Cautionary Tale in a Drink Drive case No.3 - or the one with the “helpful” officer who ensured the driver kept his licence.

CCTV is a useful tool, it records what is done and increasingly what is said, if the sound balance is right and not set to record all cameras on one soundtrack as is sometimes the case. It is also unfortunately often only received the day before or even on the day of a trial.

Recently, I was reviewing the CCTV of a breath test procedure in a fail to provide case. The suspect was bought before the Custody Sergeant who booked the suspect in. Then, as it was a very small police station, the suspect was taken behind the custody desk and “put on the machine”. 

The Custody Sergeant was very careful to ensure that he explained to the suspect what was going on and in general terms how the machine worked and the checks it was carrying out as the various beeps and clicks were heard. The officer asked all the right questions and read out the requirement to provide a sample and even correctly read out the passage on how to provide at section A14 of the Form MG DD/A (below).

The suspect was clearly drunk and had a go at providing but did not complete the sample. As the Evidential Breath Testing Instrument was a Camic Datamaster, there were no purges between attempts to provide so the suspect carried straight on with another go at providing. 

At this point the Custody Sergeant was diverted from the suspect to the Custody Desk, where his attention was required. It was such a small police station that this only required the Custody Sergeant to turn round.

Then, a second officer popped up in shot right next to the suspect and told the suspect,

           “just blow as hard as you F*****g can, that works for me.”

The suspect then clearly tried his hardest (as instructed) to blow the sides off the device, but as you would expect, kept running out of breath before he provided an acceptable sample. 

The Custody Sergeant turned round to carry on his role of Camic operator just in time to see and hear the Datamaster time out as it came to the end of its allotted three minutes and not received an acceptable sample.

The Custody Sergeant looked at the Datamaster, looked at the printout, looked at the suspect and charged him with failing to provide a sample. By this time, the “helpful” officer who had guided the suspect in how to provide had gone, the paper work was completed and the “helpful” officer never ever appeared in Section A25 of the MG DD/A. Without the CCTV we would never have known the “helpful” officer had been there or what they had told the suspect to do.

The following day, I was called to Court for this case (the CCTV had been served very late). Once the prosecutor had realised what had happened, the case was dropped. 

To be fair, the Custody Sergeant who also watched the CCTV outside Court, agreed that his colleague had really *****d things up! I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall the next time the two officers were on the same shift.

The lessons to learn are:

1. Don’t get distracted in the middle of an important procedure.
2. Don’t meddle in some else’s work or you may well mess it up.
3. Make sure that you ask for, and get, all the evidence in a case and make sure it is assessed by someone who fully understands it.

If you have a case and want it to be reviewed by an expert then contact Formedecon at [email protected] or check out more details of our services at our website www.formedecon.com. Or specifically our alcohol services at formedecon.com/alcohol-casework