Nightjack Archive

Archive Complete

2009-10-12T14:27:00.000-07:00

I've managed to resurrect the entire Nightjack blog, but it was easier to do it in Wordpress in the end.
You can see it here:

http://nightjack2.wordpress.com/

It's a bit of a work in progress as his original formatting and pictures have gone, but I'm tidying up at the mo.
If I have a moment, I'll update this blog too.

The Return Of Lucky C

2009-04-27T06:22:00.000-07:00

Well, it’s been a hectic few days. At one point traffic touched 60,000 a day and the blog is getting links from the left and right of the blogosphere. Wonder of wonders, I even got mentioned on a “Downfall” video made by ScaryMary about Iain Dale.

I can now die a happy man.

Everyone and his dog wants an interview but that isn’t going to happen even if they make my voice sound like Davros. If I can get the book anywhere towards completion, I think there’s a chance I can get it published.

In other news, I got the magic phone call from H.R. today and by some very unexpected alchemy of guesswork and native wit, I have passed the OSPRE Part I. I honestly thought I had blown it very, very badly. Now I just have to get myself re-chipped for OSPRE Part II (The Assessed Role Plays) before Autumn.

I’m not planning any more updates any time soon. I’m also locking down comments again from Friday. After that I’m on e-mail if there’s anything on your mind that you want to share.

Take care, I’m off out to get another lottery ticket

Jack

Errrm Hello….Is This Thing On

2009-04-22T06:20:00.000-07:00

I am sitting here at home with a glass of fizz at one hand and sausage, chips and beans at the other. My representative at the Orwell Prize Ceremony has just rung me with the news that I have won. It has also just been twittered on Iain Dale’s Diary so it must be true.

I couldn’t go to the ceremony but I got a friend from way, way back to go in my stead. This is what I asked him to say

When I started the Night Jack blog back in February last year, I was standing on the shoulders of others. I heard about a Police blog called Inspector Gadget at work. I read it and I agreed with it. My comments on there started to get so long that one evening I sat down with my laptop and started a blog of my own.

As I wrote more posts I found that people were coming to my site to read and leave comments. Arguments started, some of them even came close to being reasoned debates. Then people in other blogs started linking to some of my posts and saying they were worth reading. As the readership headed over 1,000 a day, I started getting the occasional e-mail from the news media asking for an interview. I even got the obligatory Police blogging book offer. I am not now, nor have I ever been, a media cop.

If anyone had told me then that I was going to make the short list for the Orwell Prize I would have asked them to stop being silly. It is still a bit of a nosebleed experience finding myself in the company of so many other blogs that I admire and follow.

I believe that as bloggers we are mostly short levers in the political world but I would like to thank the Orwell Prize for noticing us and for choosing to do so in a year that has seen political blogging become a more important part of the wider political process.

Anyway, as you may know, I am an anonymous blogger and as I do not feel able to accept the prize openly and in person, I have decided to donate any winnings to the Police Dependents’ Trust. This is a charity that assists the families of colleagues who have died in the execution of their duties.

Enjoy your night. Thanks again. Jack Night.

I’ll be back if things stay quiet for a bit. Meanwhile, I have a work of fiction to write.

Take care. Back in a bit.

If you are here for the first time, there’s quite a lot of stuff to read if you want to. People seem to like the following:

(SaltedSlug: Has anyone saved these? Throw them my way and I'll put them back up and link accordingly. Ta)

A Survival Guide For Decent Folk

Only 24 Hours To Crack The Case Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6 Part 7 Part 8 Part 9 Part 10 Part 11 Part 12

Darkness At The Edge Of Town

Living On The Ceiling

The Face Behind The Face

The Evil Poor

Gone In A Blur

The Weight

What Is A Prison For?

Notes From The Glue Factory

From Truncheons To Tasers

Pop Quiz

There’s lots more. Have fun. I’ll be back in a while.

This Is Radio Freedom………..sssssssssssssssssss

2009-04-05T06:19:00.000-07:00

Not much changes in 70 years does it?

I was going to save this until the Orwell Prize results were out but I can’t see much point waiting.

The last 13 months or so of blogging have been a lot of fun. It is still fun but I have now written down everything that I think is worth me writing. In some areas I am conscious that I am starting to repeat myself. If I keep on going I believe that I will end up spending the next year or so attack blogging the government rather than blogging about policing. I don’t want to be all about that. There are plenty of other people doing that better already.

Now as far as I know, I haven’t been outed at work and nobody has asked me to wind my neck in. This is just how I feel about the blog and it is a feeling that has been growing for a while. It’s time for me to do something else with my writing.

I don’t know if blogging changes anything. I do know that I am just a short lever in this world but it was worth a go on the off chance that there were people reading that could deploy longer levers. I’m probably going to write a book now. It won’t be another searing expose from the trenches, it will be a work of fiction. I don’t have a book deal, never wanted one. If you want to read a book on how it is buy Gadget, Bloggs or Copperfield.

Thanks for reading.

This blog will self destruct in about a month or so, my e-mail will not. Keep in touch.

Bye

Jack Night

The Summer Of “Meh” 03/04/2009

2009-04-03T06:18:00.000-07:00

So that was the G20 Day of Rage. Economy in crisis, world leaders gathered in Docklands, planned demonstrations converging on that Bank of England. Add mass media pre-coverage for weeks. Mix clever market segmentation through adopting and merging two of those hoary and symbol rich holdovers from our past into the “Hobby Horses of the Apocalypse.” All very clever, very ArtProtest, straight to the zeitgeist they must have thought. Certainly highly mediapathic. I mean, really, take your pick….

Black Horse - Against Homelessness

Silver Horse - Against Financial Crimes

Green Horse - Against Climate Change

Red Horse - Against War

150 campaigning groups were apparently united as never before. Strident and aggresive messages went out like

“At 12 noon, April 1st, we’re going to reclaim the City, thrusting into the very belly of the beast: the Bank of England. On April 2nd, we’re going to bang on their hotel doors, to deliver our message of a world beyond capitalism.”

