Oh duck off, I understand Policing just fine thanks.
PACE means The Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984. This gives Police powers to investigate and arrest, enter premises, search persons etc.
Do you or anyone else here have any evidence to suggest a crime has taken place? So PACE could be used?
No you don't. As the parents didn't either. So the Police have no 'reasonable grounds to investigate' duck all.
The alleged victim has explicitly stated they were not a victim of a crime. Even The Sun which initially implied a CSA offence had taken place have back-tracked and said they shouldn't have implied that.
That doesn't mean a crime wasn't committed, but the Police require some evidence to investigate. As you say a 'tip-,off' may be valuable and taken seriously but only if it supports other Police intelligence.
And if you cared to examine what the parents actually *said*, they witnessed nothing. They alleged they saw a screenshot of a video call which they alleged was HE in his pants. They didn't say they witnessed anything, though many have created fan-fiction where the poor parents wandered into a room and saw HE on a laptop live waiting for the alleged 'victim'.
That's not what they said. They said they saw a 'picture'. A picture they apparently don't have possession of as could not hand it over to The Police, the BBC or The Sun.
So you can duck off with your aggressive posting thanks.
There's no cover-up here, the Police have literally no information or evidence to investigate a crime.
Your other points about the Police not investigating devices in cases of suspected paedophile rings due to cost are not at all what I said and just a weak straw man argument on your part.
that’s what I mean. Establishing a crime has taken place isn’t necessary for a search warrant application. There just needs to be reasonable grounds to suspect there has been one (along with some other elements, such as proportionality of a search being assessed etc) thats what I keep telling you and you don’t seem to understand.
If the police have a credible source that say, a murder had taken place and a body was buried in John Doe’s back garden and it was John Doe’s wife who claimed to have seen this murder taken place - then that’s a reason to suspect.
so police could draft up a search warrant - corroborate some details perhaps to support it.
whether or not John Doe has committed murder or not is irrelevant - because the point of the search is to secure evidence of any criminality.
If there was nothing found on the premises, that doesn’t make the search warrant less valid, hypothetically. If it later emerged Mrs Doe suspected her husband of having an affair and wanted to spite him, that he hadn’t committed murder at all - then that wouldn’t matter. Because at the time of the application the hypothetical police had
reasonable grounds to suspect a murder.
I’ll say it louder for those at the back - you don’t need proof of a crime to conduct a search.
I’m not being aggressive, I’m not suggesting a cover up(?!) im pointing out that your understanding of how a search warrant is applied for and executed is wrong.
what constitutes “reasonable grounds to suspect” is purposefully broad. It can’t be on a whim or a hunch but it’s broad enough for police to use good judgement and weigh up proportionality. Perhaps letting the BBC conduct an internal, less thorough investigation is part of that proportionality. Using less intrusive means to establish what has occurred before progressing to a police investigation - I’m not sure.
there are grounds to argue that the parents seeing a screenshot of Huw interacting with their son
is reasonable grounds, but then im not the officer having to consider dragging a search warrant under intense public scrutiny with a wealthy man accused whose human rights are infringed upon.
and he seemed like the nicest guy ever.
www.theguardian.com
