R Sabrina Jan v The Commissioner of Police for the Metropolis
| Jurisdiction | England & Wales |
| Judge | Mr Justice Ritchie |
| Judgment Date | 02 March 2022 |
| Neutral Citation | [2022] EWHC 446 (Admin) |
| Docket Number | Case No: CO/4833/2020 |
| Court | Queen's Bench Division (Administrative Court) |
[2022] EWHC 446 (Admin)
IN THE HIGH COURT OF JUSTICE
QUEEN'S BENCH DIVISION
ADMINISTRATIVE COURT
Royal Courts of Justice
Strand, London, WC2A 2LL
Mr Justice Ritchie
Case No: CO/4833/2020
In the matter of an application for judicial review
Darryl Hutcheon (instructed by Clyde Solicitors) for the Claimant
Carin Hunt (instructed by the Met DLS) for the Defendant
Hearing date: 16 February 2022
Approved Judgment
The parties
The Claimant was the resident of a flat in a block in London SW1 (the Block) under a contract signed on 18 September 2017. She had two children, a daughter aged 14 and a son, who was an adult aged 23 at the time. She took possession on 15th September 2017.
The Defendant is the Commissioner for the Metropolitan Police who provide policing for the area where the Claimant lived.
The background to the judicial review
In the first year of her occupation of her 9 th floor flat in the Block the Claimant made two separate complaints to the Defendant of being harassed by a neighbour called Barry Catchpole (BC) who lived next door. For BC to get to his front door from the lift he had to walk along an open balcony corridor past the Claimant's front windows. About 6 months after she moved in the Claimant decided that she wished to be moved into another flat and asked for that move, but the landlord's agents (Citywest Homes) did not accept her assertions of antisocial behaviour by BC and required to see the police CAD numbers relating to her complaints before they would reconsider moving the Claimant. The police officer dealing with the Claimant in September 2017 and September 2018 never created CAD numbers for her complaints considering the substance thereof not to reach the threshold for recording a possible criminal offence on what he understood he had been told. In late October 2018 the Claimant started a complaint against the constable concerned alleging that he had failed to record her complaints properly or at all and misrepresented her complaints to her GP and wrongfully gave the GP his opinion that she was paranoid. The local police complaints resolution service upheld one of the complaints and the other two were dismissed. The Claimant appealed.
By a decision made on 23 September 2020 by Sergeant Graham Smith (SGS) of the Appeal Unit (AU) of the Directorate of Professional Standards, the Claimant's appeal from the local resolution was dismissed. The Claimant seeks to quash the dismissal decision on the single ground that the AU failed to take into account part of the written evidence which she put before it, namely 32 documents set out as an appendix to her letter/witness statement provided by her for the appeal. I shall call these the “Appendix Documents”.
Bundles
I had before me two bundles: the agreed judicial review bundle and the agreed bundle of authorities.
The chronology of the complaints
On 12.10.2018 the Claimant made a written complaint to the Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC) stating:
“1. PC Malone failed to log and investigate our serious and persistent harassment complaint in September 2017.
2. PC Malone has failed to record facts stated to him accurately, misstated and misrepresented them to my doctors and others.”
In the body of her complaint the Claimant explained what had occurred. I summarise the relevant parts of her evidence in the complaint in the subparagraphs below.
a. 25 September 2017
At midday on 25 th September 2017, just after she had moved into the flat, she made a complaint at Belgravia Police station to PC Malone (PCM). She complained that BC:
• cornered and harassed visiting friends and children in the Block lift by warning them against watching TV and smoking on the open balcony;
• looked into her flat habitually through the front windows for long periods. The Claimant described this as severe and persistent harassment. No assertion was made in the complaint that she reported to PCM that the harassment was racial.
b. PCM offered to speak to BC, the Claimant agreed and he did so a couple of days later. PCM then dropped in on the Claimant and told her that he had told BC to “lay off” and that BC would not bother her again. During that visit the Claimant disclosed to PCM what she described as her “anxiety and panic issues” along with details of the doctors and mental health consultants caring for her and described how badly this was affecting her.
c. 18 September 2018
On this date PCM visited the Claimant again and she gave to him further complaints about events which had occurred over the year since her first complaint:
• In January 2018 a woman friend of BC had asked the Claimant's then 15-year-old daughter, whilst travelling in the lift with her, why the Claimant had called the police about him and suggested that BC was an important fellow and a patient of hers.