“On April 1st, we’ll show G20 what meltdown really means.“

“Can we oust the bankers from power? Can we get rid of the corrupt politicians in their pay? Can we guarantee everyone a job, a home, a future? Can we establish government by the people, for the people, of the people? Can we abolish all borders and be patriots for our planet? Can we all live sustainably and stop climate chaos? Can we make capitalism history? YES WE CAN!” (No you couldn’t NJ)

All this pre-event rhetoric and coverage proclaimed that this was the Big One, ElGordo the demo, a catclysmic outpouring of national rage against whatever you have got.

Well, the rain even held off and the cameras turned up in numbers. It should have been a riot. It should have been Poll Tax Riots v2.0, it was certainly planned as May Day Riots 2000 v1.01. Let’s have a “carnival” the planners said (and lets not worry that there is an absolute certainty that some of the people in and amongst the revellers will be violent people they thought). As responsible as scattering razor blades in the bran tub but that’s how it is with your modern protest organiser. As I said, the cameras were there, there was no shortage of media getting the message over that there was a chance to come to London and have a real good protest whatever your inclinations up to and including a chance to damage some property and give the cops a kicking.

I wasn’t there but I will bet my next coffee that there was a Samba band involved and a lot of people in face paint pulling passive aggressive theatrical cliche shapes at the shield lines in the name of radical street theater and personal freedom of expression. Been there, done that and shouted down that particular megaphone.

Thing is, looking forward, what is going to be bigger and more symbolic to protest against this year than G20? This was it, the grand trump of street protest politics and watching from the sidelines, it was all a bit, well it was all a bit meh as the young people say.

It felt forced, like the people involved there weren’t really trying. It feels like they were largely going through the motions. Oh they had fire in their hearts around breakfast time I’m sure of that, they always do. But as that day wore on and they got to looking round at the pitiful numbers gathered, some of the organiser types must have thought “Is that it? Is that all there is?”

The sum total of national rage at the evils of “global everything” turns out to be less people than you got at last years fuel price demo. It must have been so very, very demoralising for them. In their place, I might even begin to doubt that I would ever have my place at the high table of my chosen nihilist utopia. Where is my mighty cause if all I can turn out from an A.P.B. to protesters everywhere is enough people to cheer on a Division One football match on a rainy Wednesday. Even the claims of Police brutality afterwards are sounding a false and falling flat.

Fair play to the Met, you can only play the team in front of you but I am betting a latte this time that up in Gold Command, they couldn’t believe how few people there were on the protests either. Our boys and girls done good and Che Guevara, Tony Benn, Billy Bragg, Swampy, George Monbiot, Polly Toynbee your boys took a hell of a national ignoring.

Counting The Cracks In The Pavement 01/04/2009

2009-04-01T06:17:00.000-07:00

“Political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.“

Tom Lehrer

How the hell did we get here with the likes of Copperfield, Bloggs and Gadget being joined weekly by more officers all telling tales of the ugly truths of current Criminal Justice? How did we get into a situation where the Circuit Judges are quietly revolting and the Magistrates are as unhappy as unhappy can be with being pushed around by the government? Why has serious and violent crime been on the up every year since 1997? What kind of people have been setting the policies that have kicked such a big hole between the Police and the public? Bluntly, who has had their hands on the wheel whilst public confidence in all arms of the Criminal Justice System has tanked. I have an over simplistic explanation. It’s time to name and shame.

I’m sitting here thinking that we have a Lord Chancellor who has presided as public confidence in the Criminal Justice System is dropping through the floor. Only 31% of us now feel any level of confidence in how our system deals with criminals. His reaction? Well Jack Straw has been busy doing the Hokey Cokey with Bill of Rights 1.1 and foisting a Sentencing Commission onto judges through the Coroner’s and Justice Bill. I say foisting because the rather grandly named Council of Her Majesty’s Circuit Juudges broke cover last week and said “We do not consider these sentencing proposals to have any benefit. The proposals are not sought by the judiciary or any other criminal justice group. They are unnecessary, costly and unwelcome.” That strikes me as judge speak for “Stop.“

We started this government with a Lord Chancellor called Lord McKay of Clashfern. Editor of Halsbury’s Laws of England, by most accounts an outstanding lawyer and judge, leader of the Scots Bar, basically a bloody good lawyer and well respected. Fit to be top judge? Oh yes. Man of substance. A man guaranteed to put the interests of a strong independent judiciary above party politics.

Cometh the blessed TonyBlair, cometh the old mate in the shape of Tony’s old boss Lord Irvine of Lairgs. He blows £650,000 of our money doing up his grace and favour pad including £59,000 on wallpaper. His career highlights involved marrying his best friends wife, introducing the Blairs and providing legal advice to the Labour Party throughout the 1980’s. A towering legal presence fit for the top judges spot? Possibly not but Tony liked him and he was keen on passing the Human Rights Act.

As we slide gently down the ability curve, another mate of Tony’s got to wear the shiney golden robes. Step forward Lord Falconer of Thoroton. Lest you forget, he used to be Tony’s flat mate. Surely, you are thinking, he had more qualification than that? Well, he ran the Millenium Dome for a while, and he was Tony’s mate. At least he was some sort of lawyer and he made QC in 1991.

That takes us back to the current incumbent Mr. John Whitaker Straw. Well he qualified as a barrister some years ago but since 1979, he has been a full time politician. That’s the man in charge of the Ministry of Justice. It shows.

That’s how it has been for noble office of Lord Chancellor these last few years. Does the man at the top of the pile inspire any confidence in and of himself? The results are in.

That other twin pillar of the Criminal Justice System, the Home Secretary, how has that noble office of state fared?

We start with the incumbent Michael Howard QC. Say what you like about him but he qualified as a QC on merit in 1982. As a Home Secretary, he authored the quote “Let us be clear. Prison works. It ensures that we are protected from murderers, muggers and rapists, and it makes many who are tempted to commit crime think twice.” He was a Home Secretary who at least seemed to understand that the sentencing system needs to carry a little weight and that punishments need to enjoy general acceptance as fair. He appreciated the containment element of prison as well.

Next up, running the Cops, the previously mentioned John Whitaker Straw. Jack brought us R.I.P.A. , sent Pinochet back to Chile and said of pre Operation Desert Storm Iraq “”we have faith in the integrity of the Iraqi judicial process and that you should have no concerns if you haven’t done anything wrong.” Thank’s Jack.

