IN the wake of Chief Superintendent Jim Trotman’s acquittal yesterday, Thames Valley Police needs to examine why it keeps losing cases of this nature.

We do not defend Mr Trotman’s behaviour in his private life in any way. His and Karin Gray’s actions have caused a great deal of distress to their families.

But it always appeared that the police case was built on flawed logic that Mr Trotman must have been guilty of setting fire to his car because of his conduct in his private life.

Yet to neutral observers the prosecution at Swindon Crown Court never produced anything like solid evidence that nailed Mr Trotman as a Machiavellian character who had committed arson and then laid a trail of evidence to try to frame Mrs Gray’s husband.

There appeared to be a witch-hunt mentality as the investigation swung from gathering the evidence to convict the guilty person to specifically taking down a presumed ‘dirty cop’.

We have seen Thames Valley Police scupper prosecutions with similar attitudes before.

One case against animal rights terrorist Mel Broughton collapsed as officers were exposed as almost pathologically determined to ‘get’ him, while it had to pay out thousands of pounds after illegally seizing a media organisation’s phone records in its hunt for a mole.

And the public was left with a bill estimated at £1m by its persecution of a reporter in Milton Keynes whose only crime was getting good stories.

Different cases, but each demonstrates a lack of perspective and proper scrutiny of evidence. And taxpayers are the ones picking up the bill each time.

We accept police forces lose cases.

However, Thames Valley must ask whether their procedures are fundamentally flawed after this series of failed cases.