Finally: A Partial Response to Some Months-Old FOI Requests
Cynically, I don't check my Nicola case-focused email every day, because I'm so used to the powers that be ignoring me for months on end. So I was shocked to find yesterday that Lancashire Constabulary actually emailed me on May 7 with a partial response to the spaghetti-at-the-wall FOI request I began back in November 2023, after the College of Policing "report"* was released. Does their response have something to do with the fact that a new and also seasoned PCC (pictured above) has just been appointed to oversee them? I think so. A bit more on that at the very end of the post.
The May 7 response was actually to a complaint I'd filed to their non-response the first time around. This time, they actually provided me a few crumbs to the original questions, though as has been the case with other FOI requesters, they seem to sometimes just outright ignore certain questions, or parts of questions, and hope you don't notice. I do.
My questions were mostly related to the events of January 27, how exactly the dominos started to fall and create the mess we're all so familiar with. But I also wanted to know about the force's previous contact with Nicola and Paul, what the police knew about the Fitbit and when, and a couple of other matters. Here's the full list of questions I originally sent back in November 2023:
In their original response, they cited the Data Protection Act of 2018 (no surprise), and also Section 38(1) of the FOIA, which cites potential "harm" to the "mental health" of Nicola's friends and family, as their reasons for refusing to answer any of the six questions.
Once news of the Channel 5 second hack job of a documentary came out, I used that as grounds for a complaint. If Paul Ansell was comfortable with Channel 5 airing yet another documentary featuring him prominently (and probably compensating him financially, as I have no doubt they did the first time around), how could privacy and mental health really be cited as a reason to hold back this information? So they obliged, ish. Here are their May 7 responses.
Answer to question 1: This was a stretch on my part, although if this were the US or Canada, public records on such matters would probably be readily available.
Answers to questions 2-8 (they incorrectly numbered my questions from here on out):
The answers to questions 2 & 3, about the Ring footage, are about as cursory as you'd expect. They "viewed" the footage and "received" clips, whatever that means.
Was this done at the home when they first visited at 11:25am on January 27? Or later that day? Did Ansell hand over a folder of all the recorded events from January 27? And how were they verified? Ring saves recorded footage to a cloud account (if you're signed up for the subscription that permits saved recordings), so did Ansell provide the police with access to his account, or did he hand-select files to send to them? As most of us have thought for more than a year now, someone who does CAD for a living is not incapable of fudging timestamps of video files to make things look a certain way, and the timestamp of the video released to Grizzly True Crime absolutely looks fudged. If altered videos were in the same format as legitimate Ring clips, I believe the police's "trained digital media police officers" would be none the wiser. (On the CCTV, most of my issues with it can be found in this blog post, from point #18 onward.)
Regarding question 4, about the photo of Nicola, the Constabulary's media team was quoted in the CoP report as saying that they found it "difficult to obtain a photo to circulate" during the first weekend Nicola was missing. Yet here is the Constabulary stating on the record that they received a photo of Nicola on January 27. Does the force know how to use email? Do they own a printer? What is the reason for the delay, and the complaint from their own media team to the CoP, if what they've stated to me is actually true? The missing posters stated that Nicola had gone missing "today," so they were presumably printed on Friday, January 27, and contained a photo of Nicola in a bobble hat with her hair down. Not how she allegedly looked on January 27, but there was a picture provided. So what was the actual issue here, and whose fault was it, Paul's or the police's? Sketchy, as usual. I do wonder if those missing posters were actually put up on the first Friday or if they were just backdated.
Questions 5 and 6, on the Fitbit: They didn't actually answer question 5. I wrote back to them about this and hope to receive a response. I want to know when the force learned that Nicola owned and was wearing a Fitbit, not when they first found it. As we know, it was first mentioned by Sally Riley in the press conference of Friday, February 3, a whole week after Nicola went missing. Did Paul mention it right away and the police just didn't act? Or did he hold back that information? In any case, surely he would be tech-savvy enough to consider trying to locate Nicola using the Fitbit's Bluetooth signal and one of several 'Find my Fitbit' apps available for both Apple and Android. Why wasn't this done on day one, or any of days two through six? Why did omnipresent Emma White never mention the Fitbit until a Mirror reporter asked her about it on February 3 (in a story published February 4)?
Answering question 7 apparently would be a further violation of the law that they already violated—and received pretty much zero punishment for by the ICO and CoP—with their "family"-sanctioned statements of February 15 and 16, 2023.
But the answer to question 8 is somewhat helpful! Lancashire Constabulary has gone on record here saying that no one besides Paul, not Penny Fletcher, or the vet, or anyone else, made a call about Willow or Nicola on the morning of January 27, to either 101 or 999. Paul's call was the only call.
So there you have it. Some progress, some movement, some renewed hope, for which I think we have brand new (and also previous) PCC Clive Grunshaw to (indirectly) thank.
*A footnote on the CoP report:
This really should be its own blog post, but Neya on Twitter/X, as always, sees things as they truly are, and uncovered months ago that the College of Policing engaged a prominent UK PR firm called, terrifyingly, Luther Pendragon, to help them craft the CoP report on Nicola's case. Luther Pendragon employs a team of spin doctors and writers to help their clients—mostly health care clients in the private and public sectors—look wholesome, dodge controversies, and generally whitewash (sanitize?) their activities and proclivities. They've also been employed, as Neya found, by the actual UK government. Just look at this client list:
When you look closer, it gets worse. Luther Pendragon was hired to help with the 'Independent Inquiry into the issues raised by the David Fuller case' yet they also list the NHS—the biggest offender in the David Fuller case after Fuller himself—on their client list. Excellent!
I really think the only hope here is that Andrew Snowden, as most will already know, was just voted out as Lancs PCC, replaced by his Labour predecessor Clive Grunshaw. Maybe, just maybe, someone with influence who knows Nicola's case stinks will be able to get to Grunshaw and have the case reopened. Maybe that someone is us. Grunshaw "will represent the people of Lancashire," says the website he's now taken over, and I actually believe him.
Thanks for reading.