What the fudge!!!????

[Hellhound]

Cyclist has an axe thrown at him from a van and the Police do nothing
https://road.cc/content/news/police-won ... him-284781
Surely that has to be attempted manslaughter at least

[Jdsk]

Surely that has to be attempted manslaughter at least

Most likely charge would be "common assault". That doesn't require proof of intention to kill or the gross negligence equivalent, and doesn't require contact or physical harm.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_assault

.Jonathan

[rareposter]

On an incredibly pedantic note, you can't have attempted manslaughter.

Manslaughter is when the victim dies but it was not intended - ie you only intended to use force on them.
Murder is obviously going out with the intent to kill someone and succeeding in that.
Attempted murder is the above but failing.

You can't really prove attempted murder on that - while it's fairly obvious that throwing an axe at someone is likely to do them serious harm, it'd be very difficult proving the intention to murder.

Given that there is no suspect, no witness and no actual injury caused, the chances of any investigation
(a) being done in the first place and
(b) succeeding
are incredibly small. You could dust the axe for prints and then search through CCTV for any white van at that time and (assuming of course that such footage still exists) if you find vans matching that rather generic description of a white high-top, you can question and fingerprint the driver but that's unlikely to lead anywhere either since it will have been a passenger who'll have thrown anything; the driver can deny all knowledge very easily.
I can see why they've said no investigation - it's very unlikely to actually lead anywhere.

[thirdcrank]

It may be pedantic, but I don't think it's possible to commit attempted manslaughter. That's not to say that chucking an axe at somebody isn't an offence.

In reality, this might well be a case where there's not much realistic hope of a result, but somebody has to decide whether further enquiries should be made. eg investigate local CCTV, appeal for witnesses/ dashcam footage. Not necessarily an easy decision because too many appeals diminishes their effectiveness, but on the face of it, this might be something to be decided by a CID supervisor rather than a call handler.
(Crossed with rareposter)

[Hellhound]

Whatever it is there was obviously some intent there.You don't throw an axe/weapon at another person without intent on doing harm.
The police are now investigating.

[thirdcrank]

From the update on the link in the OP

... The victim declined to give a formal statement to police. ...

That doesn't alter the gravity of what may have happened, of course, and it may be that he's frightened that somebody will come round with an even bigger chopper, but nobody really knows now what happened. Perhaps he said from the outset that he wasn't prepared to make a statement. Perhaps the original report is not totally accurate.