All things must pass and in 2001, it was time for David Blunkett. Regular readers will know my opinions on his reign. A career politician with all the knowledge and experience of law enforcement that you would expect from the preparation of Sheffield City Council and teaching. Seldom has so much damage been done to the Police Service by one man. Along with beefing up RIPA and taking a swipe at jury trial, he started us down the road towards National Identity Cards. He was forced kicking and screaming from office when it became clear that he was somewhat involved in speeding through the immigration status of his mistress’s nanny, and giving the same mistress free train tickets on the public purse. I can do no better than quoting the top cop of the time Lord Stevens “If you are ever asked to meet with Blunkett, under no circumstances should you go alone…he is a bully and a liar.” Just what you want to hear about the man running the Police.

Now David Blunkett was replaced by Charles Clarke. Another career politician with a side line in running a PR agency. He was another man wedded to identity cards with a regrettable ambition to have all communications data stored for law enforcement purposes. According to his successor, he left a Home Office unfit for purpose.

Enter Dr. John Reid. The doctorate was in history. The doctoral thesis was a Marxist analysis of the slave trade. From there until parliament he was a full time political organiser, you can guess which party. He was surpisingly sound on building more prisons, closing up our porous borders and sorting out the Probation Service but he did not survive the departure of the blessed Tony and the accession of the Dear Leader.

That brings us to Jacqueline Jill Smith, another academic but sans doctoral thesis this time. You all know the score with Jacqui. Total expenses hog. Second home that isn’t. Lots of TVs and a lovely fireplace. The current Home Secretary has made a signed claim for her husband’s prOn and trousered the resultant cash. We don’t ask for much before she claims her expenses but at least she could have pretended to check them and weeded out the obviously bogus stuff. Maybe her husband could have done better by her for his our £40,000 a year. Either way she made a blatantly bogus claim and she is set on brazening it out.

I detect a downward slope. We start of with one of the greatest lawyers of his age and we end up with errrm Jack Straw. We start off with a man who understands the public expectations that punishments should fit crimes and we end up with a petty expenses fiddler who tries to pretend she hasn’t been caught red handed. Now I’m not claiming that there was ever any golden age of the Criminal Justice System. That would be foolish, but I am just pointing out that there is a case to be made that the people in the key jobs may not have been the best possible choices .

Essential Reading 29/03/2009

2009-03-29T06:16:00.000-07:00

Please, please, please go to this link and read every single post.

I promise it is all a very very good read. Instant classic.

Electric Landlady 29/03/2009

2009-03-29T06:15:00.000-07:00

Another one of my Dad’s oft used little sayings is “if you want to beat a dog badly enough you can always find a stick“. So how much fun is it to be Jacqueline Jill Smith (silent M) at the moment? People seem to be casting around for a suitable stick for her and there do seem to be plenty of them coming very readily to hand.

The first rumblings came in December 2008 when it turned out that a series of letters sent to her local press that praised her to the high heavens were written by her husband. We pay him £40,000 a year to help her out with office and administration stuff as her parliamentary assistant. He must be very good to be worth all that money; very diligent, very thorough, reliable and loyal. No really, he must be.

Also in December 2008, Jacqui had to apologise to the House of Commons for publishing some dodgy knife crime statistics. Nobody would have known except for that Sir Michael Scholar standing up and saying that the knife crime statistics were potentially misleading and should not have been released. Lets not forget those traitors at the Public Accounts Committee releasing the damning e-mails proving that the statistics team had slapped health warnings all over the place. She must have been given poor advice. I’m sure a head or two will have rolled somewhere. We nearly got misled there. Would it have been the end of the world if we never found out? Who believes government crime statistics anyway? The e-trail was there though.

Forward to February 2008 when it turned out that she claimed her sisters spare room as her main residence because, she said, that’s where she lived most of the time. Oh dear, the neighbours didn’t agree. They know when she is at “home” because she leaves a vapour trail of cops and cars in her wake. Curtains twitch, people notice. Then there’s the duty records regarding security at her main residence and her second home. Unsurprisingly, it is big news for the local Police Force when the Home Secretary comes to stay. They have records. Some bright spark suggested that cell siting on her mobile phone would also give a very good clue as to where she was laying her hat on any particular night. There’s an explanation apparently. It’s all OK and legitimate, it just looks a bit funny. Wouldn’t it be funny though if all of these records were matched together and it turned out that although she did nothing illegal, she had been doing something shamefull, something that left her open to ridicule….which brings her to

March 2009 when it turns out that her £40,000 a year assistant / husband watched some pay per view prOn on the cable TV at their second home whilst she was away working. Did I mention that he lives full time at the second home, with the children, all the time? That would have been merely a little uncomfortable in normal circumstances. Wife away a lot and comes home stressed to hell and back. Husband watches prOn when she is out and the kids are in bed. It’s not exactly out there on the extremes of human behaviour, you just wouldn’t want it on the front page of the papers. But there is where it is today. Hardly worth printing really except the rascally assistant / husband (who we pay £40,000 a year etc etc) cocked up rather badly and claimed his prOn back off the rest of us as her wholly, exclusively and necessarily incurred expense. He even signed the claim forms to that effect. Maybe it is necessary for her work that the office staff get to watch some of the products of the sex industry that Jacqui is so publicly against. Maybe it was recorded for research purposes. Probably not though, otherwise the Pete Townshend defence would have been trotted out already. Peskily, there is a bill and an account and a reference number and it turns out that the papers can get their hands on the sordid details and make my breakfast time both funnier and a little bit buttock clenching. I genuinely do feel sorry for her. She has been let down by her staff. He tried to put his pOrn on her tab without telling her. She is mitigating the offence by paying it back and that’s about all she can do. There’s a trail.

It is no fun at all when you are subject to an investigation. You may even feel that you are subject to a witch hunt. Which of us would be entirely happy at the prospect of having our purchases, e-mails, internet access, home life and telephone records subject to the sort of scrutiny that Jacqui is undergoing at the moment? Jacqui, how many uncomfortable truths do you want to know about your nearest and dearest? Nothing necessarily criminal going on, just embarassing stuff, what will they think at work stuff, what will the neighbours think stuff, are they laughing about me behind my back stuff? It hurts I bet. How does your husband really feel about the sexual objectification of women? Now you know. Bet you wish that you didn’t. That’s the problem with keeping all the records of our private lives where they can become public. In the end, they might become public. Most folk don’t like the idea of that risk.

