Diane Louise Jordan is understandably upset about receiving a harassment warning notice from her local police force in Cambridgeshire. The Songs of Praise presenter told the Mirror: “If I didn’t have my faith I don’t know how I would survive this.”
Perhaps she was overreacting. Police information notices, as they are also called, have no legal standing in themselves. They are not formal cautions. Signing one is not an admission of guilt or even evidence that harassment has taken place.
And they do not necessarily lead to a prosecution. On the contrary, they are likely to be regarded by the police as a substitute for action in appropriate cases.
The police started issuing these notices after the Protection from Harassment Act was passed by parliament in 1997. Under the act, it’s an offence to pursue a course of conduct that amounts to harassment of another person and which the person responsible for that conduct knows, or ought to know, amounts to harassment.
Two things have to be proved for a charge to stick. First, you have to show that there was a course of conduct, which means the behaviour must have happened on at least two separate occasions. Second, you have to prove that the defendant knew, or should have known, that the conduct amounted to harassment.
The legislation was not well thought through, however. Early prosecutions failed because stalkers claimed they didn’t know that sending flowers or cards could amount to harassment. So the police started issuing suspects with formal notices. These can be useful in establishing whether there has been a complaint on more than one occasion. But what they don’t do is prove that a complaint was justified.
Crucially, notices should make it clear to anyone reading them that they are not court orders or even cautions. They should also state that anyone who receives or signs a notice is not admitting wrongdoing. Furthermore, police officers should not suggest that issuing a notice implies guilt. Guidance to this effect was issued in 2009 by the former Association of Chief Police Officers, and has been endorsed by the new College of Policing.
Four years ago, the government admitted harassment notices were not working. In a consultation paper introduced by Theresa May, the home office said: “We recognise that there are concerns around the process by which these notices are issued. Some argue that those issued with a police information notice are not given a fair hearing. Equally we are aware that some consider police information notices to lack teeth, and believe they give victims a false sense of security.”
The Home Office added that an individual’s details would not be recorded on the police national computer purely as a result of a notice being issued.
Because a police notice of this sort has no statutory basis and no legal effect, there is no right of appeal against it. But most people would find it deeply disturbing to receive one nonetheless, and you could be forgiven for not reading the small print. More importantly, issuing a notice is a poor substitute for investigating crime.
Diane Louise Jordan has denied the allegations against her, insisting that she had no contacts with her alleged victim: “I haven’t spoken one word to her in over a year. On one of the occasions I was supposed to have verbally attacked her I have proof I was hundreds of miles away in London.” The alleged victim is Kayla Thomas, Jordan’s daughter’s estranged husband’s girlfriend. Last year, Thomas accused Jordan of being very aggressive, poking and pushing her. “She was in my face saying, ‘You’re scum, you’re scum.’” That’s not accepted by Jordan.
As newspaper readers, we have no way of knowing whether one of these women is more to blame than the other. What we do know is that low-level tensions between individuals in circumstances such as these are a fact of life. They do not get reported on the front page of a newspaper unless at least one of the parties is a public figure with a reputation to lose.
Jordan has complained to Cambridgeshire police, the only option available to her. Police forces should take complaints such as this to heart. If they do not have the resources to investigate low-level harassment, they should avoid taking sides in cases where there is no realistic prospect of a prosecution.
