'Nicola Bulley's reputation 'destroyed' by police'

[MyrtIe]

Article here

The points made about victim blaming and the police disclosing this information to cover themselves are spot on imo.

The usual gutter press are having a field day with this today.

What exactly was the point of it? What's it achieved, apart from compounding the heartache of her loved ones?

YABU - the police were right to divulge this sensitive information as it was relevant to the investigation

YANBU - there was absolutely no need to do so

This is spot on. All the armchair detectives need to stop.

In all honesty I think the police can't win here. The world and his wife seems to think they are entitled to know the ins and outs of Nicolas life. They aren't.

The police have said from the start they thought it was most likely she ended up in the river somehow. They don't owe it to anyone except the family as to why they think that. Perhaps due to the information that is now public thus is why they thought most likely.

Some people are like a dog with a bone on this case, demanding to know WHY. So the police disclose she had specific vulnerabilities. That's still not enough for some people. So many people demanding WHAT vulnerabilities. People that are tweeting their theories, people taking it upon themselves to search the area. They aren't helping.

So the police feel they need to disclose additional information. And now the armchairs detectives are demanding to know why they weren't told this earlier?!

I don't know, maybe because it's none of their business? Maybe because the family don't want all her personal information splashed all over the papers? Maybe the family and her children should be allowed some privacy?

On twitter last night people were posting their fury at this new information being released . How the "1000s of people who care for nicola" should have been told. WTF?!

No one is owed anything about this case. Her life and any issues she had and how they may or may not have been involved in the situation are between the police and her family. No one else.

Yep 100% @mnhq have been completely irresponsible allowing all this speculation.

People seem to almost want her to have been taken. She's nice middle class woman with young children, she can't possibly have done something stupid or selfish.

All the evidence police have has always been that there was no one else involved. They're just trying to explain why that is.

I agree it's surprising that they've released such detail, but if police have been involved previously that's more than someone who drinks a bit too much sometimes.

If they'd just said she was being treated as vulnerable, would that have shut everyone up?

It was absolutely relevant.
When there’s nobody else to blame, let’s blame the police. Ridiculous.
The police can’t do right for doing wrong.
There’s clearly a lot more to this investigation than we know.
Now for goodness sake leave it to the professionals.
How on earth are the police sexist?! This comment beggars belief!

I’ve had to name change for this as it’s outing but I can also see this from a different perspective.

In my view the alcohol is very relevant- menopause not so much. Perhaps mental health difficulties would have been a better phrase if the mental health team have been involved recently.

a long time ago my DH put himself at severe risk a number of times due to his mental health. We had the crisis team and police MH team involved as well and there was alcohol issues. He wasn’t an alcoholic but used alcohol to cope.

to the person passing by he didn’t appear out of control, steaming drunk and wasn’t staggering about with vodka or a tennants extra in his hand in the morning. He looked like a middle class normal but knackered person to most. He walked the dog, functioned at work but underneath was a mess.

Thinking about how he was at his worse I can genuinely believe that he could have either fallen or deliberately got in the river when struggling if in a similar place. he never deliberately wanted to hurt himself but could have quite easily done himself some harm accidentally when out of his mind effectively.

the only thing I keep thinking is that if he’s gone missing he’s be classed as high risk too and how would I have dealt with that.

i don’t think the problem here I think is the police but rather the frenzie created by the courting of the media, public appeals by well meaning neighbours and family members and use of so called experts who think they’re more competent than the police. All under the spotlight of the media who must have been informed of when the family were meeting the private search team by the river.

The family appear to have been egged on or taken in when most vulnerable by those looking to make a name for themselves as ‘experts’ in the media. Which is understandable when you want to avoid the reality of your own situation or nightmare but doesn’t help anything unfortunately.

whilst not the best way to handle communication I can imagine the police are desperate to correct the false narrative around this so that some useful information can come through to them and they’re not spending their life talking to crazies.

it’s time people left the police to it and the media realised the harm they were doing.

And the armchair detectives should just fuck off as well. Along with the ones who think, after watching a few forensic TV shows, that they are qualified to go down to the site and investigate for themselves. These people haven't helped the situation. And at the centre of this are real people with their lives destroyed. It's not a fucking game of cludo.

The problem is that the armchair idiot detectives were actively interfering with the police investigation. They had to do something.

And part of the problem was people supposedly friends with her fuelling misinformation - like the close friend stating on Facebook that the abandoned house hadn’t been searched because of the owners objecting when it had been searched multiple times.

Perhaps now people will listen to only the police and her close family. Rather than random people claiming closeness as they state “facts”.

The police should have classed her as ‘vulnerable’ from the beginning, we can all read between the lines of that without maligning her further and it would have stifled speculation. Whilst I understand family would absolutely not want to believe the worst they also should have been honest - no mention of her having any issues was made, even in the dh’s tv interview. The search/diving expert absolutely should have been told by the police or the family that there was a possibility she may have entered the water voluntarily.

This is very similar to Claudia Lawrence where the police could have acted faster but instead of apologising decided to tarnish her reputation with loaded implications about her having relationships with married men. There was never any evidence that she knew they were married.
Having a poor relationship with alcohol describes a lot of the British population and given how crap the NHS is for treating the menopause I can hardly blame her for self medicating.

^This^

Plus.... There are more than a few people on these threads who spent the last two weeks demanding the police release the reasons why they believed what they did about what happened to her - and the same people are now again howling for the police's blood because they did release the reason. Whilst simultaneously not noticing that the press were threatening to release the details of her vulnerability before the police gave those details. So the press would have been leading on this based on their own version rather than a measured police version. Anyone who thinks the Mail or the Sun would have broken it well is delusional.