“Nothing to hide, nothing to worry about” really is a very, very stupid take on things, right up there with “No smoke without fire“. Nobody I know has nothing to hide. Nobody I know wants the government arranging for the blanket collection and analysis of the huge amounts of personal lifestyle data currently proposed. That’s nobody. Nobody at all.

I get it that G.C.H.Q. trawls. I get it that if I can make a strong intelligence case for it, I can apply for all sorts of telephony data. I know that I can sometimes get IP address data that is worth spit in the wind. I know that if it is for a proper purpose, I can already get all sorts of personal information for a criminal investigation. I understand that there are people in the Security Services that are itching, just itching to get their hands on a database of everyone’s browser history and e-mail headers. More data = more chance of catching bad people like terrorists they say. Give us all your data and we will sort the wolves from the sheep they say. How seductive it is to see the possibility of sleeper cells and the like emerging from the data but the chances are that they won’t. When you have the data, who will hold the line in deciding what else gets done with this it? How will you be able to resist the temptation of making use of what data you get to further other public policy or public health aims? How long will you retain the information for? Will you yield to the temptations of revenue raising? Will you use data to licence internet connections with a possibility of cutting access if the raw data says, in whatever terms, “irresponsible internet user.” How many times can I go to the BNP or the NF websites to look at their new idiocies before Professional Standards come a knocking at my door looking to play the R for Racist card on me? Will they believe me? There are balances to be struck between rights to a private life and the needs to preserve law and order. There is a real debate that hasn’t been had in any meanigful way.

No real purpose was served by branding Jacqui’s husband as a bit pervy but he is so branded. Yet there is poor livid Jacqui, presumed innocent, let down by others and somewhat implicated by their collective data trail. I am hoping that being on the business end of how damaging unfettered lifestyle data collection can be in the “wrong” hands will cause the scales to drop from Jacqui’s eyes. I am hoping that she is going to stand up in Parliament and take a lead with redrawing the line where legitmate rights to investigate crime, corruption and disorder end and our private lives begin. It cannot happen because she is now a victim, she would be seen as biased in a court somewhere under judicial review. I think that she will continue wilfully trying to prop her proposals in the face of public discomfort and protest all the way to the end of her 2,000 odd vote majority because that is all that is left for her to do.

It Was A Good Day 25/03/2009

2009-03-25T06:15:00.000-07:00

All relatively clear at work today. In fact it was an enjoyable day all round. I got home and after two days fisking Jack Straw’s vanity legislative proposal “The Rights and Responsibilities” green paper, to find that it has been kicked into the long grass from where it should not return.

It is also curry night and I have a decent bottle of white cooled in the fridge.

Definitely a really good day.

Moving The River 24/03/2009

2009-03-24T06:15:00.000-07:00

I suspect that many of my readers will already have come across this elsewhere. On the off chance that you haven’t or if you just want to see it again, here is a man doing some straight talking in a parliament. I am not politically inclined, I trust politicians as far as they can throw me but this man’s truths are my truths. It isn’t going to make the MSM but I suspect that it will go massively viral. Pass it on, tell a friend.

A Bill of Rights (Part 2) 24/03/2009

2009-03-24T06:14:00.000-07:00

Now if I was in government and I was thinking of legislating something as big and important as a Bill of Rights and Responsibilities I might consider announcing it very widely. I would have adverts on the TV and radio, billboards, appear on the news, really try and whip up some real debate. I would want my proposals debated vigorously and I would be keeping my ears very, very open. I would even be prepared not to legislate if I couldn’t be sure of getting it right. I would also stay my hand unless there was a real feeling in the country, a popular movement for such legislation. For Jack Straw over at MiniJust this is just another opportunity to blast words on a page. This is the Government that seems to consider legislation from the same standpoint as a tagger let loose in a London Underground marshaling yard with all of the spray cans.

So as promised, what does the Lord Chancellor think about the responsibilities arm of this proposed piece of legislation?

Well he quickly identifies current legal obligations, which he then characterises as responsibilities. Money laundering reporting requirements, terrorist activity reporting requirements, being summonsed to court, obligation to do duty service are all listed. Mr Straw sir, those aren’t really responsibilities, they are obligations placed on us by the state and backed with criminal sanction. Never mind. But that’s it. That’s all Jack has to talk about. Your responsibilities are errrm to obey the laws currently in place that compel you to enter the whacky world of criminal justice. I read it twice to make sure but it really is as slim as that. No talk about responsibility on Mr. Straw and his team to run our criminal justice system well. Nothing about my colleagues and I doing right by the rest of you. Thing is, those are hard things to think about and hard to write down in any meaningful way. Passing law to make compliance coercive is rather easy. It is a default alternative to brain work.

An attempt to codify this hard stuff may be beyond the competence of Mr. Straw’s team. It is certainly beyond me but I am a provincial detective and they are, well they are the Ministry of Justice. Merely codifying the obligations responsibilities of the citizen does not make anything like a Bill of Rights. A Bill of Rights and Responsibilities needs to encompass the responsibilities of all the parties to the agreement. Mr Straw, if you aren’t up to doing that yet, then please stay your hand and don’t just write some piece of “repealed in a decade” rubbish for the sake of it.

Part 3, all about our rights, is going to have to wait because I have a bad headache and I am treating myself to some sleep. Must have been something I read.

A Bill Of Rights 23/03/09

2009-03-23T06:14:00.000-07:00

Another assault on the wet cement of history has arrived quietly from MiniJust by way of a green paper opening the consultation on a Bill of Rights and Responsibilities. It is called “Rights and Responsibilties: developing our constitutional framework.”

