Officer in probe on abuse failings is named
Police inaction ‘may have put child at further risk’
A POLICE sergeant who retired part-way through a four-year investigation into South Yorkshire Police officers failing to act on evidence that rock star Ian Watkins was a paedophile has accidentally been publicly named by a police watchdog.
Police Sergeant Richard Barnes was the most senior of four officers investigated over failings which concluded earlier this year that inaction by South Yorkshire Police officers “may have placed a child at risk of further abuse for several months”. The IPCC has found that he would have had a case to answer for gross misconduct if he was still serving.
Officers in Doncaster failed to take seriously complaints made over three months by Watkins’ ex-partner Joanne Mjadzelics about the Lostprophets singer, who is currently serving a 35-year prison sentence for sex offences including the attempted rape of a fan’s baby.
Three of the four officers retired midway through an investigation by the IPCC which found all three would have had cases to answer for gross misconduct had they still been employed. The fourth officer was cleared of misconduct at a hearing.
PS Barnes’ name was inadvertently revealed in a partially-redacted version of the IPCC’s report into the issue sent to The Yorkshire
Post under Freedom of Information laws. It comes a month after South Yorkshire Police accidentally sent The Yorkshire Post the draft findings of the IPCC’s investigation, along with emails that showed the watchdog did not intend to publish its report in full.
Following a Freedom of Information request for the full report, the IPCC said it was redacting the name of all officers on the grounds that it was “personal information”. But one passage reads: “On May 11, 2012, Ms Mjazelics showed [redacted] and PS Richard Barnes an image of a five-year-old female. [Redacted] and [redacted] dismissed this image as being of an adult female and took no further action.”
The three officers who retired had been interviewed between August 2014 and January 2015 following a complaint made to the IPCC in May 2013 by Ms Mjadzelics. New legislation came into force in January 2015 to prevent police officers retiring while under investigation for misconduct but the rules do not apply to investigations which started before that time.
South Yorkshire Police today refused to confirm the dates the officers retired but said all were “entitled to retire after 30 years’ service”. Between March and May 2012, Ms Mjadzelics took a laptop to Doncaster Police Station three times which she said contained an indecent image of a young child that she had been sent by Watkins. On the first two occasions, officers did not view the content and on the third time, officers viewed the image but told her it was of an adult female. The image was never viewed by specialist child protection officers.
Attempts to contact PS Barnes through South Yorkshire Police were unsuccessful.
The officers were entitled to retire after 30 years’ service A statement from South Yorkshire Police.
ROCK STAR Ian Watkins, lead singer of the band Lostprophets, sold records by the millions and had thousands of adoring fans. But he was also an evil paedophile.
The way his case was dealt with by police in Yorkshire and Wales raises troubling questions over how investigations into celebrities are handled – and how forces treat witnesses trying to expose abuse.
In court, I represented Joanne Mjadzelics, a former partner of Watkins who repeatedly tried to warn police about his crimes but was instead ignored, warned about harrassing him and even, extraordinarily, eventually prosecuted herself over the very images she had tried to give officers as evidence.
Watkins was sentenced to 35 years in jail in 2013 for his depraved sex attacks on children and babies. But justice came years after Ms Mjadzelics had been warning them about exactly what he was doing.
She did everything to expose his crimes but was ignored by a number of different police forces.
After his conviction she received a phone call from the authorities which thanked and praised her for her assistance. They said that without her they “couldn’t have got him”. But if they had taken her seriously, the abuse could have been stopped years earlier.
She really had been the wrong sort of informer. Her background was unsteady. She was even warned a number of times about her “harassment” of Watkins.
In a police memo the contest was described as between “a famous rock star and a former escort who had been sectioned”. She had never been sectioned, but at the heart of police incompetence and bias was a failure to check information.
For years, she had written to various authorities who should have cared, Child Protection, the Association of Chief Police Officers. She visited her local police station in Doncaster time after time. She arranged appointments there asking them to make available a child protection officer.
She carried a laptop there to show an image of a child sent by Watkins – stopping abuse there and then was within their reach, as a subsequent investigation by the police watchdog the IPCC has ruled. But rather than the images being examined by an appropriate professional, instead she was accused of pursuing a personal revenge mission against Watkins.
He was only brought to justice after an execution of a drugs warrant in September 2012 revealed his involvement in sexual abuse when his computers were seized and examined. It came after warnings from Miss Mjadzelics and five other individuals to South Wales Police had gone unheeded.
After Watkins’ trial, Joanne struggled to come to terms with all the opportunities she had offered the police to stop him. She began to talk about it more publicly, becoming a noisy and inconvenient voice.
But instead of admitting their mistakes, police charged Miss Mjadzelics with possessing child pornography images.
As her QC, I saw the prosecution of her as an affront to the integrity of the criminal justice system, an attempt to cover up the disgraceful inaction by various police forces.
The jury agreed and in early 2015, she was found not guilty of all charges.
I have seen so many shifts of attitude over the years towards victims and whistleblowers. I remember the days, not so long ago, when a complainant would be judged by her clothes and her drinking. I watched with interest the pursuit of the other extreme when there was an official policy of “automatic belief ” of every victim, which caused its own problems.
I would settle for adherence to the following approach – a good investigator will go and test the accuracy of allegations and evidence with an open mind, supporting a complainant through the process. That was not how South Yorkshire Police behaved in this case.
Their response to criticism from the IPCC – an apparentlysincere and detailed apology to Ms Mjadzelics – is both promising and in stark contrast with South Wales Police, who are yet to say sorry to her for failings by officers.
However, it is disappointing to note that while the IPCC found three officers involved in Miss Mjadzelics’ case in South Yorkshire had grounds to answer cases for gross misconduct, the retirements of all three of them saves them from facing disciplinary investigation.
Timely retirement is a well-established escape route for police officers accused of misconduct.
It is hoped that this case is a salutary lesson for officers involved in investigating allegations against celebrities – evidence of wrongdoing must not be dismissed out of hand, no matter the high profile of the alleged perpetrator, nor the difficult background of the accuser.
A good investigator will test the allegations and evidence with an open mind.