Seized Property

The purpose of this page is to give an account of my attempts to find out what happened to my property at the hands of Sussex Police.

When I was arrested on August 12th 2004, my two digital cameras (neither of which had any internal memory) and my two desktop computers were seized by PC Francis on the pretext that they contained evidence of crime committed by me. No protective bags were provided for the transport of my property to the custody centre.

The manufacturers of both my cameras recommend that the batteries should be removed if a camera is not used for an extended period. I think it was probably in November or December 2004 that I telephoned the police as I was concerned about batteries being left in my cameras. The matter was referred to PC Francis, who told me that batteries do not deteriorate and lose power unless they are used. The destruction of one of my cameras may be evidence that PC Francis had second thoughts on the subject later.

On 7th January the Crown Prosecution Service issued a Notice of Discontinuance as they wanted to discontinue the charge of harassment made against me. When I objected to this, a brief hearing was arranged on 18th February 2005, at which the CPS said they were offering no evidence. On March 2nd the police returned my property. I had not been telephoned to check that I would be at home, so that my property would not be subjected unnecessarily to being driven about in the back of a police car. The items were now in plastic bags, fastened with numbered plastic tags (e.g. ENVOSEAL 4585773) to give an appearance of security. When I tested the equipment, none of it worked.

The spurious case cobbled together against me by PC Francis, presumably either with the connivance of or on the orders of PI Brown, occasioned a good deal of trouble and expense as I was to be deprived of my property for more than six months. For various reasons I needed a computer and a digital camera, so had to buy replacements. As the computer I bought did not have a parallel port and my laser printer was designed to work with a parallel port, I bought a device which was supposed to enable some parallel-port printers to work with USB ports. It did not work with my printer, so I had to buy a new laser printer. The new computer did not have a floppy drive or room in the case for one, so when I found myself in need of a floppy drive I had to buy the more expensive type of external drive to plug into a USB port.

Before being charged with harassment in August 2004, I had been subjected to harassment since January 1999 by an ex-policeman called Mabry, and since 2001 by the McCombies, who had lodged the complaint against me. Most of my records of that harassment - including copies of correspondence with Sussex Police, Mabry's solicitors, Eastbourne County Court, and companies who had been asked to send me goods that I did not want - were on those computers. As these documents were important to my defence, I telephoned the police to ask for them, but this proving unproductive, I wrote a letter on 11th November 2004 to PI Brown, CI Matthews, and CC Jones, saying, "For me to have a chance of a fair trial I will need . . . Copies of the many files in the Disputes folders on the hard disks of my computers."

The response to this came in a letter from PI Brown dated 15th November 2004: "You have been charged with a criminal offence . . . before the case is presented in court you or your solicitor will have all the evidence that the prosecution intends to use disclosed to you . . . Sussex Police will not be making any disclosures of the evidence and documents that you request unless it falls within the rules of disclosure." Whether the provision for disclosure under the Criminal Procedure and Investigations Act 1996 could actually have been carried out would depend on whether or not my computers had been disabled by then, and the principal hard disk rendered useless. That line of enquiry went no further.

After my property had been returned, none of it in working order, one camera started working again after recharging, though the usable life of its lithium ion battery (£66) will have been considerably reduced. What happened to the other items should appear from the following account of my attempts to find out what had been done to my property.

Wanting to know how and by whom one of my cameras had been broken, and wanting to know what had been done to stop my computers working, I telephoned the police. I discovered that seized property is kept in a property store, and found the name of the person responsible for the the store, Mrs C. Baldwin, to whom on 22nd March 2005 I wrote as follows:

"On August 12th last year I had two cameras and two computers seized by the police. The cameras have no internal memory, and the CompactFlash cards - unless the police deleted them - contained no photographs. The property was returned to me on March 2nd 2005. The cameras, which cost about £900, were damaged by malice or incompetence, and are now unusable. The computers, which cost over £2000 are also unusable, though according to the relevant Form MG 6C, "it was deemed . . . that no examination of the computer equipment be made". An expensive alloy computer case has been damaged, and software and perhaps firmware on both computers has been interfered with: the BIOS on one cannot be accessed; the other had had a password added, and the operating system is now apparently incomplete.

