Friday 18 September 2009

THE LONESOME DEATH OF FIONA PILKINGTON.


Olivia Davison, the Assistant Deputy Coroner for Rutland and North Leicestershire, today repeatedly asked at the inquest into the deaths why “common sense and basic old fashioned policing” had not identified the dead mother and daughter as extremely vulnerable and the victim of a hate campaign. Old Bill, who gets six months paid sick leave and the Queen's Gallantry Medal if his helmet falls off thought that the late Fiona Pilkington was over-reacting in complaining of being besieged and bombarded in her own home by a gang of up to twenty feral youths, doing so for over ten years. No-one was ever arrested, charged or prosecuted, despite her making 13 calls in the year she died. The abuse ranged from her house being besieged by howling little bastards to her son being beaten with an iron bar, her daughter, Frankie, a child with severe learning difficulties was singled out for abuse, her life already miserable made worse.

Eventually, despairing, Fiona torched her own car, while she and Frankie sat inside, neither survived.

.

14 comments:

woman on a raft said...

The respondent 'A Quiet Man' on JuliaM's blog, reminds us that the Leicestershire police were able to find £750,000 to go back and forth to sunny Portugal on the McCann case.

"The force has revealed that the costs for 2008-09 reached £196,756, taking the total figure to £745,233. It was revealed in February the cost to the force for 2007-08 was £548,477. The Home Office has reimbursed £525,069."

You only really count if you are a doctor. Anybody else is invited to go...oh, bad taste even by my standards.

call me ishmael said...

Please, Mrs Woman On A Raft, don't start me off on Gerry and Cilla; you know I have a heart condition.

Daisy said...

Yes, saw it on the local news, Mr Ishmael. Some bizzie was filmed leaving, didn't look like an Olivia, must have been the other bastard, wearing an enormous self-satisfied smirk all over his face. Unbe-fucking-lievable.

Probably wouldn't recognise a crime if you rammed it up his arse and set fire to it, but I bet you he can give you chapter and verse on local policing targets, community outreach programmes, ethnic and diversity satisfaction surveys and all the other mindless bollocks that seems to pervade the middle and upper levels of police management these days.

Common sense and devotion to duty, whatever happened to them, eh?

Mrs B said...

Well said, Mr Ishmael. My immediate reaction was why didn’t the police protect this women and her disabled child, after all it’s the humane thing to do - but the Police are no longer humane.

“You feel to moan but …you'd just be one more person crying,”

I didn’t know you had a heart condition. I suppose it’s no good telling you to stop getting agitated so I’ll just say Beethoven’s fifth piano concerto.

call me ishmael said...

If, Mrs B, you google stanislav's heart attack, you might get a different view of arteriosclerosis. I believe it is at Mr Old Holborn's blog, for one.

lilith said...

What are the police for? This case is horrific.

They have plenty of money to send four officers out to Cyprus to find a woman who isn't there.

woman on a raft said...

There has been a popular shout that this is something to do with Labour. Meh, possibly, but the poor lady's MP was the Conservative David Tredinnick, Bosworth, and she had written him several letters.

What we don't know yet is if Tredinnick did anything more than politely acknowledge the letters, such as going to the police and demanding to know what, if anything, they were going to do to protect his constituent.

I'm not terribly hopeful. As the Taxpayers Alliance reminds us, Treddinick was busy:

"his [expenses] claims feature bills for £210 for astrology software from Crucial Astro Tools, and then for £300 worth of tuition in how to use the aforementioned software. In his defence, he claims he had to learn astrology so he could assess whether Indian Ayurvedic Medicine relates to traditional English Herbal remedies because of his political interest in alternative therapies".

At the very least he could have gone round and cast a protective spell on her; even Cherie Blair would have had a bash with some salt and a chalk. Heck, even I could have done that - and I reckon I'd have put the fear of Beelzebub in to the rest of the estate, which is a darn site more than the police managed - not that they even tried - so let's hear it for alternative approaches.

