My Arrest

I was experiencing appalling harassment - way, way beyond endurance.

I made several requests to fellow residents to bear witness to the behavior I was experiencing.

In early 2009, I was invited for an interview at the Central Police Station on Winston Churchill Avenue to discuss my problems. The police said there was nothing they could do, and offered me no advice.

I eventually left the said property several months later, but on December 1st 2009 I was arrested and issued with a caution by Portsmouth Police for harassing my harasser.

The bulk of the case against me were the aforementioned requests I had sent to fellow residents requesting they act as witnesses. The Police say they were supplied to my harasser by M.

So as far as I can see, the police are telling me that attempting to take legal action against an harasser is a criminal offence.

benefit fraud I had also expressed my displeasure about his work at a location near to my new residence, a job he was doing while also claiming unemployment benefit.

It's a bit hard to put this situation into words. The police tried to compare my actions with someone adopting the same attitude towards my own employer. This I think misses the point. I am obliged to declare any criminal record and security checks etc. were made on me before employment was offered. The situation with my harasser is different, he is working at a job which is usually done by scholchildren and has none of the legal implications of adult work. In this sense, adults can slip under the net, delivering to houses etc. without any security clearance.

Personally (although this is less likely to happen because of prior security checks), I can't imagine that a customer complaining to the Royal Mail about a postman that they did not wish to see in their area citing past criminal records, would end up being arresting and charged by the Police for harassing the postman, but that is the direct analogy of what has happened to me.

You what sort of situation I am in - it is not just a case of dole fiddling, the employer is also presumably breaking the law. I think it is probably unlikely that he is paying all the required NI contributions etc. etc. that are necessary for adult employment. So the employer is unlikely to 'come to my aid' with any alternative view of events.

My own general feeling is that my harasser possibly left this job because of a change of ownership and a disinclination by the new proprietor to continue the illegal practices previously in place. I have absolutely no evidence for this assumption apart from a general 'idea' that there has been a change of ownership (an assumption derived from the fact that I pass the shop a couple of times every day on my way to and from work).

So anyway, while one section of the government is trying to clamp down on benefit cheats, the police are giving benefit cheats protection.

It is my personal belief that he could work but deliberately chooses not to. This another feature that enables me to describe the whole experience as Kafkaesque - the government goes on about people who choose deliberately to remain unemployed, people who don't actually exist, and then next thing I find myself living under the same roof as one of these very rare people.

On a previous occasion he had had his dole money withdrawn for six weeks. He immediately got himself a job - and then six weeks later he stopped working. It is my belief that under pressure (like his illegal work ending) he would get a job and be better off - without actually recognizing that he was better off, i.e. be in a mood to get back at anyone he perceived to have brought an end to his favorite pastime of sitting on his arse all day, every day, watching television.

(At the time he told the landlord that he had had his dole money withdrawn because the Dole Office had not given him any travel expenses to travel a 'Back to Work' course he was due to attend. The landlord swallowed every single word - just like he seems to have swallowed many subsequent lies. I suppose there is a chance that my harasser managed to lie without saying anything untrue -since these 'Back to Work' courses are held in the city center or in Venture Tower near to Fratton Railway Station, it would be true to say that the Dole Office did not allow him any travel expenses)

There was a suggestion that I should have got a 'restraining order', something I had never heard of previously. I think this misses the point in two ways.

  1. I was in the process of hoping to take legal action for most of this period (that's why I was asking fellow residents to act as witnesses), so in essence if a 'restraining order' was the best option for me, then that was effectively what I was doing at the time.
  2. I still don't know the full details of what a restraining order is, but if as I suspect that it involves telling my harasser my new address then that would a silly thing to obtain - tell a potential burglar and harasser where I live and then tell him to stay away from the said address, while I was being old-fashioned and assuming the best method would be to ensure my harasser did not find out where I was now living.

The father of my harasser is an Inspector in the Police Force. He was also involved in my arrest, something that previously I would have thought would not be allowed.

Essentially this goes back to the time when I was arrested for 'attacking him with a knife' after he had stormed off shouting: "I'll get you - my father's in the CID".

I have requested his father to deny that he was involved in my arrest at the time, something he has failed to do. I've received the usual 'denials' from the Police Force in general but obviously that doesn't mean anything. His father knows my email adress and it would take a matter of seconds to email denying any involvement - if he doesn't want to do that, then that can only fuel suspicion. As a layman, I would have assumed that the Police have no direct powers to stop me attempting to get such a denial from this particular officer

We all know that parents have no direct responsibility for the actions of their children but by virtue of his police force getting involved with this case directly, I tend assume that his father has acted in an out-of-order manner for a policeman (or even for a parent). He had come to know of the situation but seemingly did nothing.

Documents Missing

Not all documents that I has sent managed to re-appear in the Police station. There was 1) the letter I sent to M. requesting he bear witness to the way that my harasser always but always followed me into the kitchen whenever I entered that room and 2) the later letter I sent to M. and the tenants at the back of the house asking whether they had any information relating to the mudguard falling off my bike because someone had removed three of the four rods connecting it to the bike. I sent this letter to these tenants because they were in a position to view the area location where I stored my bike.

I met the 'tenants at the back of the house' in October 2011 and they were unaware at all of any of the problems I was having. In addition to the letter mentioned in the previous paragraph, I had sent them the general letter where I had stated I wanted to definitely go to the law.

Because they lived in a separated-off section of the house, they would not have experienced the more direct harassment I was receiving.

Nature of the Documents

The first document I was presented with in the police station was a hand-written one. Because it was hand-written, I can not check for sure but I am sure it contained no names - it just requested M. to bear witness to 'the door-slamming'. Why on Earth this should be against the law is a mystery to me.

Why the Police accepted their interpretation so effortlessly is a mystery to me also. The general idea that someone should receive a request to witness door-slamming, only for them to then hand it over to the very person who is slamming doors all the time is not an easy idea to accept. No-one like door-slamming. I myself know that M. would go through doors silently - I never knew where he was in or not.

Although I make use of the word 'wierdo', the person being so labelled would have to admit to the offensive behavior described in order to assert he was the one being referred to in such a manner.

It is directly analogous to a problem I had about twenty years ago. At the time I had to post requests to 'stop stealing food, you bastard' to which the same person always reacted with rage, stating it was nothing to do with him.

This was strange enough behavior given we were all having our food stolen but he was showing by his behavior that he himself was not having anything stolen. And by straightforward deduction he eventually alienated other tenants and was thereby finally ejected.

But the point is this : imagine if he had called the police in and stated that I had called him a bastard - because he was the one who was stealing the food and therefore the word 'bastard' referred to him. And then imagine if the poloice had prosecuted me for calling him a bastard while letting the thief off scot-free. This is a direct analogy to what has happened in this current case.

In Brief

So my harasser has turned to the police, presenting documents

...and on the basis of this action, the police prosecute me without seemingly taking any action against my harasser.

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