Opinion: Byron Camilleri’s mess

Charlton Cassar allegedly beat up his tenant so badly, with a metal rod and a piece of wood, that the tenant sustained a fractured shoulder and grievous injuries. Cassar was charged with injuring his tenant as well as disturbing the peace. Yet the police so completely botched the investigation that the court had no choice but to acquit the alleged aggressor.

This wasn’t a one-off.  With clockwork regularity, criminal suspects are conveniently let off the hook because of shocking police “errors”.  Time and time again, victims are denied justice because of shocking police blunders – the wrong name, wrong date or wrong time on the charge sheet, failure to present evidence, failure to test a white powder to confirm it is the illicit drug it’s claimed to be.

This latest case demonstrates a new level of “incompetence”, which must raise questions about whether the police’s glaring deficiencies could possibly be genuine errors.

Cassar allegedly got into an argument with his tenant in Munxar, Gozo, on 2 October 2024.  As tempers flared, the altercation spilt into the street, where the tenant ended up with serious injuries, including a fractured shoulder.

The police had in their possession the metal rod and the piece of wood that was allegedly used to inflict the injuries.  Yet the police didn’t bother to present that evidence in court.  They didn’t even bother to present the court with a photo of the weapons used. Did the police forget that they had those weapons in their possession?  Or did they lose them?  Or did they just not bother?

The police case was a total mess.  The only evidence the police presented was the reports they had extracted from the alleged victim, without any corroboration whatsoever, and a Lovin Malta video, which they lazily downloaded off the Facebook page onto a CD.

The court noted that the police hadn’t even bothered to look at any CCTV footage.  The police didn’t present any eyewitnesses from the scene of the crime.   The police constable who presented the CD with the Lovin Malta video clip didn’t even bother to identify the people whose voices could be heard in the footage.

The police didn’t summon anybody from Lovin Malta to confirm the authenticity of the video and to testify whether it had been edited.  Superintendent Bernard Charles Spiteri and Sergeant David Borg Grima simply handed the court the reports that were filed.  The court pointed out that this only constituted hearsay evidence.

The police even failed to serve the charges within the three months allowed by law.  The court had no choice but to declare the charges extinguished. Now, Cassar can no longer be prosecuted for his alleged crimes.

This case highlights, at best, the gross incompetence of our police force.  At worst, it raises justified suspicions of collusion between suspects and police officers.

This could have been an open and shut case, had the police done its work – presenting the weapons before the court, summoning eye witnesses to testify, trawling through CCTV footage, professionally identifying voices of those individuals in the video, calling Lovin Malta editors to confirm that the video had not been tampered with, and if so to request the original footage. At the very least, you’d expect the police to serve the charges within the legal time limit.

What’s even more shocking than the criminal negligence of those police officers is the utter failure of the Police Commissioner or other high-ranking police officers to lift a finger to investigate the recurring failures of their force.

What’s deeply disturbing is that the minister responsible for the brutal abuse at Corradino and the ludicrous drug heist from the AFM barracks hasn’t even made the slightest attempt to reassure the public that an investigation is ongoing and that appropriate steps will be taken to prevent another repeat.

When a British police officer, Philip Payton, missed significant evidential opportunities and repeatedly failed to investigate and prosecute crimes properly, he was the subject of an Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC) investigation.

He was found guilty of gross misconduct after failing to present the necessary evidence in court, as in Charlton Cassar’s case. At the two-day hearing, Payton was found to have breached police standards of professional behaviour.  He would have been kicked out of the force had he not resigned. Payton was added to the National College of Policing’s barred list, which prohibits him from ever working with the police again.

The IOPC Regional Director, Miranda Biddle, said his “handling of these investigations fell so far below the standards of what members of the public are entitled to expect, and his failures have had a devastating impact on the families involved”.

She pointed out that had the police force not taken action, serious crimes would have gone unpunished.  That’s exactly what’s happened in the Munxar case.  That tenant’s shoulder was fractured.  His injuries were very real. Yet the accused has gone unpunished.  And the police officers who bungled the case haven’t even been called in, let alone suspended or investigated.

To reassure the public, the UK IOPC said the “police have subsequently undertaken an internal review and implemented additional supervision approaches to ensure that concerns are flagged and addressed to prevent such failures reoccurring”.

What action has Minister Byron Camilleri taken to reassure the Maltese public? None at all.  He can safely keep plodding from one calamity to the next because Prime Minister Robert Abela insists that Camilleri “always shows seriousness, correctness and integrity”.

“He was always extremely professional in his work,” Abela insisted, lauding the minister because “90% of the public trusts the police force”. Those 90% might think otherwise if it were their own relative beaten up in Munxar.