The Police, Moorov and the Currency of Allegation
How Liberty Is Being Manufactured Into Guilt
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The Moorov doctrine lets separate, weak allegations be stitched into one “pattern.” What does not stand alone is given weight by accumulation. A handful of thin complaints becomes, by process, a single “coherent” story. Weak evidence is transmuted into apparent corroboration.
That operation is amplified by police practice. Women are interrogated with structured, leading questionnaires: tick-box sequences that harvest answers. Each “yes” is recorded, indexed and folded into the dossier. These are not interviews aimed at truth; they are harvests aimed at volume.
Many of those complainants are ex-partners. Grudges, emotional disputes, messy relationships, material the police should treat as suspect, are instead treated as fuel. The presence of motive or prior conflict is not a reason to pause. It is, in practice, a reason to proceed.
And then there is money. The Criminal Injuries Compensation Authority (CICA) hands out awards on the balance of probabilities. It does not wait for juries. It pays. In 2023–24 CICA paid out just under £165 million and processed roughly 42,000 applications. The scheme uses a fixed tariff: awards start at around £1,000 for qualifying harms and, in very severe cases, escalate to extremely large sums. The state will compensate a complainant without a criminal conviction; the standard is civil, not criminal.
Put this together and the business logic is dangerous and obvious.
• The police harvest allegations from people they know or can easily reach.
• Tick-box questionnaires extract usable answers that are then reframed as corroboration.
• Moorov sews these separate answers into a “pattern” that looks persuasive in court.
• The complainer can seek compensation through CICA regardless of a criminal verdict.
• Prosecutors and investigators score “results”, charges laid, convictions obtained, which bolster careers.
This is not merely incompetence. It is structural capture. The incentives line up perfectly to produce the desired outcome: charges, convictions, and the appearance of efficiency, at the cost of truth.
What this system does to a man’s life is simple and savage.
• Careers ruined.
• Families torn apart.
• Finances destroyed in a fight for innocence the law barred him from making.
• A social death: friends read headlines and assume the worst because a stitched narrative is louder than nuance.
If you can prove your innocence but the court barred relevant evidence under s.274, or Moorov has been used to piece together unrelated fragments, your proof is irrelevant. The machinery has no interest in truth. It is interested in throughput.
There is a name for an institution that converts human lives into performance metrics and compensation opportunities. Call it a guilt factory.
It must be said plainly: the police are not merely making mistakes. In too many cases they are making careers. Where incentives reward volume and conviction, injustice will follow.
Because when liberty becomes a stepping stone for someone else’s promotion, justice is dead.
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Verified Sources
1. Criminal Injuries Compensation Authority:
Annual Report & Accounts 2023–24, showing just under £165m in compensation and application figures.
2. House of Commons Library briefing:
Compensation for criminal injuries (2025).