invisible woman
I AM NOT CRIMINAL. THIS IS GOOD NEWS
Good news. Officially, I am not a criminal. Not according to Hertfordshire Constabulary, anyway.
This may sound like an unusually modest achievement for a practising solicitor. But in September 2025, the Hertfordshire Office of the Police and Crime Commissioner stated that my conduct meant that “a criminal offence had taken place”. It just forgot to identify the offence, the statutory provision or the evidence establishing it.
Now I have finally received Hertfordshire Constabulary’s Defence to my data-protection claim — and the police have formally and officially distanced themselves from that conclusion. Their position is that the criminal-offence finding was the OPCC’s view, not theirs, and that they do not adopt it.
In ordinary English: do not look at us; the OPCC said it.
There is only one problem. The OPCC did not witness the incident. It reached its conclusion through a complaints process based on Hertfordshire Constabulary’s incident record, body-worn video and account of what happened. The police are now disowning the label — but it was their information that enabled the OPCC to attach it to me.
How the label appeared
On 26 August 2025 I went to Northwood Headquarters to collect documents for a military client, which also happened to be my partner. I was there as a solicitor, not as a visitor looking around the base. Hertfordshire Constabulary's own Defence now accepts that I attended in a professional capacity. It also accepts that the officers asked me to leave and that I complied.
I was not arrested. I was not charged, cautioned or prosecuted. No officer gave me a notice identifying an offence. No criminal case followed. If the story had ended at the gate, there would now be very little to write about.
But the story did not end at the gate. I complained about the police attendance and the way I had been treated. The Office of the Police and Crime Commissioner for Hertfordshire, or OPCC, dealt with that complaint. It is a separate public body performing functions within the police-complaints system. It was supposed to examine whether the complaint had been handled reasonably and proportionately.
According to the Defence, on 8 September 2025 the OPCC acknowledged the complaint and issued its final report. In that report it recorded that the location was a prohibited area, referred generally to national-security controls and then made a much more serious statement about me: Your non-compliance meant a criminal offence had taken place.
That sentence changed the character of the incident. I was no longer simply a solicitor who had attended an area around a military establishment, allegedly argued about access, been told to leave and left. An official complaints body had converted the episode into a completed criminal offence. They put a label on me and my alleged actions.
The obvious question was: which offence?
Was the OPCC alleging an offence under the Official Secrets Act, the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act, the National Security Act, the Northwood Headquarters Byelaws, public-order legislation or something else?
What conduct satisfied the legal elements?
Where was the prohibited boundary?
Who gave the legally effective direction?
What exactly had I failed to do, and when?
No one supplied a coherent answer. Different documents referred to different laws and powers.
One account spoke vaguely of a 'Prohibited Places Act', which is not the name of an applicable Act. Other passages moved between the Official Secrets Act, trespass, public order and common law. The conclusion was firm. Its legal foundation kept changing.
I therefore asked for the records. On 30 January 2026 I made a subject access request for the incident log, the call and dispatch material, body-worn video, officers' notes, metadata, audit trails and the legal terminology used about me. Those records should have shown what Hertfordshire Constabulary had been told, what the officers recorded and how the allegation had travelled into the complaints process.
Instead, I waited 192 days for a refusal. Hertfordshire Constabulary initially cited the wrong statutory provision and later relied on national-security exemptions. The material remained hidden, while the statement that a criminal offence had taken place remained in an official report.
I then asked for a review of the complaint outcome. On 8 September 2026 the review body upheld the handling as reasonable and proportionate. It treated my demand to understand the factual and legal basis of the criminal conclusion largely as an attempt to obtain evidence through the complaints process. Once again, I was directed towards information-rights routes that had already failed to provide the information.
Then, on 28 October 2026, Hertfordshire Constabulary served its Defence to my data-protection claim. The Defence repeated the OPCC's criminal-offence statement, but this time the police added a sentence of their own:
This was not the view of the Defendant and for clarity the Defendant does not adopt this same view.
Hallelujah!
Translated from litigation English, that means: Hertfordshire Constabulary does not stand behind the OPCC's conclusion that I committed a criminal offence.
This is not a court judgment declaring me innocent, because there has never been a prosecution from which I needed to be acquitted. It is something narrower but still important.
The police force whose records and officers formed the factual foundation of the complaints process has now formally told the court that the most damaging conclusion in that process is not its own.
For fourteen months, the criminal label survived because every institution pointed towards another institution or another procedure. The OPCC relied on the incident material. The police withheld the material. The review process said it was not a disclosure mechanism. The information-rights process invoked national security. But once the conclusion appeared inside a Defence, where it could affect liability and damages, Hertfordshire Constabulary stepped away from it.