"Previous attempts to find out whether my complaints about the damage to my property have been logged or recorded by the police, and to find out how my property was damaged, have been unproductive as yet, having apparently been passed from PSD in Lewes to Hailsham, and from Hailsham to Uckfield.

"Yesterday I tried to speak to the person responsible for the Police Property Store in Eastbourne, without success. This morning I asked the CPS whether they could prosecute the police for me, but it seems that that is not possible.

"So this morning I tried again to contact the person responsible for security at the Eastbourne Police Property Store, and was told that it is you.

"I am now intent on finding out who had access to my property and why. Will you please provide me with any information that you have on the conditions under which property seized from the public is kept secure, and details of who had access to my cameras and computers while they were in your custody, and why.

"Incidentally, I am compiling a list of my complaints about Sussex Police for publication on the Web, and it seems likely that the complaints will need to include complaints about how complaints are dealt with, as the procedures in Sussex seem to bear little resemblance to the guidelines published by the IPCC."

Mrs Baldwin on 23rd March replied as follows:

"Having made some local enquiries I have been advised that these matters are currently being investigated by Sussex Police and that Chief Inspector Matthews, Wealden District Commander, Uckfield Police Station has recently written to you. I have therefore forwarded your letter to him for attention."

CI Matthews had written to me on 22nd March, but his letter suggested that he was largely ignorant of most of my complaints about the police that had been sent to him by the Sussex Police Authority and by me, and did not tell me anything whatever about what had been done to my property and by whom. The only aspect of the matter that he showed any interest in was how much hardware had cost and whether I had receipts. I did not have receipts for the two computers which I had built myself, nor for the thousands of inaccessible files which represented years of work. That CI Matthews did not want to know what had been done to my property by someone working under his control I found disgusting, and evidence of a lax attitude that partly explains the appalling quality of the police service in his area. CI Matthews was to provide none of the information I asked for in the letter which Mrs Baldwin had passed on to him.

Not having succeeded in finding out exactly what had been done to disable my computers, and not having managed to get beyond removing the password which had been added to one of them, I had to take them apart, and found that two of the hard disks and the Molex connectors to them had been marked with numbers. A Sussex Police Schedule of Non-Sensitive Unused Material, Form MG 6C, says that "it was deemed by both the OIC and the Computer crime unit that no examination of the equipment be made". It looks therefore as if the taking apart and disabling of my property was unauthorised, and in view of what was done to the equipment it looks like deliberate sabotage.

I was unable to get either computer to recognise its hard disks, so I had to install a new hard drive in one of them and buy a digital device for reading files from a hard disk via a USB port in order to retrieve what files I could from four hard disks. With three of the hard disks I succeeded in reading the files, but the most important of the four resisted repeated attempts at reading, so I have lost thousands of files on that disk, some of which are irreplaceable. I had to reformat the three hard disks which still worked, and it took me two and a half months to put the computers back into the sort of order that had been built up over years of work.

Seven months after writing to the custodian of the property store, I had still received none of the information for which I had asked, so on 1st November 2005 I wrote again to Mrs Baldwin. After referring to my previous letter, and to what had happened to it, I went on:

"As a result, I have received none of the information that I asked for from you. I do however have a letter dated 19th October 2005 from DI Preddy, who took over my case for the Professional Standards Department, which says, 'I have no evidence to prove that any damage was indeed caused.'

"I have made several serious complaints about Sussex Police, the less important of which, after intervention by H.M. Inspectorate of Constabulary, have been examined in a report recently produced by DI Preddy. I have told DI Preddy that I think his report dishonest, so I intend referring my eight filed complaints and perhaps additional complaints to the IPCC.

"Before I do so I will be publishing a critical review of interview tapes which it took me more than twelve months to obtain from Sussex Police, and a detailed examination of DI Preddy's Case Summary.

"According to the Summary, my property was 'placed in the property store under G83 reference 0357590 dated 12th August 2004.' Also according to the Summary, my 'camera equipment had been submitted to the Hi-Tech Crime Unit at Sussex House'. I have just tried to telephone them to ascertain the state of the equipment at that time, but was told by the call centre spokesperson that the Unit was for police use only, not for the public.

