Update / reminder, October 2017 

Dorset Police, Hampshire Police, PCCs, the IPCC, Inspectorate of Constabulary, Information Commissioner and Tribunal, Judges and Judicial Ombudsman, Home Secretary, MPs, etc., STILL HAVE THEIR HEADS STUCK IN THE SAND – POLICE INCOMPETENCE, WASTE, CORRUPTION, FRAUD, PROTECTION, COVER-UP

See the menu on the Dorset Speed website for the full history and evidence of these failures. The aim of this page is to simply detail some of the key facts, as there are no signs yet that any of those public officials or organisations are doing anything about past failures or working towards better standards. Some of those individuals are still in their positions and presumably still ensuring that their failures continue.

For those not familiar with the background / context, here is a brief overview  . The following points stand up on their own without the vast background and other failures.

1. Dorset Police made a £million with a camera justified by, and later covered up by, not one but a whole shocking catalogue of lies . Some will say that the money would not have been made if drivers had not broken the law but a) the lies were to everyone who trusted that the police were working for their safety and b) "police misconduct would not happen if there were not law breakers" is a pretty poor excuse for lying to the public to make money from them, which is FRAUD (wrongful or criminal deception intended to result in financial or personal gain).

2. I seemed to hit the nail on the head with a one sentence FOI request about the cost of the awareness courses. Dorset Police would have to:
a) If honest, provide an answer which would show that the course profit was about 700% , or
b) They would have to try to ignore / dodge the question, or
c) They would have to provide vague and massively inflated costs to try to hide the profit, or
d) They would have to declare me "vexatious" so they didn't have to answer anything.

They chose b) and then when that failed, they chose c), and then of course, when I pushed them for a proper breakdown, they chose d), declaring me vexatious when my previous FOI investigation had revealed and stopped a £1million fraud, an excellent demonstrating of using FOI correctly for the benefit of the public. This resulted in a 2 year freedom of information battle and (along with other points) a 2 year complaint battle, at no doubt considerable cost to the police as well as me, when a competent and honest organisation with nothing to hide would have provided a proper answer in about 10 minutes. I won't repeat all that here but all the information, background and evidence and shocking spread of the cover-up and protection is on my name and shame page.

3. On with the key standalone points: Martyn Underhill passed the investigation to Colin Smith, Head of Professional Standards at Hampshire Police. He did seem impartial in the early stages and keenly agreed with both of the terms of the complaint, click to actually hear him,  misrepresentation of finances , and misrepresentation of safety benefit , but after the second meeting he went completely silent. Although I asked him to look at the Speed on Green camera, he did not. In this clip it is clear that the "impartiality" is starting to fade: "lying and inflating is within our ballgame" Colin Smith is very quiet. Misrepresentation of safety benefit explained again. "You're right, that is stuff we can comment on" - he did not "We will look at the staff costs (£522,000).. and the premises costs ..should be able to get that quite quickly" - he did not "We will seek that breakdown" he did not "We will have a look on those points you've raised" - he did not "All comes down to integrity .. transparency is what we should be doing" "(me) If all I get is a proper breakdown ... or the 4 main costs" "I think we should be able to obtain that and include it within our report" he did not even mention it.

4. It was not possible to communicate with Colin Smith again. There was nearly a year of silence and then between the time that he passed his clearly corrupted report to Martyn Underhill, and Martyn Underhill accepting and publishing it, and allowing me to see it and challenge the obvious omissions, inconsistencies and errors in it, he retired and completely vanished! (more on this later). It is not possible to draw any other conclusion than that Colin Smith initially had good intentions, but when the magnitude of what he had got into became clear, and perhaps under pressure from others (I wonder who?), he decided not to do what he had said he would do and not to write what he knew and believed in his final report, which had no criticism of Dorset Police whatsoever. Surely this is a very serious matter indeed.

5. So by the time Martyn Underhill met with me to discuss the report, it was a bit late to do much about it. MU added his own "investigation" of the greed on green camera, carefully picking information from what he was told by the police and council and ignoring everything from me. He very reluctantly agreed to ask James Vaughan to respond to the misleading press release, and just one of the figures that was obviously massively wrong, JV just said that in his "opinion" the PR was not misleading, and the IS cost had reduced. So it was wrong then! So it was misleading! Why did not not just say this instead of refusing to detail it and corrupting the whole information commissioner / tribunal system! (they should not have been corruptible though). The other 3 bigger costs remain unexplained but the decision of no financial or safety misrepresentation, or misconduct remained.

6. James Vaughan recorded the meeting but told me after many attempts for me to get a copy that the recording had "failed", although it seemed to take him a month to decide it had "failed". How fortunate that it "failed"! Unfortunately, I recorded it too. Hear for yourself, a PCC and an Assistant Chief Constable sweeping police misconduct under the carpet .

7. An astonishing 4 senior officers have vanished  at key points during my investigations when I later found out that this is common practice for those wanting to dodge misconduct investigation . Although we cannot be certain why all these senior members of the police vanished at crucial points in this case, this cannot be complete coincidence and does rather amount to what looks like an escape from what they knew was wrong-doing.

8. If these shocking failures were not enough, Martyn Underhill was then protected by the Dorset Police and Crime Panel, who simply passed the complaint back to the IPCC who did not even look at it as they deemed it to be part of the previous complaint, and the Chief Constable Andy Marsh and PCC Simon Hayes of Hampshire protected Colin Smith by deflecting my complaint against him and doing nothing. My current MP Michael Tomlinson seemed quite keen to pick this up but has like so many others just gone quiet.

So that's it for now. We still have Martyn Underhill as PCC, whose duty is to make the police accountable to the public, but as we can see, does the exact opposite, and I believe we still have Brian Austin as Road Safety Operations Manager, who has lied in at least one FOI response  and whose career is dependent on the money coming in from "safety" operations he helps to select, which is about as distasteful as anything could be. And an establishment and government that ignores / protects / rewards these kinds of shocking failures.

Ian Belchamber.