Gidney&Knowlesy

What a shame for:

The parents involved & worrying

The kids as they were playing as kids

The witnesses as kids this could be an experience never forgotten

The school for not having appropriate signs - don't play on gate

The witnesses that have to go through X's accident down the Police station

The Police for not being able (political I know..) to drop this as soon as it was deemed an accident

The taxpayers; seems like it gets more letigious every day & taxpayers are stumping up the readies....

Chris29

Good redult mate!

Video interview - As said befre, now standard procedure with all child witnesses under 16 whether vulnerable or not, just good practice.

Statement - Ooops, looks like someone should have read it first! Happens all the time, just making sure procedure was followed properly, probably got 'Freds' mum ringing every two mins mithering!

If officer says it's going nowhere there's probably no reason to statement other witnesses, again just best practice in case of comebacks complaints from Freds parents.

Sounds to me like officer being leaned on from above to get a result either way, which is happening too much nowadays. Quick question, you haven't said how it ended, was your chils bailed to reattend at station, (Sec47 Police Bail) or just released into your care(?) for officer to recontact?

Probably a good idea to get your childs version of events on paper, just to tie up loose ends should this be looked at in the future, a new disturbing trend in forces is for old written off crimes to reappear with questions being asked (because we haven't got enough to do without rewriting everything we said twice!!). Sounds like no action will be taken and with regard to a criminal record, no as has been said before, the only thing could be an entry on your own forces local computer, i.e name age and incident. This in no way is ever made public and is never released to companies checking for jobs etc.

As for wrongful arrest its a no go and you don't want to do it mate. It wouldn't be Fred you would be gettin at it would be the officer and they were only doing there job, there was reasonable grounds to suspect an offence had taken place and it sounds like all procedure was followed correctly. I'm afraid this is where you have to remember that solicitors lawers etc are only paid if they are doing something and a wrongful arrest case will keep them busy and earning for weeks (not a dig at the profession, everyone has to make a living!). Much has been made of the new tendancy to sue at every opportunity and i strongly urge against such action.

Just have a good Christmas mate and try to forget about it!

Chris.

anon_dad

Just to complete this thread: As said above my son had to return to the police station on 2nd Jan.. unless we got an offical letter saying otherwise, so all before xmass and after xmass we dived on each mail.. but by New Years eve there was no letter.. so we Resigned ourselves that we would be starting 2004 with this hanging over us and we would have to return to the station on 2nd Jan

But then at 17;30 New Years eve there was a knock at the door.. which turned out to be a PC hand delivering a letter stating that there would be no further action

As you can guess we were very pleased to get that letter!

So its all over

ajm

Very good to hear! Too bad it had to waste so much police time and weigh your minds down over the festive period.

Have you taken advise about legal action against your accusers, where appropriate? It would be nice to think that in this day and age there could still be some kind of compensation for the unecessary suffering you were put through - and some kind of deterrant for the wouldbe litigants from wasting police time again in future [img]images/smilies/mad.gif[/img]

Leslie

Glad it has turned out alright. Saxo Boy is right, in these days of control freakery no one is allowed by his superiors to use simple common sense any more. Ordinary people are not considered intelligent enough to be able to think for themselves now! It all has to be laid out by numbers.

Les

carl

When I was a kid, I was playing on the "bars" at school (I bet they don't have them any more) when I fell off. Then a fat kid landed on top of me and broke one of my front teeth.

It's had a crown on it ever since. Maybe I should track him down and push for compensation? I could go for:
initial dental work
subsequent loss of earnings (if it ever comes off I have to take time off work to have it stuck back on)
trauma (always a good one)