The alleged crime survived every administrative challenge. It did not survive contact with the Defendant's lawyers.
I previously described that administrative labyrinth in The Crime She Committed Nobody Can Name. Each institution pointed to another process. The conclusion remained in place while the evidence needed to test it remained beyond reach.
The Defence therefore adds a fourth circle to the diagram: litigation reversal. The police rely on the history of the OPCC report when it helps tell the story, but disown its most damaging conclusion when liability and damages arrive in court.
What the Defence had to admit
The Defence is strongest where it cannot sensibly avoid the documents. It admits, among other matters, that:
This is not a Defence built around a clean record of timely compliance. It is a Defence built around admitting the procedural wreckage and denying that the wreckage caused anything compensable.
The litigation strategy in plain English
Once the unavoidable admissions are made, the strategy becomes clear:
Admit the delay and deny the consequence.
The Defendant accepts the delay but describes the backlog as an explanation. A backlog may explain institutional failure; it does not convert it into compliance. Nor does it explain why the Information Rights Unit apparently did not communicate directly with me for months while the OPCC (why OPCSS was dealing with my information rights requests???) repeatedly acted as an administrative postbox.
The Defence then attacks damage and causation. It says there is no medical evidence, no financial loss and no serious compensable distress. That is the familiar litigation move: concede the broken process, then argue that the person trapped inside it should not have been particularly troubled.
The difficulty is that the uncertainty is not abstract. I am a solicitor. Journalists repeatedly ask what happened on 26 August, whether I committed an offence and whether any adverse police record exists. In fact one asked me today.
I have professional and regulatory responsibilities. I cannot give a definitive answer because the public bodies holding the source material have not allowed me to reconstruct the official narrative, even as parts of that narrative have been used against me.
Replace reasons with blanket of national security
The Defence abandons the statutory provision cited in the refusal and relies instead on national-security exemptions under section 78A for law-enforcement processing and section 26 for other processing. But the pleading does not explain, category by category, why disclosure of such matters as call wording, timestamps, audit trails, the legal basis considered, administrative handling records or a severable account of the incident would prejudice national security.
National security may justify withholding particular material. It is not a magic phrase that answers every question at once. The central issue is not whether some material might properly be protected. It is whether every relevant category was actually examined, whether partial disclosure was considered, and whether the exemptions are being used to shield the origin and evolution of an adverse proposition about me.
Use the record while withholding the record
The Defence relies on the incident record, the existence and review of body-worn video, and the complaint-handling chronology. At the same time, the underlying data remain undisclosed. That creates a useful evidential asymmetry: the institution can describe the record, characterise the record and rely on the record, while the data subject is told she cannot know enough to challenge its accuracy.
The accuracy argument is then reframed. The police can say that an incident log is accurate as a record of what a caller reported, even if the caller's proposition was wrong. That distinction can be legitimate, but only if the system preserves it. A record of an allegation is not the same thing as an established fact. A report that someone refused to leave is not proof that she refused. An image of a sign is not proof that she saw it, understood it, crossed a boundary or committed an offence.
The institutional advantage is obvious: withhold the source, rely on the summary, and then ask the data subject to prove that the hidden material is inaccurate.
Turn a victim report into a credibility exhibit
The most revealing drafting choice appears in a section headed The Claimant's Complaints. It is not clear why it appeared in the Defence at all, but here we are.
Into that section the Defence mixes not only the police complaint and my data-protection correspondence, but also a separate crime report in which I was the reporting victim of alleged crimes, which I originally reported to the Metropolitan police, which allocated it, yes, to Hertfordshire police for investigation. Whilst my allegations are against very senior military officers, Hertfordshire police, in their wisdom initially allocated further the case for investigation to a trainee detective - a very nice and empathetic person, but whose experience was limited to cracking such spectacular crimes like garage burglaries.
The pleading compresses that history into a narrative that I could not provide evidence, I did not wish to waste police resources and I later requested that the investigation be completed.
The placement is not legally neutral. My victim report was not a complaint against Hertfordshire Constabulary and did not belong naturally in a section about my complaints. Its inclusion invites a credibility inference and offers an alternative narrative for distress.