And... If it wasn't the police's role to disclose such information, how was it the families role to very deliberately lie and say that there were no issues, no problems, and no possible reasons or contributors to her disappearance? Oh I get why they didn't say anything - although it would have been better if they had said nothing rather than say stuff that wasn't true - but they misled (no doubt for the best of intentions) and that fuelled the attacks on the police and the armchair detectives speculation.

And.... how many f...ing threads on this subject do we need? - UAIBU just for starting yet another one.

I just so feel for her if she has taken herself off for some time away, which is the best case scenario. What’s she supposed to do now? Walk back into her life with the whole country knowing about her struggles 😔 It’s the same as every police social media post in my area though. Every time someone goes missing, if there’s any chance someone believes they’d harm themselves it’s plastered all over the post and quite often the person is traced fine and well. I always think how is that person then supposed to move on when their problems have just multiplied 🤦🏼‍♀️

I think in this case her ‘vulnerabilities’ could have been put in a more vague way rather than specifying this level of detail. Even just to say there had been previous concern for her wellbeing or something would spare her some of her dignity.

It really doesn’t seem like she’s in that river though. I so hope she’s found

This is pretty much spot on unfortunately.

I do see this as an issue separate from the public defaming/victim blaming element though. I'm concerned about police bias.

People with mental health issues are treated with biases by police because research shows, perhaps as expected, that people who go missing are disproportionately affected by mental health issues compared to the general population.

So on the one hand, it's understandable that the police find struggles with addiction relevant to a missing person's case. On the other, the presumption that it's definitely the case that Bulley is the cause of her own death or disappearance could be based on this bias rather than being accurate.

If you follow missing persons true crime cases, you'll so often hear of police dismissing missing persons cases as runaways because of their mental health history, even when it's not the case.

Just to be clear though I'm not inferring that's definitely what happened here, and I think that what information is out there points to no foul play. I still think it's pertinent to mention potential bias though.

This whole case is pretty twisted IMHO and a prime example of what's wrong with modern social media. People are privvy to a little information because it's easy to access it now online and they think it makes them Miss Marple and that they're entitled to every last detail of the case. The media and public have sensationalised this story to a point that it's getting much more coverage than lots of very similar cases. They criticise the police for not doing XYZ even when the police say clearly that they have done XYZ. They criticise the police for not divulging certain information, they criticise when they do.

I do find it odd that it wasn't made clear that she had vulnerabilities from the outset. However, if anything I think that this was done so that people would take the case more seriously not less. I'm not sure what benefit there has been to revealing the specifics of these vulnerabilities and it's a pretty sad testament to mob mentality that they felt they had to tbh.

I think we need to remember that the police haven't really made this case what it is, the media and the public have. I think we should just stop with the mob mentality now and just let the police do their job. I don't think there's any real reason to think that they aren't doing it to the best of their ability

I completely agree with this.

I agree re stigma, as someone who has had addiction issues in the past and have loved ones who do.

However I also think it's important that people's private medical history is not made public without consent.

I could find 100% of Twitter posts from police where they describe a missing person as vulnerable. They didn't do that here and I doubt that was because the family asked them not to.

Someone upthread said this information had been disclosed with the permission of the family? That isn't what the statement released last night. The police told the family why they were releasing the information.

I think it's a disgusting arse saving exercise. There is now a very strong implication that they think she commit suicide and to avoid criticism of their decision to concentrate on the river, they've told us all she was unstable.

The police have dealt with this level of speculation before and if they haven't, perhaps they need to work out how to deal with it rather than divulge very personal information about a missing person. There is a reason MPs of all parties are concerned about this disclosure.

Yes I was thinking this myself the other day, wondering how I would feel if it was my family having to deal with the scrutiny, and the online detectives. I'm surprised this has been allowed to stand on here. And I wonder how many 'detectives' from this site rocked up to the scene in real life.

Social media isn't going away and has been here for a long time now. The police should have strategies in place to deal with it.

This is clutching at straws, surely. If so then someone would recognise her regardless of the information being divulged - her face is everywhere.

It's disgusting that the police have shared such personal information about her, it's so unnecessary. They could simply have said at the start that they are looking for her as they believe she is vulnerable, and that they wouldn't be sharing more to respect her privacy, and left it at that.

The police haven't been "forced" to reveal anything, other than to cover their own sorry asses. I really hope she turns up, and sues them for sharing her personal information so openly and publicly.

I think the whole thing is disgusting. The police revealing this, the speculation online, the armchair detectives, shame on them all. I'm not in the UK and had only seen headlines and hadn't read into it too much until last night when I was sick and couldn't sleep. I read threads about it in a few places and was completely shocked by what was being said, I had no idea the dirty depths some people as sinking too.

On another thread some people were calling it white privilege that this case has been so talked about. It doesn't seem like any kind of privilege to me to have your whole life pulled apart and gossiped on, not for Nicola and certainly not for her family. Some people need to take a really hard look at themselves.

If she does have alcohol issues then that is relevant to the investigation. However, should the police have publicly disclosed this the way they have? Absolutely not.

I get the feeling it's a reaction to the public criticism of the investigation and the diving expert that was brought in. It's the wrong reaction though.

However I also think it's important that people's private medical history is not made public without consent.

This. 100 percent.

If I’m honest I think this information should have been released at the beginning of the investigation - in order to give a clearer picture of possible circumstances surrounding her disappearance.