The Liverpool Echo reports:

A Liverpool family are in line for a bumper pay-out after settling seven civil claims against Merseyside police.

The Shields family, from Garston, and their solicitor sat around the table with legal representatives from the force to thrash out a confidential deal over numerous claims of wrongful arrest, false imprisonment, assault and malicious prosecution stretching back more than five years.

Dad-of-six Richard Shields, 49, believes his family are being targeted by the police.

In claims against the police taken to the civil courts, the Shields family have won eight times and lost three.

Mr Shields, a full-time carer for his youngest son, said:

“They are a law unto themselves. This isn’t just co-incidence that my sons and I keep getting arrested. It is harassment. We’ve had quite a lot of contact with the police now and it’s become boring.

We get arrested for nothing, spend hours in custody on a trumped up charged and the case is thrown out of court.

We’ve been to court on numerous occasions and been cleared. If I’d been convicted on the last charge they tried to do me on I could have been facing prison time for allegedly assaulting an officer.

It is a ridiculous situation we keep finding ourselves in.”

The latest case the Shields took to Liverpool County Court, and won, was over the arrest of Richard and sons Christopher and Joshua, then aged 14, at their former home on Aigburth Road in 2007.

The police claimed Christopher sped past them and mouthed obscenities.

They went to the Shields home nearby to talk to him and say they were met by family members outside, where there was a scene.

Mr Shields snr and Joshua were both arrested and eventually charged with assaulting and obstructing police in execution of their duties.

Christopher Shields was also arrested outside his home and issued with an on-the-spot fine at Belle Vale police station.

The Shields family denied the police version of events, saying officers simply turned up on their doorstep, barging their way into the house. When the case went before magistrates in Liverpool, the pair were acquitted.

Christopher was also set to challenge his fine in court but the police never put the paperwork through their systems and it was dropped. At Liverpool County Court, a jury sat through 10 days of evidence before rejecting the accounts of the police officers who arrested the Shields.

Christopher Shields won his case for wrongful arrest, false imprisonment and assault (by the use of handcuffs), Mr Shields snr was awarded damages on the same grounds and another that the police had trespassed on his property without lawful excuse, while the jury also found for Joshua in a case of malicious prosecution.

Last year, Mr Shields snr won a four-year battle with the police over a similar incident which saw him and two of his sons arrested after one of them was attacked in the city centre.

The Shields’ family solicitor, Chris Topping, of Broudie Jackson Canter, said:

“These cases have taken a long time to conclude, ultimately the family have received proper compensation for the ordeals which they suffered at the hands of the Police. Being paid compensation is not the whole story, for the family their desire has always been to be allowed to get on with their lives. We, at Jackson Lees, have worked hard to bring about this resolution to the claims and hopefully, for their peace of mind, these payments will prove to be the concluding acts of this saga.”