Avon & Somerset Chief Constable faces jail for defying High Court

by not david shayler Tue May 19, 2009 14:16

"Colin Port tries to stop release of potentially damning evidence that officers added illegal images to a suspect's computer."

You're just making things up now tony, Colin Port may well have a corrupt history on other matters, but this doesn't mean that you can leap to conspiratorial and libellous claims every time his name pops up. What you actually succeed in doing is muddying the waters, with conspiratorial mumbo jumbo, on those more serious and well documented areas of concern.

The best way to obscure real conspiracies is to add fake ones to the mix, such as in the manner of say, David Icke and David Shayler, the two reincarnations of Christ, who have both done what they can to steer anti-war and anti-state sentiment towards the extreme lunatic fringe, in order to intentionally discredit it?

In other words, their conspiracy is to add other water muddying fake conspiracies to the mix.

Is that your intention too?

A Real Conspiracy:

Colin Ports Involvement In Covering Up Murderers Of Rosemary Nelson
http://www.birw.org/summary%20of%20BIRW%20submission(Nelson).html
"On 15th March 1999, solicitor Rosemary Nelson was blown up by a bomb attached to the underside of her car by loyalist paramilitaries. She suffered horrific injuries and died two hours later."

by spooooky - wooooky Tue May 19, 2009 19:06

Is there anything to this other than your opinions and assumptions or imaginings Mr. Gosling?

Can you document ANYTHNG? ............... is there any substance to this piece?

by guido Tue May 19, 2009 20:34

Oh dear. Tony, youve rattled someones cage!

There is clearly nothing of note in your post apart from the fact that police officers have lied to the courts. And a couple of experienced high court judges agree with this view and have made an order. And that a senior police officer has publicaly defied them.

There is clearly more going on than we know. Why would a senior police officed risk his liberty and pension over a few pictures? Perhaps its not the pictures that are the problem.

There is a broom pushing its way through the establishment. Its sweeping aside corruption that has been allowed to fester for years. Im sure that this story will develop. In the mean time here is Colin's cv:
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Colin Port started his policing career with Greater Manchester Police in 1974 before going on to work for Warwickshire Constabulary.

In 1994 he started work for the United Nations as Investigations Co-ordinator with the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.

He was then appointed Director of Investigations for the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda before becaming head of the South East Regional Crime Squad.

Between 1999 and 2002 he was seconded to Northern Ireland to investigate the circumstances surrounding the death of Rosemary Nelson.

Mr Port became Avon and Somerset Constabulary’s sixth Chief Constable in January 2005 after moving to the force from Norfolk Constabulary where he was Deputy Chief Constable.
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I suppose that this will be dismissed as untrue! More to follow!

by plodding Thu May 21, 2009 13:22

Chief Constalbe disobeying the law - after appearing to have botched an investigation - fronting a judge up.

Very silly on his part, unlikely to help discipline really. What a twat !

by guido Tue May 26, 2009 11:55

Oh dear, looks like Colin Port is determined to get himself locked up. Not content with sticking two fingers up at the High Court yet another attempt has been made, via a lower court, to get hold of the contentious hard drives. This latest attempt failed and all he got for his trouble was a bill for costs.
Colin, if you continue to Gamble you will loose. Go to the High Court, purge your contempt, and tell the truth. If you don’t the truth is going to come out anyway.

by guido Wed May 27, 2009 18:47

Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear!

Seems like Paul will need plenty of legal advice in the absence of common sense prevailing.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/bristol/8070337.stm

Nothing like a contempt hearing to concentrate the mind and flush out the truth.

by Danny - police Fri May 29, 2009 16:50

I work for Mr Port and like any member of staff I've seen his email about fighting his corner, but I didn't know what it was all about in the first place.
The best bit of your article was your link to theregister which filled me in properly on the legal issues -
1. What qualifies somebody to call themselves an expert and take away copies of evidence?
2. Does an acknowledged expert stop being an expert when he is convicted of perjury?
The suggestion that the evidence in this case is dirty pictures and that the underlying motivation of the 'expert' is closet paedophilia is just smoke: this issue would be just as important in any other case.
Imagine you were involved in a really nasty assault (as suspect, victim, relative, whatever) and the other side started using a so-called expert who was a liar and no expert at all. Now he's wandering around looking at statements, interviews, CCTV, medical records, and so on. Is that fair to you?
I'm guessing now that Mr Port and his lawyers are trying to force the highest court they can reach to define an expert witness better.
It's no joke to be a former Chief Constable with a criminal conviction. Mr Port's c.v. would earn him a lot of money on lecture tours and consultancy after his retirement but you don't even get into countries like the US with that kind of record. He has far too much to lose in his career and his back pocket to carry on with this unless there's a real issue of conscience. If he wanted an easy life he could just hide behind the courts and obey the instruction to give back the hard drives.
Thanks for your help with this. I feel I know a lot more now.