Incidentally, that Chris Tew isn't retired, unless there is more than one Chris Tew.

He's listed HERE as a detective superintendent in the Specialist Crime Investigation Department.

The unit he is attached to is MAPPA - Multi Agency Public Protection Arrangements - and they've got an entire website.

To be strictly fair, this unit was constructed to "manage the risk posed by certain sexual and violent offenders", but the tormenters were not within that category because the police never took any action, so no one was ever defined as an offender, even when trying to provoke a disabled girl in to an indecent act.

You can read their annual report.

The danger here is that the case will be used not to make the police take the appropriate action under up to eight existing acts capable of addressing yobbery, but to argue that they should be freed from all that pettifogging legality and be allowed to work on the 'No arguments, sonny, you're nicked' principle.

This is a potential danger to civil liberties as there have been several verified examples of police officers taking it upon themselves to try to tell people what they can and can't say, usually on the argument that some delicate eared lady (that's me) might hear and be so overcome that she faints and falls in the road.

woman on a raft said...

While I am spitting bile:

Chris Tew was listed in 2007 as:

Det Supt Chris Tew
Child Abuse Investigation Unit, Leicestershire Police.
(DCI Chris Redfern substituting)

at a meeting of the agencies across the county involved in child protection. Only, not the Pilkington children, because they were only being abused by the neighbours, not by the parents.

Doesn't count, apparently.

Here's a sample of the 13 pages of guff:

RESOLVED:
That action 1 be amended to read as follows:-
‘To promote public awareness in the wider community – including faith, black and minority communities and children and young people – about how everybody can contribute to safeguarding and promoting the welfare of children’


Fuck me Jesus over the goalposts of life, because I cannot understand how they spend 13 pages agreeing to send each other memos about amending the previous memos.

If you want Ruin's company manual, the minutes of the Leicester, Leicestershire and Rutland Local Safeguarding Children’s Board are chapter 1.

call me ishmael said...

It's what they do, Mrs Woman On A Raft, you know that, a paper trail of bureaucratic arse-watching.

Child protection committees proliferate in direct proportion to the failures of under-resourced and badly trained and supervised front-line workers, abusively managed and then dumped in the shit by ghastly careerist totalitairianistses nouvelle, chiefs of this and that, assistant directors of the other, each concerned only with his or her next career move and not blotting their record with anything controversial, like principle.

Multi-disciplinary inter-agency intitiatives cover the backs of many, save those they are convened to protect.

I reported Tew's retirement as it was noted in the Telegraph, thanks for all your additional work.

So much of Ruin stems from the language; if only we spoke less of career and more of work, service and duty. In politics especially it seems contradictory to talk of it being a career, how can politics be both public service and personal enrichment ?

Maybe the independently wealthy Alan Duncan, famous for his self-denial, can unravel this conundrum.

black hole sunset said...

This is a very sad story, even by today's standards.

That the incompetence and wilful negligence of those with a duty to protect might be used as an argument in favour of the enrichment and empowerment of said same negligent incompetents is one of Ruin's favoured narrative devices.

call me ishmael said...

And ain't that the truth?

black hole sunset said...

It might even, Mr Ishmael, be the narrative of Ruin; a definition, almost.

I am always, ever, and perpetually grateful for your efforts Mr Ishmael, indebted, even, but this story has made me sad; should sadden all, in truth.

I have tried, and failed, to read it a second time, such is its poignancy.

call me ishmael said...

No, Mr BHS, the debt is mine; this is, though, a rare heartache.

Phil Tait said...

I have a disabled daughter like Fiona. Makes me mad this. Difference is I have rural neighbors who care, a voice, resources and I'll fight back. Does anyone know where they are buried. Ashamed that I couldn't have helped them in life but at least I can remember them with flowers meantime. Dam, I'm still furious. Phil Tait