The thesis is that as we are going through times of great change and turbulence, people are worried that their rights and freedoms are under threat and they need Jack to legislate them into security. Hmmm. Why would that be Lord Chancellor? Lets have a think. Off the top of my head and in no particular order

a) Folks don’t like the way that R.I.P.A. is working out. You know, the bins and the school places stuff. We thought it would be errm regulated but it turns out is was just enabled

b) They are uneasy with this government’s habit of databasing everything and then either giving the data to people who will lose it or cutting out the middle man and losing it all by yourselves.

c) ID cards just don’t feel British and loading them with data is worrying. Just because a thing is technically possible does not mean that you have to do it. I know it’s a long road back and I know that for reasons I cannot fathom it is a hill you have chosen to die on but really…just stop.

d) You have turned the Police into a machine bureaucracy that criminalises where it used to advise, warn and guide. Read any of the Police blogs by the people doing the job and you will get the picture.

e) By such well thought out wheezes as NCRS, central targets and automatic parole, you have increased the chances of “decent folk” receiving a criminal record and a shaming trip through the criminal justice system whilst simultaneously reducing the consequences of interacting with the same system to trivial for the career criminal and and the lifestyle anti-social. Punishment at the top end no longer fits the crime and at the bottom end it is way too harsh.

f) You have breached our human rights in the collection and retention of DNA. There was a Court case about that. It was in Europe I think. You lost. I am sure you must know about it.

g) In the name of multiculturalism you have jumped us into partnerships with some of the worst shysters and idealogues going. You have then allowed them an overbearing voice in some areas of public policy and you have paid for it, with our money.

h) Some years ago, your boss decided it would be a great idea to undermine public confidence in the pension system by taking a double dip. That made so many people feel secure in their relationship with the state and in particular it’s attitude towards our property.

i) Quite a lot of us are wondering how we can stop this particular state building up the unmanageable mountain of debt to the point where our children’s children will be paying it off and whichever bunch of chancers get in next, those of us in work will be taxed until the pips squeak.

j) The expenses fiddles stuff. It makes us think that you are not into politics for the public good but to rake as much cash in as possible for as little work as possible. Oh and the double standards over privacy and the Freedom of Information Act not being, that hasn’t helped either.

I could go on, and on, Jack just read the comments to any of Polly Toynbee’s pieces over the past three or four years. It’s all there.

So overall, it would be fair to say that I find some rich irony in examining the reasons why so may decent folk and hard working families feel ill at ease about their relationship with the state. It is because the executive has done us all over deluxe. So it’s a bit rich for you to don the white hat and come riding down from the hills to save us all at the fag end of this government’s rule. Do you think we are stupid? Do you think anybody is buying.

There is other nice sounding but dumb stuff as well. In the executive summary I read

“We believe it is important that opportunities are made available fairly to everyone.” The fallacy that you can legislate things away writ into the constitution? Jack, no, please no. Enough is enough is enough. How much more legislation do we need on fairness? Where do you stop? Do you lobotomise bright people? Do you strip and redistibute all wealth until we all have the same?

“We believe historians will bracket this Government’s reforms with the constitutional transformations of the 17th and 19th centuries as times of profound and invigorating change when power was redistributed.” Oh Jack, historians will surely bracket this Government’s reforms somewhere, but I am thinking it will be more along the lines of the Rump Parliament and Anthony Eden. This will be seen as a time when the executive took overweaning power and used it so often and so hard in so short a time that it broke the relationship between the governed and the governors. This will be the age when things got so rotten, the stink so offensive that it could no longer be ignored.

“We seek to entrench a progressive consensus for the longer term.” Yup, there it is, Jack looking to leave his mark as indellibly as possible by keeping things just as messed up as they are. Any particular reason why the consensus has to be a progressive one? How deep will the entrenching be with an unfettered executive in the next government? Never mind, I am sure that the consensus will be just what the consultation excercise decides it should be. Typical, couldn’t resist showing his hand that it is not about any reform that society wants, nope it is about what Jack and his team want to leave as their legacy.

There is more on Criminal Justice but I think I will leave that for another post. There is certainly enough to work on and I’m not even at the bottom of the executive summary yet. Once again this Government is charging into the very biggest society changing stuff with nice sounding words and heads as empty as empty can be. This time it’s a Bill of Rights and Responsibilities. I will bet my next coffee that if they have enough time to get it on the books I will end up with the shitty end of both. That’s the way it is.

Only 24 Hours To Crack the Case (Part 12) 19/03/2009

2009-03-19T06:13:00.001-07:00

It was one of those quiet, “catch up on your paperwork” Sundays in the Alterdale C.I.D. offices. These are the very occasional slow days when the lid has stayed on and nobody has done anything so bad that the morning suits have to get involved. These are the days when someone goes out for bacon and sausage sandwiches and we get a chance to catch up on each others lives, talk sport and embellish the office gossip whilst addressing some of our dustier jobs. The News of The World may also get passed round.

Post heart-attack-in-a-bun and mid coffee, the D.S.’s phone rings. She answers it and then begins making notes with the occasional “Uhh-huh.” Then we all shut up and listen harder as she starts echoing. “Child….. hospital….. Mum… Dad…… bleeding on the brain ….likely to prove.” This is the sort of conversation that usually grabs the attention of the whole office. The D.S. has a bad poker face that tells us everything about the rest of the call. Whilst we were asleep something had happened. Whilst we have been washing down down finest pork products with cheap instant coffee, elsewhere, an incident has been coming to a head. She comes off the phone with “Jack, Danny, Pruntsy we just got busy. There’s a job on. Briefing room in 30 minutes. On call D.C.I. is on his way. Get yourself a brew, we’re in for a long day.” Then she is off doing whatever Detective Sergeants do in that space before briefings, stoking the response. Carrying freshly charged brews, we head off to the briefing room downstairs to find out just how busy things have got.

In the briefing room all the usual suspects for a big job are gathering. Jeans, t-shirts and weekend stubble, that would be the Intelligence Unit. We local suits sit together and the Family Protection Team suits arrive and sit together. Two uniform colleagues come in just late with van keys. Off to the side, the Duty Inspector is sat by himself taking it all in. The D.C.I. arrives with a D.S from the Family Protection Team and he gives us the long-story-short as we sit there, note books on knees, each taking our particular notes, each hoping for one of the good jobs. In the early hours a little girl was admitted to the local hospital. Mum and Dad had driven her there in the back of their car. The little girl was fitting. She was shipped on to the big regional children’s hospital that is far, far away in someone else’s division. She is very poorly and in police terms is “likely to prove.” As the examination and diagnosis progressed this turned out to be “likely to prove with serious injuries.” The socio-medical term for them, with which we are all too familiar, is non accidental injuries. She has a bleed in her brain, spiral fracture of one arm and healed fractures to both legs. The Night Detective was deployed round about the time I woke up and he is still on the job. He is with the parents at the hospital.