by passtheport Sat May 30, 2009 14:14

Out of respect for the law I have chosen not to make any disclosures about the unlawful activities of Avon and Somerset Police before and during their entry and search of my home and office last September. Public debate and trial by media are recognised devices sometimes employed by the police when their activities are challenged. However, the issues here have become so obscured by reports on Mr Port’s various outbursts that I am compelled to release some of the verifiable facts about this case in an effort to redress the balance.

I have worked in the field of computer forensics since 1986 when the first computer viruses appeared. During that time I have assisted in cases ranging through international fraud, theft, industrial sabotage, rape and even murder. I believe that in most of these cases I was engaged by the prosecution. As far as I am aware none of my reports has ever been challenged.

Since 2000, I have become increasingly aware of evidence and reports presented by prosecution experts which fell far below an accepted standard of accuracy and impartiality. I have reported such matters to various police forces with no meaningful response. My reaction was to start a website in 2002 which publicised such matters and attempted to highlight the need for proper standards to be set for people working in this field. Again as far as I am aware, at no time has the factual content of this website been shown to be untrue.

From that time on I have been subjected to intimidation, bullying and even threats of violence by the police and some of their misguided supporters (mainly those with a financial interest in the burgeoning child protection industry). This culminated in my being convicted of perjury in relation to my claims to hold a B.Sc. degree in electronic engineering. During my trial no evidence was presented that any of my reports had been affected by this claim and no evidence was presented that my work has ever been anything other than scrupulously honest and even handed. The content of my website was introduced as evidence of my ‘anti-police’ attitude but again, no evidence was produced to show that the contents were not truthful. I believed that I was justified in claiming such a qualification (from events in 1965) but was unable to provide documentary proof because of the time that had elapsed. I am now described as a ‘discredited expert’, which avoids the fact that my expertise has never been discredited.

This intimidation has continued up to and including the case currently being publicised by Mr Port.

Mr Port is attempting to take the moral high ground by saying (Sun article 16th May 2009) that the seized material contained “over 2,500 hard copies of child abuse images and they must have come from somewhere.” (my emphasis). I am aware (and will prove) that those images had been “exhaustively” examined (unlawfully) by Avon and Somerset police in September 2008 and were identified as being within active and archived case files (i.e. statements, reports, transcripts, solicitors details etc. of past and current cases). I have not seen these images but I know from what remains of my files that in at least one of the instances a) the file contained a report produced by a police expert and b) the file had been retained as evidence in possible future criminal proceedings against that expert. Such material can easily be traced to its source. It follows that for Mr Port to make such a statement meant either that he had been seriously misled by his own officers, or sought to present a deliberately misleading and emotive story for public consumption. His further comment, “yet I am prevented from even examining the material.” Is similarly misleading, since his officers had already examined at least some of it. The additional suggestion elsewhere that the police wanted to examine these images in an attempt to identify and protect the children involved is also misleading and for similar reasons. It conveniently ignores the fact that the police themselves maintain a huge database of such images (for comparison purposes).
It should also be noted that Mr Port’s observation that the “[High Court] ruling goes against all common sense.” is at odds with his own officer’s admission that, “The Police accept the judgment of the High Court of Justice and accept without question that mistakes were made in the form of the original application for the warrant and in the subsequent conduct of the search.”
It is my contention that these “mistakes” by professional officers who must have made hundreds of such applications were not merely a technicality but were quite deliberate because they knew that a more appropriate application to a Crown Court Judge was most unlikely to have been granted.

It is my belief that Mr Port’s statements are deliberately intended to stir up misinformed public opinion against the High Court and myself.

