I was angry seeing cops read Nicola statement without apologising for THEIR woeful probe & THEIR intrusion into her life
THERE are many sad aspects to the Nicola Bulley story.
It’s been an absolute tragedy for her, and for all her poor family and friends.
And it’s been one of those incidents that has gripped the entire country as speculation grew over where she was, and what may have happened to her.
Like most, I didn’t know Nicola but was willing her to be found alive and the discovery of her body in river reeds less than a mile from where she disappeared was a sickening gut-punch.
But this has also been a shocking disaster-class in how the police run an investigation like this into a missing person.
When Lancashire Police suddenly decided to tell the world that Nicola had alcohol-related problems relating to the menopause, I honestly though they’d lost their minds.
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Why on earth would they publicly trash the reputation of a defenceless missing woman in such a deplorably intrusive and tawdry way?
We still haven’t had a good answer to that question – probably because there isn’t one.
But it’s hard to escape the suspicion that the cops were just desperate to divert mounting criticism of their failure to find Nicola after three weeks.
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On February 3, soon after she vanished, they announced there were ‘no significant issues involving Nicola’s health.’
That, we now know, was a lie.
In fact, she had been suffering various significant health issues that might have adversely contributed to her state of mind.
The police lie encouraged a whole army of armchair detectives to pop up on social media and start hypothesising what happened to her, some even going to the scene to spew their bonkers theories and post them to the world.
It was all deeply unedifying and completely predictable.
What the police SHOULD have done is taken the media into their private ‘off the record’ counsel as soon as they knew about Nicola’s health issues and asked them to not to publish the information but to be mindful of it in the reporting.
This used to happen all the time when I was a young newspaper reporter working the crime beat in Streatham and Tooting in South London, and police officers regularly briefed me on what they were investigating.
It happened even more so when I became editor of two national newspapers and senior police commanders would take me into their confidence on big stories.
In those days, the police were happy to work with the media to help solve crimes and we would share information.
Carefully coordinated, well-informed, press and TV publicity is a hugely powerful tool for any detective.
It was a mutually beneficial relationship, and there was a trust that neither side wanted to breach.
But since the infamous Leveson inquiry into press standards, which depicted every contact and encounter between police and media as a toxic criminal act that did society a disservice, that relationship has been shattered and the police and media now operate as two separate entities, often actively working against each other’s interests.
The result of this new stand-off is the kind of fiasco we saw with the Nicola Bulley story, where the police lost all control of their vitally important narrative, and all sorts of mad conspiracy bulls**t was allowed to spread on social media.
'Inexcusable intrusion'
It made me angry to see Detective Chief Superintendent Pauline Stables read out the statement from Nicola’s family which attacked media intrusion and specifically named and shamed Sky News and ITV for contacting them directly after her body was found.
Not because I don’t think the family are perfectly entitled to feel upset at the intrusion into their lives in the past three weeks. Like anyone in their position, such huge media attention can be extremely stressful at what is already an incredibly tense time.
No, I was angry because there wasn’t a single word of apology or regret from Ms Stables about her own force’s woefully poor investigation and shameful, inexcusable intrusion into Nicola’s life that prompted much of the speculative claims which caused her family such distress.
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Many lessons will need to be learned fast about how similar stories are covered in future.
But the key one for me is that there must be an urgent reappraisal of how the police and the media interact, so they go back to working together with a common goal to solve crimes and tragic mysteries like Nicola Bulley’s disappearance.
