Policeman faces sack as video reveals brutality

A police officer faces the sack – and up to six months in jail - when he appears in court on Tuesday to be sentenced for assaulting an innocent woman inside Melksham police station in Wiltshire. As the victim herself said, the incident was something that might be expected under a tin-pot dictatorship, but not from a policeman in a quiet market town.

The extent of Sgt Mark Andrews’s brutality has been exposed on the eve of his sentencing by a video obtained by the Mail on Sunday. It shows Andrews dragging Pamela Somerville across the floor of the police station and then hurling her into a cell with such force that she suffers severe facial injuries.

The incident occurred in July 2008 when the 57-year-old market researcher was brought into the station after being found asleep in her car.

Somerville denied she had been drinking and explained that she had been sleeping in the car following a row with her partner. “I couldn’t go back because I didn’t want to lose face with John [her partner] after storming out the way I did,” she said.

“I just wanted to get in my car and drive. My car is a safe haven, somewhere where I listen to music and relax.”

Though innocent of any crime, Somerville refused to submit to a breath test which incurred the wrath of Sgt Andrews, a 6ft 3in former soldier.

The video (above) shows how, in the course of their violent encounter, he put her in an arm lock and pushed her so hard through a cell door that she was knocked unconscious when her head met the concrete floor. After coming to, she pressed an intercom and cried out: “I’m hurt, please, please help me.”
 
Two years on, awaiting Andrews’s sentencing, Somerville says: “I am just an ordinary, middle-aged, middle-class Miss Goody Two-Shoes. I had done absolutely nothing wrong.

“What happened to me was extraordinary, terrifying, and no one should ever be treated in the same way again, no matter what they are said to have done. It’s the kind of thing that might go on in a tin-pot dictatorship in Latin America, maybe, but not in rural Wiltshire.”

Somerville needed hospital treatment after the assault and claims her vision still suffers as a result of the incident.

Andrews was reported to his superiors by a fellow police officer, WPC Rachel Webb, and was convicted of actual bodily harm by Oxford magistrates earlier this summer.

Wiltshire's assistant Chief Constable Patrick Geenty described the episode as "completely disgraceful”, adding that: "People have a right to expect that the police will always act by placing the safety and welfare of the public as their first priority.”

Pamela Somerville remains sanguine. “There are good apples and bad apples everywhere,” she says. ·