Incompetence, Or Design..?

PC Roberto-Cristian Varvara, 27, was charged alongside then-girlfriend, Special Constable Alexandra Chiriac, 22, over a three-day break they were said to have taken to Romania in mid-October last year. Colleagues of the officers accused them of returning to work at Colindale Police Station instead of going into self-isolation and quarantining.

However a prosecution mounted against the officers collapsed in dismal circumstances for Scotland Yard and the Crown Prosecution Service, after it emerged PC Varvara and SPC Chiriac had been charged under the wrong Covid-19 regulation.

Hmmm...suspicious? 

Heaping on the embarrassment, Deputy Chief Magistrate Tan Ikram excluded key evidence from a PC who had failed to caution PC Varvara during an angry interrogation, while he also concluded there was not proof that the trip to Romania had actually taken place.

Or serial incompetence? It's really hard to decide one way or the other. But I'm leaning towards incompetence, since it seems there's a lot of it to go around: 

In June, they had been convicted of breaking the quarantine rules when originally prosecuted through the Single Justice Procedure, and were handed £2,000 fines each at a behind-closed-door hearing.

The magistrate had not spotted the defendants were charged under the wrong regulation...

*sighs* 

Neither of them paid fixed penalties that they were issued and did not engage with the Single Justice Procedure prosecution.

But they successfully applied to overturn the convictions and push the case to trial on Tuesday this week.

Judge Ikram found that the police, backed by the CPS, had tried to use a Covid-19 regulations that was in force in July 2020, rather than October 2020, to pursue the case.

Remember when they called it the Great British justice system..?