For two years I was sat upon a ticking time bomb. An inscrutable device, whose workings I couldn’t understand, but which threatened to blow my life apart were it to go off. It didn’t go off, it was eventually safely defused, which is why I am here to talk about it, but for the time it was ticking it added fear and uncertainty to every part of my life.

In February 2006, when the pigs came knocking, I had a job I liked, with a decent wage, a house in the ‘burbs that I could just about afford, a beautiful lady who said she loved me (when she was drunk), and the most gorgeous 7 month old baby boy who worshiped his dad almost as much as I worshiped him. I stood to lose all of these if the efforts of Sussex Police were to achieve their aims. The three charges they bought against me – supply of cocaine, supply of cannabis and money laundering - all carried a minimum of a custodial sentence. I was facing prison if I were to be found guilty of even one of the three charges.

The fact that I was innocent of all three was of little consequence, it only made it more confounding. My arrest had seemed ludicrous, and being charged with these three offences four months later made even less sense. I went into a period of shock following both these occasions and was signed off work for a number of weeks. My head was spun. My baby was in his first year, so it had been a long time since anyone in our house had slept for longer than three hours at a time, so our mental states were already quite delicate. Following my arrest I really didn’t know what was going on. Surely, a publicly funded organisation wouldn’t start an expensive criminal proceeding if they didn’t think they had a chance of winning it? Did they know something I didn’t? If they did, they weren’t telling me.

Lesson learned no#1 - The law is not interested in right or wrong, only results.

When the police came knocking on my door that Saturday teatime, they weren’t looking for me. They were looking for a friend of mine. To protect his identity let’s call him Dante. Dante had got himself involved in some dodgy dealings; drugs, money and cars. But I hadn’t seen him in a long time so I didn’t know where he was. I still don’t, and neither do the police. Even after two years reportedly chasing someone who (we now know) hasn’t gone far, they have scored a big fat nada. But perhaps this is because they weren’t actually trying too hard. Rather than expend their efforts trying to catch someone who didn’t want to be caught, they had a much easier target. A target who wasn’t going anywhere, because he had a job and a family and a bus to catch every morning. Even if I had only the most tenuous of connections to this bundle of drugs and money the pigs had lucked across, perhaps they could build something from it.

It became clear that, rather than attempt to catch a possible drug dealer, Sussex Police were instead going to try their best to bang up an innocent associate of his. Just because they could. Whether I was guilty or innocent, moral or immoral, a good or a bad person didn’t matter. It was only about what they could manage to make for the minimum amount of effort.

Obviously, the resources spent trying to prosecute me (the total cost of which runs into the tens of thousands of pounds) would have been much better employed in activities such as solving crimes, serving the community, or making our streets a safer place. But this is not how the system works. The only measure of success to a Police Officer is their conviction rate, so this is all they focus on. In the choice between a criminal who runs, and an innocent who doesn’t, the easiest conviction is usually with the innocent. Because, even picking someone entirely at random, if you were to examine their lives closely enough, or put them under enough pressure, you are bound to find they are guilty of something. And this just might give you something to work with.

to be continued …

This entry was posted on Friday, July 4th, 2008 at 8:03 pm and is filed under criminal justice, introspection, philosophy, society. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.