What in fact happened was considerably more complicated. I did not simply announce that I had no evidence, withdraw an allegation and ask the police to close the file. At that stage, I explained that I was not in a position to participate further or provide the material required, and that I did not want police resources committed to an investigation that I could not then properly support. That was a qualified and context-specific position—not a retraction, an admission that evidence did not exist, or a judgment that the underlying report lacked substance. When my circumstances later changed, I made clear that I was ready to provide the relevant information and sought to have the investigation reopened. I also asked for access to information connected with my earlier reports and for an explanation of how Hertfordshire Constabulary intended to ensure the independence and integrity of any renewed investigation. Those questions remain unanswered. The Defence therefore takes a provisional decision made in particular circumstances, strips away its qualifications and subsequent history, and repackages it as a credibility point in litigation about the police’s failure to provide and properly manage my personal data.
The Defendant does not expressly call me dishonest or vexatious. Good litigation drafting rarely does. The technique is more careful: assemble a separate block of complaints, emphasise repeated correspondence, include an abbreviated account of a victim report, and allow the architecture to do the insinuating.
That is why the Reply must have restored the chronology and the categories. A conduct complaint is not a subject access request. A victim's crime report is not a complaint against the police. Administrative routing by the OPCC does not discharge the Chief Constable's statutory obligations. And a later decision not to continue a sensitive investigation, expressed with qualifications, does not resolve whether the police complied with an entirely separate data-protection request.
The solicitor point is not decorative
The Defence's admission that I attended in a professional capacity has consequences beyond scene-setting. It establishes that the treatment occurred while I was performing legal work. That matters to seriousness, foreseeability and professional impact.
The Law Society has recently documented the wider environment in which solicitors face threats, abuse and intimidation for doing their jobs. Its 2025 survey, published in January 2026, reported that 49 per cent of respondents said they or their firm had received a threat in the previous year, 38 per cent felt their personal safety was threatened because of the profession, and 13 per cent had considered leaving it.
The Council of Europe's Convention for the Protection of the Profession of Lawyer was created in response to harassment, threats and interference with professional duties. The United Kingdom has signed but, as of this writing, has not ratified it and the Convention is not yet in force. I do not invoke it as a free-standing domestic cause of action. I invoke it because it expresses a principle that should not be controversial: a lawyer should be able to carry out professional duties without intimidation, improper hindrance or the unexplained transformation of professional conduct into criminality.
Here the sequence is unusually stark. The police record my professional capacity. The police ask me to leave. I comply. The complaint system, brief by the Police and upon police records later says a criminal offence took place. The offence is never identified. The evidence is withheld. Then, when sued, the police expressly decline to adopt the conclusion.
If unexplained criminalisation of a practising solicitor's professional conduct is treated as a minor administrative inconvenience, the institutional message is not confined to me.
Who put the label on me
Hertfordshire Constabulary's litigation position creates a simple evidential fork.
Possibility one Hertfordshire Constabulary supplied information from which the OPCC adopted the criminal conclusion.
Possibility two The OPCC independently converted the incident record, body-worn video or complaint material into that conclusion.
Possibility three The conclusion came from some other source or some combination of sources that has never been identified.
Every branch requires an answer. If the police supplied the proposition, their present disavowal requires an explanation of what was communicated and in what terms. If the OPCC invented the conclusion, it must identify the legal and evidential steps it took. If another source supplied it, that source and the onward information chain must be identified.
This is not wordplay. A public body cannot safely maintain a record that a named person committed an offence while refusing to name the offence, the law, the elements, the evidence, the decision-maker and the recipients. Nor can the conclusion become untouchable merely because one institution says it belongs to another.
The methodological defect
The deeper problem is the method. It operates like this:
In court, the police say the conclusion was the complaints body's view and decline to adopt it.
The result is a bureaucratic perfect circle. Information can travel outward, but accountability cannot travel back. Each institution uses only the part of the chain that suits its immediate function. The data subject is expected to challenge a proposition whose source keeps changing depending on whom she asks.
This is why the comparison with the Service Police Complaints Commissioner matters intellectually, even if I do not presently advance it as a separate argument in this case. The same methodological defect can recur across systems: primary material is converted into an adverse inference; the inference is treated as fact; and responsibility for its accuracy disappears across institutional boundaries. Correcting the method in one field can establish a standard for others.
The police pushes OPCC under the bus
On receiving the Defence on 28 October 2026, I did not wait. Alongside my Reply, I sent the OPCC a formal demand for explanation, correction and apology.
The OPCC now has a choice.
It can maintain its conclusion. If it does, it must identify the exact offence, the Act and section, each legal element, the conduct said to satisfy those elements, the boundary allegedly crossed, the direction allegedly disobeyed, the evidence relied upon and the person who made the determination.
