Melanie Barton

Melanie Barton is a former beat officer who later moved into a role overseeing Professional Standards complaints. In that capacity, she was responsible for assessing evidence, body-worn video, and written statements relating to my complaint against Avon & Somerset Police.

Her report misrepresented key facts.

Body-worn camera footage shows an officer seizing my prescribed medical cannabis and refusing to return my prescribed morphine. The footage also shows the officer removing the pharmacy label from my medication container. Despite this, Melanie Barton’s report stated that my morphine was not seized. This is directly contradicted by the footage itself — footage she explicitly referenced in her own investigation report, confirming that she had reviewed it.

In other words, the evidence existed, was seen, and was still misrepresented.

I provided a detailed written statement outlining the wider context of events, including threats made by my parents to petrol-bomb my home. Those statements were ignored entirely in her findings. No assessment, no comment, no justification for their exclusion.

The outcome of her investigation did not resolve inconsistencies in the evidence; it papered over them.

I am now pursuing a small-claims action to address the factual inaccuracies and omissions contained within her report. At that point, she will be required to explain how documented evidence was reviewed yet contradicted in her conclusions.

Despite how she is portrayed in a Bristol Live article, this is not a case of integrity under pressure. It is a case study in how Professional Standards processes are used to shield officers from accountability by reshaping the record rather than addressing it.

This page exists to preserve what the official process failed to: the evidence, the omissions, and the discrepancies — in full view, and in context.