"The only certainty now is that, given the complete nonsense the police have made of this whole sordid business so far, they will be extremely careful to follow procedures properly and make sure that justice is served."
Are you certain that's a certainty, Andy?
The police seem to be making a complete dogs' breakfast out of a number of major investigations lately. One of the problems they face in cases of historical sex abuse is that their guidance (and I don't know where it came from) states that they must start with the assumption that the “complainant is telling the truth”. They seem to still be working under this basic tenet despite one or two high profile debacles. This is bound to lead to trouble (as indeed it has) because it seems that a number of the complainants were telling anything but the truth. One of my uncles (now sadly no longer with us) was a Detective Chief Inspector and served in the Met – including a spell with the Flying Squad. He once told me that the CID (that he was part of) worked on the principle of “Trust nobody, believe nothing, check everything”. Under that principle “Nick” would have been distrusted and disbelieved from the outset and the ordeals that Mr Procter, Lord Janner and others suffered may have been avoided.
Quite what the journalists were thinking of (apart from increased circulation for their organs) is a little hard to fathom:
“Mark Watts, former editor in chief of the now-defunct Exaro, admitted showing a series of photographs of suspects and ‘dummies’ to Nick but that it was a ‘completely legitimate’ way of operating.”
He may consider it completely legitimate and he and his scribes may well be acting within the law (though that is arguable). However, their action in planting in the mind of someone like “Nick” images of someone they suspect may be responsible for his suffering would almost certainly fatally undermine any chance of a successful prosecution, even if the correct miscreants had been identified by such a method.
The police (and by that I mean the senior officers who set the strategy and tactics, not the officers who see it through) need to wise up a little and develop a strategy which avoids believing everything that somebody tells them without question. Otherwise further debacles of his nature are bound to follow.