Or it can withdraw the conclusion. If it does, it should apologise in writing, identify every record containing or implying the criminalising proposition, correct or qualify those records, notify recipients, and confirm that the proposition will not be relied upon as an established fact.
It must also explain its administrative role. The Defence repeatedly describes the OPCC receiving, forwarding and responding to my data-protection correspondence.
Was the OPCC merely a postbox, or did it undertake some function in relation to my information rights?
If merely a postbox, why is this conduct-history presented as though it answers the data-protection claim? If it was performing a substantive function, what was the legal basis, scope and outcome?
I have asked for a response by 11 November 2026. The challenged review decision is dated 8 September 2026. A judicial review claim must be filed promptly and, ordinarily, no later than three months after the grounds arose. The outer three-month date is therefore 8 December 2026, and correspondence does not stop the clock.
The institutional choreography is almost elegant. To protect itself in the data-protection claim, Hertfordshire Constabulary has stepped away from the OPCC's criminal conclusion. Yet the OPCC reached its decision through a complaints process built around Hertfordshire police records. The police and the complaints body are legally separate when responsibility becomes expensive, but operationally connected when information moves.
Good news for now
So yes, the good news is that Hertfordshire Constabulary does not adopt the view that I committed a criminal offence at Northwood Headquarters. It took fourteen months and litigation to obtain even that much clarity.
The bad news is that the official label still exists in the complaints record, its evidential origin remains unexplained, and the source material needed to test it remains withheld. A disavowal in one pleading is not the same thing as correction across the information chain.
The next move belongs to the OPCC. It can identify the crime. It can explain the evidence. Or it can remove the label and apologise for applying it.
Hertfordshire Constabulary has already moved its chair. Now we wait to see who is left when the music stops.
And then, five minutes before publication…
There was one more strand running alongside today’s court filing.
On 23 September 2026, I contacted Hertfordshire Constabulary to say that I was considering re-engaging with crime investigation 41/84346/25 and asked for the earlier correspondence relating to it. On 6 October, I formally requested that the investigation be reopened. I explained that I was now ready to provide the relevant information, but also required an independent assessment of the conflicts of interest created by Hertfordshire Constabulary’s own involvement in the wider events. I repeated that request on 13 October. On 28 October, after still receiving no recorded decision, I sent a final demand for a straightforward answer: is the investigation reopened and live—yes or no?
So today I did three things at once. I filed my Reply to Hertfordshire Constabulary’s Defence. I required the OPCC to explain and apologise for its unsupported conclusion that my conduct meant a criminal offence had taken place. And I demanded that Hertfordshire Constabulary stop using my earlier, qualified decision not to continue as a litigation narrative and instead decide whether it would now investigate the crime I had reported.
Five minutes before I finished this article, an email arrived from Hertfordshire Constabulary’s Legal Services Department:
“I have sought instructions in this matter and understand that Officers will be contacting you in respect of crime investigation 41/84346/25.”
Finally. Hallelujah 2.0.
The wording remains careful. It does not yet confirm that the investigation has been reopened, who will conduct it or how the obvious questions about independence and conflicts of interest will be addressed.
But the timing is remarkable. In its Defence, Hertfordshire Constabulary chose to place my crime report inside a section headed “The Claimant’s Complaints” and to present a compressed account suggesting that I could not provide evidence, did not wish to waste police resources and later asked for the investigation to be completed. Once I challenged that account and demanded an actual decision on reopening, I was told that officers would contact me.
So this article ends with a procedural cliffhanger. Hertfordshire Constabulary may now have to investigate the very crime report its Defence attempted to use against my credibility.
I am waiting for the officers to call.
You know my number.
Note on the proceedings
This article comments on live civil proceedings and related public-law correspondence. The Defence records the Defendant's pleaded position; it is not a judicial finding. My characterisation of the Defence and the institutional methodology is analysis and opinion based on the documents presently available. The underlying factual and legal issues remain for determination.
Principal materials
The Crime She Committed Nobody Can Name
Hertfordshire Police background page
Law Society Threats to solicitors report
Law Society Death threats intimidation and physical violence faced by solicitors
The Crime She Committed Nobody Can Name
And today's song is - CARPE DIEM
This may sound like an unusually modest achievement for a practising solicitor. But in September 2025, the Hertfordshire Office of the Police and Crime Commissioner stated that my conduct meant that “a criminal offence had taken place”. It just forgot to identify the offence, the statutory provision or the evidence establishing it.
Now I have finally received Hertfordshire Constabulary’s Defence to my data-protection claim — and the police have formally and officially distanced themselves from that conclusion. Their position is that the criminal-offence finding was the OPCC’s view, not theirs, and that they do not adopt it.