It is the usual Sunday breakdown of not quite enough bodies for too many jobs. “Jack, we need you to meet Croppsy down to the big city Children’s Hospital.” says the D.C.I. Croppsy is the Night Detective this week. We used to be in uniform together. He is quiet, a very good listener and a very keen observer of human nature. He has been on the phone back to base and he is not at all happy with Mum, Dad or their behaviour.

Whilst I am finding keys, finding the car and then following the van in convoy, Croppsy is trying to keep an eye on Mum & Dad. They are doing the children’s Christmas play version of distraught parents who have no idea what has happened to their child. They seem to be taking Croppsy and the medics as their audience. They have no idea how badly the audience is taking the performance yet.

“Oh Mary what can have happened to our little child“

“I do not know husband Joseph. I hope she gets better.“

“Yes Mary I hope she does as well. Please save our child kind doctors and nurses.“

Well not quite that bad but they are both at credibility levels zero, pegging the fakeometer. Mary and Joseph keep going outside for “a walk and a smoke” or as we call it, taking a few moments away from Croppsy’s eyes and ears to get their stories straighter.

Mary and Joseph are young parents. Joseph holds down a minimum wage warehouse job that he took straight from school. Mary stays home looking after the child. The little girl cries a lot apparently. Joseph loves his kid but the rest of his family think he is a little bit heavy handed with her. His older brothers wouldn’t let him look after their kids. Fatherhood has come to Joseph too young. Mary is a little younger and about as prepared for family life as Joseph. They are both arrested very soon after I arrive. Joseph goes in the van. Mary is coming back with me and Croppsy and then, some 18 hours after he started work, Croppsy is going home. It is a long and silent journey back to Alterdale with Mary going from weepy to taciturn in the back seat. Croppsy’s car will have to stay on the police bay at the hospital until someone can get back to pick it up.

At the station, I get paired with Jane from the Family protection team. This is all well within her area of expertise. We are to interview Joseph. Jane leads all five interviews and in every one Joseph sheds big tears of self pity at some point. After interview number two, this becomes a grim running joke between Jane and I. When will he cry? What question will bring on the tears? We figure out that he cries whenever we start discussing the level of injuries to his daughter. He makes no admissions beyond being a bit rough when he plays with her and dropping the little girl off his knee whilst feeding her. She hit her head on a badly placed plastic brick, apparently. Mary went out a soon as he came home from work. She hadn’t even made his dinner. That gets mentioned a lot, she hadn’t even made his dinner. Mary just took off to the bingo. The little girl wasn’t right. She wouldn’t feed. She wouldn’t settle. Mary came home late and the little girl had a fit or something so they drove her to the hospital. He doesn’t know about the broken bones.

When Joseph goes back to his cell, a rarity, his solicitor nods me to one side and says “Jack, do you think he did it?” I mutter some C.S.I. cliché about following the evidence. It is clear that the solicitor has made up her mind whether she has to defend him or not.

In room two, Pruntsy and Sally from the Family Protection Team are interviewing Mary. More tears. She wouldn’t hurt her kid. Joseph wouldn’t hurt their kid. She has no idea how she was hurt, never noticed the broken arm, the broken legs. She was out last night with her friends. Joseph was looking after the little one. When she came back the little girl wasn’t right and they took her to hospital.

That’s the best they could come up with. A tumble onto a plastic brick, happens all the time, that must be when she hurt her head. A bit of rough play explains the broken arm. Little kids get broken arms easy don’t they officer? Never noticed the broken legs, don’t know how that happened, maybe more rough play. Well she wasn’t walking yet so why would we notice the broken legs? The medical professionals do not agree but never mind. Mary and Joseph keep up that position all the way to the court doors. He won’t point the finger at her or make admissions and she won’t point the finger at him or make admissions. Pity the poor jury that has to work out who hurt the child so very badly when the only people who know are not talking. A deal is stitched up on the court steps between the C.P.S. and the defence teams. It allows Mary and Joseph to maintain their fiction and delivers matching short sentences for child cruelty. A bad story full of provable lies and impossibilities but sufficient a fig leaf for the C.P.S. to do the deal and agree minimal admissions convictions. That’s probably the best justice that we can manage.

The little girl lived but that bleed on the brain did lasting damage. She cannot hear and she cannot see. A week later, I went back to her ward after work and left her a soft toy. It was all I could think of to do.

Mind The Gap 19/03/2009

2009-03-19T06:13:00.000-07:00

One of the commentators here Dr. Mevin T Gray sketched out in a few lines regarding our hellbound handcart

1. A consensus exists that our laws have not been made for the people by the people and some of us ponder how long the legitimacy of such laws will be recognized.

2. So many now enjoy lawlessness with impunity it would be naive to deny that profitable anarchy will soon have appeal to the masses.

3. A consensus exists that our Establishment is corrupt, creating mistrust and loss of faith in the political system and all mechanisms of government.

So we shuffle our feet and await those final ingredients - Depression and mass unemployment - Voilà!

Dr. Melvin T Gray 2009

It certainly doesn’t help things when the very worst you can do seems to attract 5 years real time off a starting point of 15 years. Who did that? That would have been the Father for Criminal Justice David Blunkett, a man who had a machine bureaucracy for every problem. You can trace a lot of our current problems back to those bits of the Criminal (In)Justice Act 2003 where Mr. Blunkett scrabbled to make his high water mark in the area of sentencing. Regarding this pernicious, spiteful and damaging piece of legislative quackery I can do no better than to quote Lord Justice Rose

In December 2005

“The most inviting course for this Court to follow, would be for its members, having shaken their heads in despair, to hold up their hands and say: “the Holy Grail of rational interpretation is impossible to find”. But it is not for us to desert our judicial duty, however lamentably others have legislated. But, we find little comfort or assistance in the historic canons of construction for determining the will of Parliament which were fashioned in a more leisurely age and at a time when elegance and clarity of thought and language were to be found in legislation as a matter of course rather than exception.”

