When there is an assault in the street and someone is injured how do the Police decide who to arrest. What if each party to the fight accuses the other of being the aggressor? Should they just assume that whoever is more seriously injured is the victim? Should they assume that the party that called the police is the victim? These two are in fact the criteria that the British Police use to assign the roles of victim and offender.

But, in real life it is seldom that simple. Often the true offender will be the party that calls the police. Since they were unable to prevail in the physical fight they now use the police as a weapon against the true victim. They were incapable of prevailing in combat, so now they resort to manipulation. Nor is the relative severity of injuries of any probative value in determining blame: Often the aggressor misjudges their abilities, or the abilities of their intended victim. They attack a person they assume to be weak, an easy target; but then they get the surprise of their life when the easy target turns out to be way more capable than they anticipated. The aggressor ends up getting their ass whooped by the frail old vulnerable man they tried to beat up.

Unfortunately the police seem incapable of understanding these simple facts. They are easily misled into treating the true victim as if they were the offender, and treating the true offender as if they were the victim. Once the police have selected which party they will treat as the victim, that party becomes the police's “client”.

The police have well defined procedures for handling counter accusations. These procedures are published, and thus available for the public to read. The procedures require that the police accept counter-accusations, and treat them with equal enthusiasm as the original complaint. But in practice the police blatantly ignore their own published rules. Once they have selected which party to make their “client” they refuse to even consider the possibility that they have made the wrong choice.

Once they have arrested the party that they have chosen to be the offender they refuse to let that person make a crime report. In the case described on the linked website you will be able to read the words of the custody sergeant saying that it would not be appropriate to accept a crime report from the party that had been arrested as he was being treated as the suspect. Why do the police behave in this way? Because they have no interest whatsoever in truth or justice. They, and their colleagues the Crown Prosecution Service, care only about winning as many cases as possible, and losing as few cases as possible. It is all about the scorecard. Indeed, the police have been caught saying that the reason they will not investigate the suspect's claims impartially is that it would adversely affect their case in court if the suspect's defense lawyers let it be known that the victim were also being investigated for the same crime. Winning the case at trial is way more important to the police and CPS than determining the truth about what actually happened; indeed winning at trial is the only thing that matters to the police and CPS. If they imprison the victim of a crime rather than the offender that is a win for the police and CPS. And they don't care in the slightest about the injustices that they engineer every day.