In ordinary English: do not look at us; the OPCC said it.
There is only one problem. The OPCC did not witness the incident. It reached its conclusion through a complaints process based on Hertfordshire Constabulary’s incident record, body-worn video and account of what happened. The police are now disowning the label — but it was their information that enabled the OPCC to attach it to me.
How the label appeared
On 26 August 2025 I went to Northwood Headquarters to collect documents for a military client, which also happened to be my partner. I was there as a solicitor, not as a visitor looking around the base. Hertfordshire Constabulary's own Defence now accepts that I attended in a professional capacity. It also accepts that the officers asked me to leave and that I complied.
I was not arrested. I was not charged, cautioned or prosecuted. No officer gave me a notice identifying an offence. No criminal case followed. If the story had ended at the gate, there would now be very little to write about.
But the story did not end at the gate. I complained about the police attendance and the way I had been treated. The Office of the Police and Crime Commissioner for Hertfordshire, or OPCC, dealt with that complaint. It is a separate public body performing functions within the police-complaints system. It was supposed to examine whether the complaint had been handled reasonably and proportionately.
According to the Defence, on 8 September 2025 the OPCC acknowledged the complaint and issued its final report. In that report it recorded that the location was a prohibited area, referred generally to national-security controls and then made a much more serious statement about me: Your non-compliance meant a criminal offence had taken place.
That sentence changed the character of the incident. I was no longer simply a solicitor who had attended an area around a military establishment, allegedly argued about access, been told to leave and left. An official complaints body had converted the episode into a completed criminal offence. They put a label on me and my alleged actions.
The obvious question was: which offence?
Was the OPCC alleging an offence under the Official Secrets Act, the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act, the National Security Act, the Northwood Headquarters Byelaws, public-order legislation or something else?
What conduct satisfied the legal elements?
Where was the prohibited boundary?
Who gave the legally effective direction?
What exactly had I failed to do, and when?
No one supplied a coherent answer. Different documents referred to different laws and powers.
One account spoke vaguely of a 'Prohibited Places Act', which is not the name of an applicable Act. Other passages moved between the Official Secrets Act, trespass, public order and common law. The conclusion was firm. Its legal foundation kept changing.
I therefore asked for the records. On 30 January 2026 I made a subject access request for the incident log, the call and dispatch material, body-worn video, officers' notes, metadata, audit trails and the legal terminology used about me. Those records should have shown what Hertfordshire Constabulary had been told, what the officers recorded and how the allegation had travelled into the complaints process.
Instead, I waited 192 days for a refusal. Hertfordshire Constabulary initially cited the wrong statutory provision and later relied on national-security exemptions. The material remained hidden, while the statement that a criminal offence had taken place remained in an official report.
I then asked for a review of the complaint outcome. On 8 September 2026 the review body upheld the handling as reasonable and proportionate. It treated my demand to understand the factual and legal basis of the criminal conclusion largely as an attempt to obtain evidence through the complaints process. Once again, I was directed towards information-rights routes that had already failed to provide the information.
Then, on 28 October 2026, Hertfordshire Constabulary served its Defence to my data-protection claim. The Defence repeated the OPCC's criminal-offence statement, but this time the police added a sentence of their own:
This was not the view of the Defendant and for clarity the Defendant does not adopt this same view.
Hallelujah!
Translated from litigation English, that means: Hertfordshire Constabulary does not stand behind the OPCC's conclusion that I committed a criminal offence.
This is not a court judgment declaring me innocent, because there has never been a prosecution from which I needed to be acquitted. It is something narrower but still important.
The police force whose records and officers formed the factual foundation of the complaints process has now formally told the court that the most damaging conclusion in that process is not its own.
For fourteen months, the criminal label survived because every institution pointed towards another institution or another procedure. The OPCC relied on the incident material. The police withheld the material. The review process said it was not a disclosure mechanism. The information-rights process invoked national security. But once the conclusion appeared inside a Defence, where it could affect liability and damages, Hertfordshire Constabulary stepped away from it.
The alleged crime survived every administrative challenge. It did not survive contact with the Defendant's lawyers.
I previously described that administrative labyrinth in The Crime She Committed Nobody Can Name. Each institution pointed to another process. The conclusion remained in place while the evidence needed to test it remained beyond reach.
The Defence therefore adds a fourth circle to the diagram: litigation reversal. The police rely on the history of the OPCC report when it helps tell the story, but disown its most damaging conclusion when liability and damages arrive in court.