In March 2006

“Time and again during the last 14 months, this Court has striven to give sensible practical effect to provisions of the Criminal Justice Act 2003, a considerable number of which are, at best, obscure and, at worst, impenetrable.“

I have to say, I like the cut of his jib. He retired in 2006.

So, we end up with a system where the clearly guilty get a third off for a guilty plea and then a walk from the prison gates when half of what is left has gone. I cannot think of another piece of legislation that undermines public confidence in the Criminal Justice System so efficiently.

Are things really as bad as Dr Melvin T Gray thinks? Well, I think we may be heading that way. I’ll be keeping a watch on the level of vigilante crime reporting over the next year. That’s the most reliable indicator of public confidence in our collective ability to deal with crime. When the organs of the State charged with administering punishment are perceived to be failing in their duty, people do begin to take the law into their own hands.

It’s getting to the point where I am having to bite my tongue with witnesses. I am weighing impact on witnesses that ranges between inconvenience and mortal threat against a nigh pointless prison sentence and it’s hard to convince myself that the effort is worth it. At work we grow inured to seeing savage criminality lightly punished. It has got so bad that a sentence of real time over 5 years is greeted in our office as a great example of admirable judgement by his or her Lordship. The bunting goes up when in reality, we should be railing nearly every time that dangerous people are being put into short term storage that does little to either reform them or deter others.

Society depends on sanctions. When the sanctions stop working so does society. Acceptable, accepted punishment is a bullwark against tar, feathers and pitchforks. I’m not advocating a return to hanging and flogging but the balance between crime and it’s necessary corollary punishment has gone all to hell. The punishment for being bad no longer covers the damage done, no, not even close.

Just A Ranging Shot 09/03/2009

2009-03-19T06:09:00.000-07:00

Metaphorical bag packed. Long lie in this morning and an early night tonight. So….

Jacqui Klebb, are you entirely sure that you laid off the weed after university or has the pressure of living in hope that you can get away with claiming that a rented single room in your sister’s house is your main residence finally got to you. Never mind, there’s a lovely paid up part time pad waiting for you back in the Midlands with your husband and the kids. They must wonder where mummy has been these last few years or do they come down and stay at your sisters bedroom main residence at weekends and holidays? Anyway, mustn’t be bitter Jack. Not her fault, she’s only exploiting the ambiguities in the rules. Nothing wrong with that.

Anyway, I imagine a conversation at the Home Office, some months ago that went a bit like this

JK “People, we’re running out of time. Gordon’s toast and the top job will soon be up for grabs. I have yet to plunge my hands into the wet cement on the walk of political immortality. What am I to do? How will ages yet to come possibly be able to look back on my years as Home Secretary and see the burgeoning greatness that will inevitably sweep me, Jacqueline Jill Smith from the playing fields of Dyson Perrins CofE Sports College (special measures 2008), to the very top of the political tree. Who will rid me of this troublesome air of mediocrity?”

Alan Campbell (for it is he) “Well Minister, the policy wonks down at the Violent Crime Unit at Peel Place have an idea that they’ve been sitting on for a while. It may raise your profile in the right places within the party.”

JK “Oh them,remind me? Oh yes, forgot about them, haven’t heard much from them since that smoke and mirrors job we did over knife crime. Hmm think we got away with that one, news cycle moved on to bankers and Jade Goody. So spit it out little Al, what have they got.”

AC “It’s a database Minister, you see……”

JK “A what….seriously little Al, are you daft, a bloody database. Here I am up to my chins in boiling poo and you want me to announce another government database. Have you any idea what the papers are going to make of that, let alone that git Old Holborn. Get a grip man. Right now I could really do without another Stasi State story in the Daily Mail“

AC “But Minister, this one is different. This one protects women and children from serial domestic abuse offenders. This one could let the cops pass information about wife beaters all over the country. The idea is, we track the offender everywhere…”

JK “Oh really, why didn’t you say. With a chip? Go on, say there’s a chip. A mind control chip in their heads that stops them doing things…”

AC “No not a chip..”

JK “An ID card then..go on Alan, say it involves making them have ID cards”

AC “Again sadly no Minister. As you know , despite your express wishes, the ID card does not have a chip with a tracking mechanism. Not yet anyway.”

JK “Well how does it work then. How will this database help anybody?”

AC “Well we make them register their address and stuff like sex offenders“

JK “Yeeeessss….and“

AC “Then wherever they go, we tell the Police and the Social Services. They watch them like hawks looking for any sign of them starting a new relationship. Every time they get an new boyfriend or girlfriend, we send a Social Worker to ask the new love interest if they really wants to be partnered up with a violent maniac. The wonks think it would work really well by ensuring that nobody who raises there hand against a significant other ever gets a chance to have a relationship that we don’t know about ever again.”

JK “So it works by……. Oh, I see.“

AC “That’s right Minister. It works by using lots of cops to carry out covert surveillance of people who might commit a crime at some point. They watch, like hawks, like I said, day and night, night and day until the violent offender begins to pitch woo. Then we interpose a Social Worker between the happy couple and try and make sure that she drops him like a hot brick.”

JK “No seriously little Al, very funny but what did they actually say“

AC “No Minister, that is the big idea. Trust me on this it will play well with the Third Sector and the Parliamentary Party will see you as big on crime and really, can you think of a less sympathetic target than wife beaters. If you want another thin wedge end, they are it. Pedo’s, Terrorists, Smokers, Wife Beaters, just need to work out whether we have time to have a pop at carnivores, drinkers and the self employed before the election.“

JK “Well it’s not as if it will ever happen anyway, but it makes the right noises I suppose. Get me the relevant A.C.P.O. bod on the line two. Tell you what, whilst we are at it, lets graft in a bit of forced marriage, genital mutilation, honour based crime and sinister Eastern European pimps. That should cut some ground from under the BNP and the Tories.”

LATER

JK “Brian, how are things in Wiltshire?”

Brian Moore (for it is he) “What are you after Home Secretary?”