• The same woman friend of BC had rung the Claimant's doorbell at around 8pm one night in April 2018 and asked whether she knew where BC was because he was not answering his phone or door.
• On one occasion, when BC was drunk and standing at the bottom of the Block lift, he gestured to the Claimant and her daughter to get closer to him then held the lift door open for them to come in, they did not.
• BC stepped into the lift and held the door open for an Indian friend of the Claimant on another date.
• BC “followed” her visitors.
The Claimant told PCM that she had applied to register BC's antisocial behaviour with Citywest but that they would not do so without the CAD report from September 2017. (On the Citywest evidence in their contemporaneous emails that assertion was not wholly accurate, they had made their own assessment of her complaints as well and found them insufficient). The Claimant asserted that she thought that BC was harassing her because she was Asian. PCM asked about the effect of this on the Claimant and how her anxiety was and if he should speak to anyone medical about her condition and she informed PCM that Dr Rubitel at the Gordon Hospital was her case manager for anxiety and panic. PCM left his phone number and email address to comfort the Claimant should anything worry her further.
d. 5 th October 2018
On this date the Claimant obtained her medical records from her GP and having read them drew the conclusion that PCM had spoken to her GP (which was what she expected) but had misrepresented the facts of her complaints to the GP and provided an opinion on the Claimant's state of mind (that she was paranoid about her neighbour who had only nodded at the Claimant in a lift) which the Claimant considered to be “incorrect” and a “misstatement”. PCM had also referred the Claimant to social services/children services.
The AU referred these complaints for local resolution as it was empowered to do.
First local resolution — Sgt Angelo Corsini
Sargeant Angelo Corsini (Corsini) investigated the complaint. By November 2018 he was aware that the Claimant had described the status of her complaint as “racially aggravated harassment”.
BC died in October or early November 2018. I do not know precisely when. In an email dated 6.11.2018 this fact was recorded by Corsini and communicated to the Claimant. Corsini therefore told the Claimant that the complaints against BC would not be investigated further.
So, from November 2018 onwards, the purpose behind the complaints which the Claimant had raised against BC had disappeared. She had no need to move away from her flat in the Block based on BC being an alleged harasser and no need for the CAD numbers to support the move. The Claimant was safe from the perceived harassment by BC. However the Claimant did not withdraw the complaints against PCM.
On 12.11.2018 Corsini issued the scope action plan for his investigation into the complaint and sent it to the Claimant. He informed the Claimant that he had received evidence from PCM, namely some Merlin reports about her complaints. He explained that this was a system for sharing information with other agencies – the NHS and Social Services. He gave the report numbers. He did not provide copies. He informed the Claimant how she could request them through a Public Access Office. He set out his plan to talk to PCM and review any information provided by the Claimant.
The Claimant responded by email to Corsini apparently happy with the suggested action plan and approach and indicating she would seek the Merlin reports.
The Claimant did not send to Corsini any of the Appendix Documents which she would later complain that SGS did not open or read.
Corsini's decision was issued on 22.11.2018 and consisted of an apology that the Claimant had needed to complain and advice to the Claimant that Corsini had spoken to PCM informing him of the Claimant's two complaints. Corsini passed on to the Claimant PCM's response — which was that he “felt” that BC's actions did not meet the substantive offence of harassment (so inferring that is why he did not make a CAD report and this was confirmed by Counsel at the hearing) and stating that PCM had recorded the Claimant's complaints dated 2017 and 2018 on a different system (the Merlin system for interacting with other agencies). Appeal rights were provided.
Appeal to the AU from the first local resolution
By a letter dated 27.11.2018 the Claimant appealed. In that letter the Claimant re-affirmed her allegation that the harassment by BC was “racial” and “aggravated” and asserted that she had lived in “perpetual fear”. I do not see how that could have been so when BC had long since...
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