What the Defence had to admit
The Defence is strongest where it cannot sensibly avoid the documents. It admits, among other matters, that:
- an incident record was created following the request for police assistance at Northwood Headquarters
- two police units were deployed and the duty inspector and sergeant were to be informed
- the attending record described me as a solicitor acting in a professional capacity
- the officers asked me to leave and I complied
- my subject access request was made on 30 January 2026
- no personal data was provided before the refusal of 10 August 2026, a period of 192 days (by the way, no data was provided after either)
- no extension notice was served within the initial statutory period
- the refusal of 10 August cited the wrong statutory provision
- no written determination was given within the period applicable to my rectification and restriction requests
- internal allocation of functions does not alter the Chief Constable's responsibility as controller.
This is not a Defence built around a clean record of timely compliance. It is a Defence built around admitting the procedural wreckage and denying that the wreckage caused anything compensable.
The litigation strategy in plain English
Once the unavoidable admissions are made, the strategy becomes clear:
Admit the delay and deny the consequence.
The Defendant accepts the delay but describes the backlog as an explanation. A backlog may explain institutional failure; it does not convert it into compliance. Nor does it explain why the Information Rights Unit apparently did not communicate directly with me for months while the OPCC (why OPCSS was dealing with my information rights requests???) repeatedly acted as an administrative postbox.
The Defence then attacks damage and causation. It says there is no medical evidence, no financial loss and no serious compensable distress. That is the familiar litigation move: concede the broken process, then argue that the person trapped inside it should not have been particularly troubled.
The difficulty is that the uncertainty is not abstract. I am a solicitor. Journalists repeatedly ask what happened on 26 August, whether I committed an offence and whether any adverse police record exists. In fact one asked me today.
I have professional and regulatory responsibilities. I cannot give a definitive answer because the public bodies holding the source material have not allowed me to reconstruct the official narrative, even as parts of that narrative have been used against me.
Replace reasons with blanket of national security
The Defence abandons the statutory provision cited in the refusal and relies instead on national-security exemptions under section 78A for law-enforcement processing and section 26 for other processing. But the pleading does not explain, category by category, why disclosure of such matters as call wording, timestamps, audit trails, the legal basis considered, administrative handling records or a severable account of the incident would prejudice national security.
National security may justify withholding particular material. It is not a magic phrase that answers every question at once. The central issue is not whether some material might properly be protected. It is whether every relevant category was actually examined, whether partial disclosure was considered, and whether the exemptions are being used to shield the origin and evolution of an adverse proposition about me.
Use the record while withholding the record
The Defence relies on the incident record, the existence and review of body-worn video, and the complaint-handling chronology. At the same time, the underlying data remain undisclosed. That creates a useful evidential asymmetry: the institution can describe the record, characterise the record and rely on the record, while the data subject is told she cannot know enough to challenge its accuracy.
The accuracy argument is then reframed. The police can say that an incident log is accurate as a record of what a caller reported, even if the caller's proposition was wrong. That distinction can be legitimate, but only if the system preserves it. A record of an allegation is not the same thing as an established fact. A report that someone refused to leave is not proof that she refused. An image of a sign is not proof that she saw it, understood it, crossed a boundary or committed an offence.
The institutional advantage is obvious: withhold the source, rely on the summary, and then ask the data subject to prove that the hidden material is inaccurate.
Turn a victim report into a credibility exhibit
The most revealing drafting choice appears in a section headed The Claimant's Complaints. It is not clear why it appeared in the Defence at all, but here we are.
Into that section the Defence mixes not only the police complaint and my data-protection correspondence, but also a separate crime report in which I was the reporting victim of alleged crimes, which I originally reported to the Metropolitan police, which allocated it, yes, to Hertfordshire police for investigation. Whilst my allegations are against very senior military officers, Hertfordshire police, in their wisdom initially allocated further the case for investigation to a trainee detective - a very nice and empathetic person, but whose experience was limited to cracking such spectacular crimes like garage burglaries.
The pleading compresses that history into a narrative that I could not provide evidence, I did not wish to waste police resources and I later requested that the investigation be completed.
The placement is not legally neutral. My victim report was not a complaint against Hertfordshire Constabulary and did not belong naturally in a section about my complaints. Its inclusion invites a credibility inference and offers an alternative narrative for distress.
