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At a meeting arranged by the CPS
and subsequently by Board member Tom
Whitbread, Call Sign participated
in a discussion between the Dial-a-Cab
Complaints Officer and two representatives of
the CPS. We were asked not to use their names
for professional reasons and have acceded to
that request. There were two main points on the table. We were interested in getting more help for the series of attacks on licensed taxi drivers in the E14 area of London, while the CPS were interested in ensuring taxi drivers called as witness to court attended so that cases did not get unnecessarily dismissed. The Crown Prosecution Service is the government department that prosecutes most of the criminal cases in England and Wales following investigation by the police. That includes motoring offences. The CPS have to decide whether there is sufficient evidence and whether it is in the public interest to prosecute a case in the courts. The CPS representatives at the meeting were part of a special team – the only one in the country that specialised in prosecutions against the police. As the meeting went on, the CPS request became clearer as it transpired that several taxi drivers had made complaints against members of the police. As DaC drivers can imagine, if you have a legitimate complaint against one or several members of the police force, then getting action against those you believe to have committed an offence against you as a victim or even a witness, might not be easy. However, the CPS claim that they try to make sure that should you be in the position where you have levied a complaint against the police or are needed as a witness for a prosecution, they will assist you in your evidence – even if that means giving your evidence behind a screen, where relevant. The CPS told us of a recent intended prosecution where a taxi driver promised to give evidence against a passenger who had verbally attacked and abused him and in the process also damaged his taxi. After the driver had reported the attack to the police, it turned out that the passenger was also a serving police officer and that he had gone on to verbally abuse an engineer at the local railway station where police caught up with him. He had been drinking. The CPS decided that besides anything else, as a police officer he should have known better. In addition, his attack had been on a public servant ie a licensed taxi driver going around on his lawful business and another transport representative at the railway station. The intended prosecution would also have been to get compensation for the damage to the taxi and also to help instil confidence that even if the person |
CALL SIGN MEETS THE CROWN PROSECUTION SERVICE
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in the wrong is a police officer,
then justice will still need to be seen to be done. However although they had spoken to the taxi driver at the second court hearing prior to the actual trial reaching court, on the day that he was really needed, the cabby never turned up. "We tried phoning his mobile," said the CPS representative, "we phoned his home address and even got local police to go round to his house, but he wasn’t there and as hard as we tried, we couldn’t make contact with him." She went on to add: "A conviction was obtained separately regarding the engineer’s attack and he received compensation, but although we had put a lot of work into the case involving the taxi driver and were very hopeful of him receiving compensation not just for the abuse, but also for the physical damage to his taxi, we were left with no alternative but to drop the case. "We could have obtained a witness summons – something we often use in cases involving domestic violence where we believe a witness might be too afraid to attend court, but we didn’t do it in the case of the taxi driver, as we had no information about any fears. His decision not to attend was also a shame because there was a good chance that he could have been reimbursed for his losses. The defendant turned up and it was decided that as the taxi driver hadn’t (he actually also missed the first hearing, but attended the second), the cost involved in arranging a further case as against the relatively small amounts involved, could not be justified. The magistrate then took the decision to dismiss the case irrespective of the CPS application to apply for an adjournment." Tom Whitbread asked whether the driver might have been afraid to turn up, but the CPS rep responded that the officer would not have known where the driver lived and even though Tom reiterated that as a police officer, he could have had some sway with TfL and possibly obtained the info, the CPS thought that |
scenario to be very unlikely. Ending this part of the discussion, the CPS representative added: "Please be assured, to all Call Sign readers and drivers on DaC – and any other taxi drivers reading this – we do take complaints of this nature against police officers seriously, but if you do not then turn up in court, it is unlikely that any result will go in your favour." And E14… |
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