FOR years many of us suspected that something was rotten at the core of Cleveland Police.

Indeed the Echo has been a forefront of efforts to expose corruption and mismanagement deeply ingrained within the senior ranks of the force. Our efforts to investigate some of its murky secrets led to the police using powers that had been set up by the Government to protect us all from terrorists and gangsters as a means of protecting itself from reporters who were getting too close to the truth.

The phone monitoring case has been yet another shameful episode in the recent history of Cleveland Police.

Yesterday the clean-up operation started as a press conference was called and Chief Constable Iain Spittal announced an overhaul of the way the force handles complaints, and that the disgraced Professional Standards Department will be broken up. If the stage-managed event had a sense of déjà vu about it then that is because this is not the first time in recent years the scandal-hit force has reluctantly washed its dirty laundry in public and pledged to clean up its act.

Mr Spittal was not in his current post when the unlawful activities took place but he has been left to sort out an almighty mess. The real culprits long since fled the scene. 

At the end of last year Mr Spittal sent letters of apology to us here at the Echo after some of Britain’s most eminent judges ruled the force had unlawfully used anti-terror powers to snoop on private phone calls. Yesterday Mr Spittal offered fulsome apologies when he came face-to-face with Graeme Hetherington and Julia Breen – two Echo reporters whose phones the force monitored. 

The apologies and planned shake-up are steps in the right direction by Cleveland Police but we doubt they will be sufficient to regain the trust and respect of the community it serves.