What in fact happened was considerably more complicated. I did not simply announce that I had no evidence, withdraw an allegation and ask the police to close the file. At that stage, I explained that I was not in a position to participate further or provide the material required, and that I did not want police resources committed to an investigation that I could not then properly support. That was a qualified and context-specific position—not a retraction, an admission that evidence did not exist, or a judgment that the underlying report lacked substance. When my circumstances later changed, I made clear that I was ready to provide the relevant information and sought to have the investigation reopened. I also asked for access to information connected with my earlier reports and for an explanation of how Hertfordshire Constabulary intended to ensure the independence and integrity of any renewed investigation. Those questions remain unanswered. The Defence therefore takes a provisional decision made in particular circumstances, strips away its qualifications and subsequent history, and repackages it as a credibility point in litigation about the police’s failure to provide and properly manage my personal data.
The Defendant does not expressly call me dishonest or vexatious. Good litigation drafting rarely does. The technique is more careful: assemble a separate block of complaints, emphasise repeated correspondence, include an abbreviated account of a victim report, and allow the architecture to do the insinuating.
That is why the Reply must have restored the chronology and the categories. A conduct complaint is not a subject access request. A victim's crime report is not a complaint against the police. Administrative routing by the OPCC does not discharge the Chief Constable's statutory obligations. And a later decision not to continue a sensitive investigation, expressed with qualifications, does not resolve whether the police complied with an entirely separate data-protection request.
The solicitor point is not decorative
The Defence's admission that I attended in a professional capacity has consequences beyond scene-setting. It establishes that the treatment occurred while I was performing legal work. That matters to seriousness, foreseeability and professional impact.
The Law Society has recently documented the wider environment in which solicitors face threats, abuse and intimidation for doing their jobs. Its 2025 survey, published in January 2026, reported that 49 per cent of respondents said they or their firm had received a threat in the previous year, 38 per cent felt their personal safety was threatened because of the profession, and 13 per cent had considered leaving it.
The Council of Europe's Convention for the Protection of the Profession of Lawyer was created in response to harassment, threats and interference with professional duties. The United Kingdom has signed but, as of this writing, has not ratified it and the Convention is not yet in force. I do not invoke it as a free-standing domestic cause of action. I invoke it because it expresses a principle that should not be controversial: a lawyer should be able to carry out professional duties without intimidation, improper hindrance or the unexplained transformation of professional conduct into criminality.
Here the sequence is unusually stark. The police record my professional capacity. The police ask me to leave. I comply. The complaint system, brief by the Police and upon police records later says a criminal offence took place. The offence is never identified. The evidence is withheld. Then, when sued, the police expressly decline to adopt the conclusion.
If unexplained criminalisation of a practising solicitor's professional conduct is treated as a minor administrative inconvenience, the institutional message is not confined to me.
Who put the label on me
Hertfordshire Constabulary's litigation position creates a simple evidential fork.
Possibility one Hertfordshire Constabulary supplied information from which the OPCC adopted the criminal conclusion.
Possibility two The OPCC independently converted the incident record, body-worn video or complaint material into that conclusion.
Possibility three The conclusion came from some other source or some combination of sources that has never been identified.
Every branch requires an answer. If the police supplied the proposition, their present disavowal requires an explanation of what was communicated and in what terms. If the OPCC invented the conclusion, it must identify the legal and evidential steps it took. If another source supplied it, that source and the onward information chain must be identified.
This is not wordplay. A public body cannot safely maintain a record that a named person committed an offence while refusing to name the offence, the law, the elements, the evidence, the decision-maker and the recipients. Nor can the conclusion become untouchable merely because one institution says it belongs to another.
The methodological defect
The deeper problem is the method. It operates like this:
- A public authority records or receives an adverse description of a person.
- The description is converted into an evaluative conclusion, such as trespasser or criminal offence.
- A complaints body relies on police-originated material to uphold the handling of the complaint.
- The individual asks for the underlying information so the conclusion can be tested.
- The police withhold the information, invoking national security.
- The complaints body says its process is not a disclosure mechanism and directs the individual elsewhere.
- The information-rights route supplies no effective means of testing the conclusion.
- The conclusion remains capable of circulation and adverse use.
In court, the police say the conclusion was the complaints body's view and decline to adopt it.
The result is a bureaucratic perfect circle. Information can travel outward, but accountability cannot travel back. Each institution uses only the part of the chain that suits its immediate function. The data subject is expected to challenge a proposition whose source keeps changing depending on whom she asks.
This is why the comparison with the Service Police Complaints Commissioner matters intellectually, even if I do not presently advance it as a separate argument in this case. The same methodological defect can recur across systems: primary material is converted into an adverse inference; the inference is treated as fact; and responsibility for its accuracy disappears across institutional boundaries. Correcting the method in one field can establish a standard for others.