Only Mr Port is aware of his exact motives for his extraordinary outbursts, but I am certain that it has little to do with child pornography. I believe that a likely explanation of his position and the police activity may run as follows:

1)In the Harris case I had found indications that the indecent material the police had found on the hard drive may have come from an outside source. This was mentioned in my report to the court. Once I had been arrested and my files and equipment had been seized I was obviously unable to appear at the trial and so my suspicions were not put before the jury.
2)I believe that once they had decided to arrest me and seize the Harris material they needed evidence of a crime. They came up with the obviously ludicrous allegation that I and my colleague had ‘conspired’ to conceal my identity (by signing my own name on the exhibit label?) in order to gain access to child pornography at police premises. It now seems extremely likely that officers at CEOP (who were responsible for handling Operation ORE) were informed of this and perhaps assisted in devising a method whereby all of my files and equipment could be seized and examined.
3)Operation ORE was an immense police operation begun in 2002 which investigated over 7,000 UK based suspects who, based on a database of subscriptions, had allegedly paid to access child pornography websites. During all of the subsequent prosecutions the police consistently refused proper forensic access to the evidential material and the operation became mired in increasing controversy. As far as I am aware, the final few attempted prosecutions were dropped last year. The relevance here is that I have been investigating the conduct of this operation since 2003. My efforts were boosted in 2006 by the provision of copies of the evidential material from the US, which had been concealed by the police in the UK. My investigation of this revealed (amongst other things) massive evidence of credit card fraud within the database and conclusive evidence of breathtaking incompetence in the prosecution’s experts analyses of how this database had been generated. Some of the information from my investigation was published in a generalised form on my website. More detailed and verifiable analyses were produced for use by people handling a growing number of appeals.
4)The evidence I have collected over the six years since I first became involved in Operation ORE is extremely sensitive and undoubtedly includes information that the police (particularly CEOP) would prefer not to see revealed. It is likely that this evidence will eventually lead to exposure of the biggest police scandal that this country has ever seen.
5)Thus it appears that this may be a last ditch attempt by the police to cover up possible incompetence (or worse) by Avon and Somerset police and the shortcomings of Operation ORE. Colin Port may have been persuaded to make his stand on alleged child pornography to cloud the issues and retain the illegally obtained data.

It is a fact that he has not retracted any of his statements in spite of being made aware that some of them are provably untrue. Far from ‘risking his career’ it seems he has a few skeletons in his own cupboard as an internet search on his name will reveal. It is possible that his career is in terminal decline and he has much less to lose and much more to gain personally by his apparently high-minded pronouncements.
I also feel that the recent support for his position offered by Jim Gamble of CEOP is extremely interesting given that Mr Gamble headed the Operation ORE enquiry and has more to lose than most when the appalling shambles is eventually exposed.

There is obviously much more that is now known to me. The relevant facts will be presented to Senior Judges at the High Court during the contempt proceedings scheduled for 16th June. Their decision is what counts, not the unsupported, misleading, inaccurate and emotive utterances of an embattled Senior Police officer.
The current furore is not about child pornography or alleged paedophilia, such allegations are just so much smoke and mirrors. The issue of privileged material is fundamental to the rule of law, without the protection that it provides we would never hear about the misdeeds of the authorities – be they MP’s dipping their bread in the taxpayer’s gravy, police officers shooting unarmed civilians or police denying thousands of people their right to a fair trial.

Jim Bates

by Bib Sat May 30, 2009 17:50

Those that know Colin Port will also know that he is a law unto himself, and runs his force in the same way.

There are many examples of serious bullying by senior managers (with his blessing) of the rank and file, causing many of them to go sick. If the staff complain they are further bullied, threatened with pay cuts or being sacked. They are told to forget it, and get on with it - or else!

Not surprising that they’ve got the 5th Worse sickness record of any force in the country!

I don't understand how the police authority can be happy with this situation?

by Gordon Brown Wed Jun 10, 2009 20:35

Mrs Port, who earned over £200k from the IBM / Southwest One PPP deal with the cops, called on her husband's employees to harrass a Process Server who had attended the Port home to serve the Contempt Summons on Chief Constable Port.
If anyone else had tried this, the police would have charged them for wasting police time.
However, in this instance, Port's men tried to intimidate the Process Server, who was acting in the stead of the High Court in London.