DCHS statement on policing

Our response to a statement issued on 16 January 2018 by Devon & Cornwall Police:

On an almost weekly basis we encounter illegal hunting, acts of violence and criminal damage. We absolutely reject the police’s suggestion that these incidents go unreported to them.

We have reported every single incident this season and provided detailed witness statements, video and other physical evidence and details of assailants. We have the incident logs and crime reference numbers to prove it. The police’s claim that they are unable to investigate because groups like ours are not forthcoming with information is nothing short of a lie.

In our experience very little comes of the police’s investigations unless we actively chase them every week for months. This distracts us from our core aim, which is to protect hunted animals in the field, so much so that we have recently taken on a volunteer whose sole responsibility is to keep track of all the ongoing investigations and contacts with the police. We have also recently instructed a solicitor to take forward a specific complaint to the police.

There are a number of ongoing police investigations into multiple acts of criminal damage to our vehicles, incidents where sabs have been threatened, driven at and assaulted by hunt members, and the fox killed by the Silverton Hunt on New Year’s Day.

However, the majority of crimes we report, some of them involving serious threats and acts of violence, result in no police response whatsoever. We made a 999 call on Boxing Day when sabs were being attacked by members of the Cotley Hunt, one of whom made a threat to kill. We were told there was nobody available to come out, although there had been several police vans at the peaceful protest in the town centre that morning. Meanwhile the Silverton Hunt were recently able to summon an immediate police response on the basis of what we were told was an ‘unspecified complaint’ about our presence. Officers who attended carried out thorough and unnecessary checks on our vehicles but refused to take any action on the illegally driven hunt vehicles we pointed out to them. If Devon & Cornwall Police want to be seen to be impartial, we need to see some evidence of this. We warned the police that their inaction would be seen as a green light by the hunt to escalate their behaviour. Later that day those illegal vehicles were used to block us in on the road so their passengers could surround and threaten us and damage one of our vehicles with impunity. This is the kind of thing we experience week after week.

Our past experience where we have gone through all the motions is that almost every case is thrown out. We are not talking here about legitimate assessments by the police or CPS that a prosecution does not stand a realistic chance in court. Instead what we see is gross incompetence (evidence being ‘lost’), cases being stalled and stalled until they run out of time (many offences have a six month time limit), deliberate twisting and misrepresentation of evidence we present to them, and victim blaming along the lines of “if you don’t want to be assaulted, don’t go along to a hunt”. A common theme is that even when officers do attend and video evidence of arrestable offences is shown to them at the time and individuals pointed out, no arrests are made, the hunt is allowed to continue and the assailants are able to leave the scene, resulting in opportunities for evidence-gathering being lost.

The overall effect of police inaction is to embolden hunts and make the crimes they commit more frequent and more severe. We have seen this most shockingly in the vicious attack on South Devon Animal Rights just last weekend, but the seriousness of the situation is nothing new. Two of our sabs were badly injured in 2016 by the Cheldon Buckhounds. One of them required extensive surgery to his fractured skull. The incident was not taken seriously by police, who were negligent in their response on the day, didn’t interview any of the assailants for several months, and failed to arrest or charge anyone, despite ample video evidence of the entire incident.

We are worried that unless the police start taking hunt violence seriously and adopt a much more proactive approach, someone will be killed.

These incidents are being presented as ‘clashes’ between two sides in an emotionally-charged ‘dispute’, but Devon’s twenty foxhunts are organised criminal gangs, who operate in continual violation of the Hunting Act and harass, threaten and even attack anyone that gets in their way. This includes landowners, members of the public who happen upon hunts and of course sabs and monitors. In thirteen years of the ban Devon & Cornwall Police have totally failed to get a handle on the scale of illegal bloodsports and all the crime that follows in its wake.

On paper the law is on our side. We hope Devon & Cornwall Police’s statement is a sign they are finally waking up to the scale of the problem in our countryside. We are seeing some indications that things may be changing and we applaud anyone within the force who is working to make this happen. We also encourage anyone who witnesses the crimes committed by hunts to always report them.

For as long as Devon’s illegal hunts are allowed to continue, people will keep going out to stop them.