvement. Two months have passed that should have shown the case to be ridiculous and the council and the corrupt nature of the ombudsmen being what were at fault. I’ve supplied plenty of material to show this. Should anyone have to accept an unfair, corrupt ‘decision’ made by an ombudsman or the IOPC? How do you think people feel who are wrongly arrested or let down by the police? Rape victims, victims of racial profiling? I could already empathise that these policing practices can cause fresh trauma and PTSD, compound the trauma already present. Institutional gaslighting is seriously maddening. My arrest has strengthened this empathy. I’m a white male who managed to get a modest degree, but I’m not successful or middle class. I’ve been unwell a long time, and the police and council knew of my condition and my vulnerability.

Since the arrest I’ve often woken up in the night several times immediately in a panicked condition. I can imagine petty criminals and their weed-addled fans reading this and thinking I’m ‘a pussy’. It’s a big difference, to be arrested and to be on bail for challenging corruption, as compared to mindlessly scrapping in a club or breaking into a shop at 4 a.m. When you know the weight that’s being put behind your victimisation the feeling is overwhelming. These people, from the council to the police, have not let up in their victimisation of me despite knowing of my condition, and despite my strong arguments in the complaints procedures, despite my having completely run rings around these liars for nearly six years in terms of effort and integrity.

Often before I fall asleep now I’ll see a police car in my head – those images you get before nodding off into dreaming. Seeing an English police car passing me on the road causes anxiety. Being in a room when police officers, real or fictional, are on television causes anxiety. These are triggers. I have PTSD from what the council, police and ombudsmen had already done before the arrest, but the symptoms have, in these ways, been worse since. I’ve read articles about wrongful arrest, and compensation sums of £5000 being awarded. That is nowhere near enough, in the circumstances, after six years. There has just been far too much sustained true systemic corruption – a solid web of collaboration between several institutions. I’ve read of court cases where these kinds of behaviour lead to compensation of near to half a million, and have spoken to someone recently, an advocate who was involved in a case where a victim of policing received £1,000,000. I’ve told the Home Office I want £275,000. It’s not primarily about the money, but I can’t have the last six years back, and these people need to be hit hard. The Chief Executive and Directors at the council are certainly people obsessed with money, having stonewalled me the way they have to preserve their privilege, their stolen freedom, and are no more than amoral accountants totally unsuited to the roles they are overpaid to do. I will enjoy the money, and rightly. A reward, for sticking to my guns, for weathering illness that’s come of this, a reward for telling the truth and fighting for something of lasting public benefit. Many people in this situation deserve to lose their jobs and a lot more. Will this all be covered up, temporarily or permanently? I may soon be driven to my death. Will something come of my death if so? I’d like to think it’s worth fighting, even if you have to sacrifice yourself as part of the fight.