The police pushes OPCC under the bus
On receiving the Defence on 28 October 2026, I did not wait. Alongside my Reply, I sent the OPCC a formal demand for explanation, correction and apology.
The OPCC now has a choice.
It can maintain its conclusion. If it does, it must identify the exact offence, the Act and section, each legal element, the conduct said to satisfy those elements, the boundary allegedly crossed, the direction allegedly disobeyed, the evidence relied upon and the person who made the determination.
Or it can withdraw the conclusion. If it does, it should apologise in writing, identify every record containing or implying the criminalising proposition, correct or qualify those records, notify recipients, and confirm that the proposition will not be relied upon as an established fact.
It must also explain its administrative role. The Defence repeatedly describes the OPCC receiving, forwarding and responding to my data-protection correspondence.
Was the OPCC merely a postbox, or did it undertake some function in relation to my information rights?
If merely a postbox, why is this conduct-history presented as though it answers the data-protection claim? If it was performing a substantive function, what was the legal basis, scope and outcome?
I have asked for a response by 11 November 2026. The challenged review decision is dated 8 September 2026. A judicial review claim must be filed promptly and, ordinarily, no later than three months after the grounds arose. The outer three-month date is therefore 8 December 2026, and correspondence does not stop the clock.
The institutional choreography is almost elegant. To protect itself in the data-protection claim, Hertfordshire Constabulary has stepped away from the OPCC's criminal conclusion. Yet the OPCC reached its decision through a complaints process built around Hertfordshire police records. The police and the complaints body are legally separate when responsibility becomes expensive, but operationally connected when information moves.
Good news for now
So yes, the good news is that Hertfordshire Constabulary does not adopt the view that I committed a criminal offence at Northwood Headquarters. It took fourteen months and litigation to obtain even that much clarity.
The bad news is that the official label still exists in the complaints record, its evidential origin remains unexplained, and the source material needed to test it remains withheld. A disavowal in one pleading is not the same thing as correction across the information chain.
The next move belongs to the OPCC. It can identify the crime. It can explain the evidence. Or it can remove the label and apologise for applying it.
Hertfordshire Constabulary has already moved its chair. Now we wait to see who is left when the music stops.
And then, five minutes before publication…
There was one more strand running alongside today’s court filing.
On 23 September 2026, I contacted Hertfordshire Constabulary to say that I was considering re-engaging with crime investigation 41/84346/25 and asked for the earlier correspondence relating to it. On 6 October, I formally requested that the investigation be reopened. I explained that I was now ready to provide the relevant information, but also required an independent assessment of the conflicts of interest created by Hertfordshire Constabulary’s own involvement in the wider events. I repeated that request on 13 October. On 28 October, after still receiving no recorded decision, I sent a final demand for a straightforward answer: is the investigation reopened and live—yes or no?
So today I did three things at once. I filed my Reply to Hertfordshire Constabulary’s Defence. I required the OPCC to explain and apologise for its unsupported conclusion that my conduct meant a criminal offence had taken place. And I demanded that Hertfordshire Constabulary stop using my earlier, qualified decision not to continue as a litigation narrative and instead decide whether it would now investigate the crime I had reported.
Five minutes before I finished this article, an email arrived from Hertfordshire Constabulary’s Legal Services Department:
“I have sought instructions in this matter and understand that Officers will be contacting you in respect of crime investigation 41/84346/25.”
Finally. Hallelujah 2.0.
The wording remains careful. It does not yet confirm that the investigation has been reopened, who will conduct it or how the obvious questions about independence and conflicts of interest will be addressed.
But the timing is remarkable. In its Defence, Hertfordshire Constabulary chose to place my crime report inside a section headed “The Claimant’s Complaints” and to present a compressed account suggesting that I could not provide evidence, did not wish to waste police resources and later asked for the investigation to be completed. Once I challenged that account and demanded an actual decision on reopening, I was told that officers would contact me.
So this article ends with a procedural cliffhanger. Hertfordshire Constabulary may now have to investigate the very crime report its Defence attempted to use against my credibility.
I am waiting for the officers to call.
You know my number.
Note on the proceedings
This article comments on live civil proceedings and related public-law correspondence. The Defence records the Defendant's pleaded position; it is not a judicial finding. My characterisation of the Defence and the institutional methodology is analysis and opinion based on the documents presently available. The underlying factual and legal issues remain for determination.
Principal materials
The Crime She Committed Nobody Can Name
Hertfordshire Police background page
Law Society Threats to solicitors report
Law Society Death threats intimidation and physical violence faced by solicitors
The Crime She Committed Nobody Can Name
And today's song is - CARPE DIEM
