Wiltshire policeman convicted of assaulting a woman in custody has been cleared on appeal!

[DuelingFanjo]

According to the judge... injuries she suffered "were probably caused by her falling to the floor after letting go of the door frame".

so she basically walked into a door. FFS! story

Heard it this morning on the local news. Shocking! I have been ranting round the house about this!

It really is a case of "oh, he didn't mean to hurt her". Well that's OK then. She abviously imagined the bruising and pain he caused her. So long as men don't mean to hurt women we just have to suck it up!

And he is only suspended from work - so yes he could be back to assault a few more women and get away with it, in the very near future!

the video clearly shows that he throws her to the ground! I can't believe that they are saying she 'let go' of the door frame!

I know. I can't imagine what the judge was thinking. Well I can, it was something along the lines of "she was in custody so she deserves everything she gets" . He was clearly looking at the CCTV footage through manspecs or something!

I'm furious about this. Her biggest crime that I can see, what being completely drunk.

It just STINKS!

I don't even know if she was completely drunk ,not that this is a crime, as she had slept it off in her car overnight.

Wonder if the judge has returned some dodgy verdicts before?

Its terrible, the CCTV looks fairly compelling to me. IIRC someone else came forward and said that this policeman had also assaulted them previously.

If coppers can't be convicted of wrongdoing when its on CCTV there is no chance of them ever been found guilty when there is no CCTV. SO big green light for them to do what the hell they want.

I guess he'll get his job back now!

This makes me furious. He is clearly pushing and shoving her roughly on the CCTV. How much more evidence do they need?

I find it hard to believe his assertion that she was the most unpredictable prisoner he had ever come across, too. Police officers will be dealing day in and day out with people who are drunk, drugged or have serious mental health problems, and I haven't seen any mention in any of the coverage that this woman had any previous convictions or a previous record of bad behaviour.

Surely police training must cover how to handle people who are behaving erratically or abusively, or attempting to harm themselves, and how to control them safely without hurting them? This woman was smaller and presumably weaker than the officer, and if he was having that much trouble getting her into the cell he should have asked his colleagues to help him. There is no excuse. .

This reminds me of a police encounter I had many years ago. I witnessed a robbery from the window at my workplace late at night and rang the police. They came round and asked me some questions and then went out and trawled the neighbourhood and brought back this rather seedy looking man and wanted me to say that this was the man I had seen. I kept telling them that I had only seen the back of the man from several storeys up by the uncertain light of a street lamp so there was no way I could identify him.

"Oh yes", said one of them. "It is him: he's got previous." They wouldn't stop pressing me to say it was him. Because, obviously, if somebody had "previous" it wouldn't really matter if I lied and said I had seen something I hadn't- people with "previous" don't deserve any better, do they?

Don't know what to think about this. When it first appeared in the media it seemed quite cut and dried, but the court had access to both sides and found the police officer not guilty.

Why does this seem to happen, again and again, that the courts never find the Police guilty? Either the media are misreporting it terribly - leaving out bits/making things up and misleading us - or the courts simply don't like convicting police officers of any offence. Obviously, a bit of CVCTV footage doesn't tell the whole story, but just what we can see is surely unacceptable - no matter what the woman did.

It's hard (for me) to believe that our justice system is so useless, so I have to go with the partial nature of the evidence as presented to us by the media.

But it's extremely worrying. If the news reports are accurate, the police seem to be able to attack innocent members of the public at demonstrations and vulnerable people at police stations with impunity. Is that really how it is??

I have to admit when i first saw this in the news ,i was a bit about it , a few seconds of cctv footage do not tell the whole tale . This doesnt condone his rough treatment of the woman ,but without being aware of all the facts and the back story ,im not going to be baying for his blood .