"My own view is that it was likely that PC Francis damaged the equipment, my computers as well as the camera. When I telephoned the police to say that I was concerned about batteries being left in my cameras for such a long time, the matter was referred to PC Francis. My website was closed down by PC Francis because I declined to remove or change two comments I made about PC Francis on it: that he said that damage to my side gate was not evidence of forced entry by three people who assaulted me, and that when he was supposed to be investigating a crime he said to me, 'Keep quiet and listen to me.' PC Francis had a motive for making my computers unusable. It is also relevant that PC Francis by his own account has some sort of qualification in computing.

"So I say again, 'I am now intent on finding out who had access to my property and why. Will you please provide me with any information that you have on the conditions under which property seized from the public is kept secure, and details of who had access to my cameras and computers while they were in your custody, and why.'

"I hope that you will not indulge in the sort of obstructionism that is common from Sussex Police if one is in search of truth and justice, and am almost certain that I will not need to add you to the growing list of instances of dishonest personnel employed by the local police."

In spite of what I had said about DI Preddy in my letter, Mrs Baldwin wrote back:

"Although I am the person responsible for the running of the property store at Eastbourne I am not in a position to deal with complaints or claims in respect of property retained within the store in this instance. I have therefore forwarded your letter to Detective Inspector Preddy of the Professional Standards Department at Sussex Police Headquarters Lewes who I understand is dealing with your complaints and have requested that he contact you in due course."

When the completion of the course will be due is not clear, and whether DI Preddy will comply with Mrs Balwin's request I have yet to discover.

There was a clue relevant to what happened to my cameras in DI Preddy's report on my complaints about the police. My attempt to follow this clue for myself led to the following email interchange:

From: Geoffrey Madden   To: <contact.centre@sussex.police.uk>   Subject: Broken camera   Date: 02 November 2005 09:59

"Having tried several times to use the email contact on your website, only to get an Error message, I'm now trying a more direct route. The message is as follows -

"For the Attention of the High-Tech Crime Unit at Sussex House

"Yesterday I 'phoned the police 0999 number and asked to speak to someone at the High-Tech Crime Unit at Sussex House. I was told that the Unit was only available for police use, not for the public; but it was suggested, I think, that I could contact the Unit via email, so here goes:

"On 12th August 2004 I was arrested, and had a camera seized. When the camera was returned to me in March of this year, it no longer worked because the batteries had been forcibly removed, breaking the arrangements for keeping them in place under compression.

"According to DI Preddy, when questioned about what had happened to the camera, the police officer who had seized it said that it 'had been submitted to the High-Tech Crime Unit at Sussex House' before being 'stored at the Hammonds Drive property store.'

"I presume that your Unit records details about hardware which passes through its hands, so would someone from the Unit please let me now whether the Unit was sent my camera, if so when, and if so the state of the camera when it arrived and when it left the Unit.

"The camera is a Kodak DC215 ZOOM digital camera EKS94711431, and would have been accompanied by a Canon Powershot G2. According to DI Preddy, the cameras had been 'placed in the property store under G83 reference 0357590 dated 12th August 2004.' Also according to DI Preddy, 'This allegation of Harassment was crimed by PC Francis as EW2/5355/04.'

"Hoping to hear from you soon, preferably in writing."

From: <Fcc.Fcc@sussex.pnn.police.uk>   To: <ronald.preddy@sussex.pnn.police.uk>   Cc: <GGM . . .
Subject: Re: Broken camera Date: 02 November 2005 13:27

"DETAILS PASSED TO DI PREDDY TO MAKE FURTHER ENQUIRIES."

This account will be continued with further information if it becomes available, and with critical comments about Sussex Police if it does not become available.

G. Madden 6-12-05

The handwriting of the person responsible for sabotaging my computers

P.S. 1st January 2006: The critical comments will be incorporated in the complaints log page of this website.

P.P.S. 20 July 2006: and on the 3cc page, and perhaps on other pages as well.