JK “Fancy a consultation”

Stop thrashing around, it’s over. You didn’t need a consultation to know that wife beating is a bad thing and you don’t need one to know that there are massive issues of forced marriage and honour based violence. We get it in the cops and most people out there in the real world get it to. Why are you making us tell you formally. Are you hoping that the echo back from the fake charities in the consultation will be loud enough to foist more unnecessary and authoritarian legislation on us. Are you hoping that the Grand Wizard will come down on a smokey cloud of enlightenment with an easy fix? There isn’t one and another law enforcement database certainly isn’t it. We have VISOR already and in case you didn’t know. That V in Visor is for for Violent and the O is for Offender, I think you get the picture. We’re busy dealing with the problem the hard way, the slow way, with Social Workers and other partner agencies. We talk about serial dangerous violent offenders quite a lot already whether they are wife beaters or not. Again, in case you didn’t know, it’s called a MAPPA or Multi Agency Public Protection Arrangements.

The legislation is already in place, so are the procedures. We arrest whenever we can, have done for years, but there are massive issues with getting the victims to come forward as witnesses.

None of this should come as a surprise to you, so what gives with this fake consultation?

By Their Works 13/03/2009

2009-03-13T06:11:00.000-07:00

I have posted on your common or garden Al-Muhajiroun demo some months ago. I think it bears re-posting because Nu-Muhajiroun were very much front and centre in Luton. I also think its worth remembering that even back then, most Muslims, who I have pegged as very much “Decent Folk”, didn’t support them. Not much has changed on that front.

To protect the humble, Al Muhajiroun changed their name and they now go by the unintentionally ironic name Ahlus Sunnah wal Jamaah which I am told translates as “People of the example of Mohammed and the Community.” The name alone pretty much guarantees that it is a small student politics type clique with the usual mix of charismatic egotists and basking but duller followers. For those spiritually pure young men of Nu-Muhajiroun however, there may not even be the additional benefits of willing members the opposite sex.

By the rather light attendance from the majority of the Muslims in the Luton community, it would appear that Hamas-Lites’ brand of situationist event has stopped drawing any significant support from locals. Worse still for them, the generally omni-present guilt tripping members of Stop The War gave the Luton event a miss. It is clear that whatever it was that Nu-Muhajiroun are selling, the market is drying up. You can always sell a march for Palestine and for Iraq and draw a few hundred, but you can’t sell knocking returning soldiers to more than your half dozen local activists. Still they got the media coverage in trumps and they didn’t even get arrested. Daft, but not stupid.

Anyway, this is “By The Dawn’s Early Light” which I posted in April 2008. Apologies if you’ve heard this one before.

The marchers gathered at the local community centre in the crisp early morning. It looked as if the rain was going to hold off. There was the usual bargaining going on between Police and protesters. Banners such as “Jews are the children of Satan” “Hitler was right. Final solution now” and the ever popular “All Jews must die” were confiscated leaving only such gems as “Jews out of Palestine” and “Jihad For Palestine Now” to be waved by the assembled worthies. The crowd fell into various recognisable stereotypes

Professional Protesters
Dressed for the outdoors. Not from round here. Festooned with still and video cameras to record the hoped for Police brutality. Mobile phone clamped to ear, in possession of the megaphone and a wireless laptop. The laptop is undoubtedly used to update the blog regarding the fantastic local support for this daring direct action in “support of the oppressed people of wherever” or “against the evil something or other.”

Militant Muslims
Mostly male. All wearing black & white scarves. Tended to dress in all black. Shaved heads, full beards. They looked sort of like militant boy scouts. The “sisters” were fully veiled as modesty requires. One brought his little children in little green headbands and basically everything but the bomb belt.

Bussed In Supporters
Students. Came in a minibus, had their own placards, a bed sheet banner and a lot of handout leaflets. Hoods up, scarf pulled up to nose. Didn’t mix with the locals.

Locals
The mixed age male members of just about every local mosque. No local women present. Not a modest thing for a girl to do. All handed placards which they waved with varying degrees of enthusiasm

So the man with the megaphone gets them underway and onwards march the 2000 or so protestors. Then a very curious thing happens, one of the militants gets the magaphone and the following chant is heard
Caller “Bomb bomb USA”
Crowd “Bomb bomb USA”

Caller “Bomb bomb Israel”
Crowd “Bomb bomb Israel”

Caller “Bomb bomb UK”
Crowd ” Bomb bomb errr what did he say? No way”………sound of tumbleweed”

One of the main men then grabs the megaphone off the wild eyed bearded loon but the damage has been done. At every back alley and side street, locals are melting away with not a backward glance. Trails of abandoned placards marks their passage. By the time that the protest arrived at the local shopping centre, there was about 100 people left in it, if that.

Still, the militants have a few tricks left. Lets burn a flag they think and the Stars and Stripes is produced from a back pack. Oh dear, what’s this? In accordance with some obscure but unexpectedly useful EEC directive of 2001, Old Glory has obviously been drenched with some sort of fire retardant. It sputters out time after time and after several failures, and burnt fingers from over used lighters, the militants throw the scorched standard to the pavement and begin jumping up and down on it. I think that wasn’t quite the statement that they were hoping to make.

Its thirsty work all this flag burning and local alienation so the militants retire for light refreshment to ..wait for it, wait for it that symbol of Moslem Brotherhood and cultural toleration, the local KFC from which they emerge with giant cups of Pepsi. One of them told me that Policing was a kuffr job. I told him that Pepsi was a Yankee Imperialist drink. I’m not sure if he got it.

One thing to bear in mind though, when it came to talk of bombing Blighty, the locals wanted absolutley no part of it. The rest, well the thought of it didn’t seem to upset them that much really.

T.C.O.B. 11/03/2009

2009-03-11T06:11:00.000-07:00

I am in Alterdale in the rest room of one of the prefab mini-marts that are mopping up the last remnants of local retail resistance everywhere. Everybody here is in branded work-wear. The walls are painted cheapest white onto bare plaster. The floor is non-descript beige lino tile with an acceptable slip coefficient. There are no windows and the only source of light is a fluorescent strip bang in the centre of the ceiling. John the shift manager and I are sat on the anti Goldilocks chairs that seem standard backstage these days. These are chairs that are just a little too low, a little too small and a little too hard. The smell of a few day’s worth of microwave quick-food hits you as soon as you walk in. My paperwork is spread on a table where nobody ever eats at.

John and I have a problem and it is your problem as well. One of the scions of the Thorpe family has done a bad thing that I am investigating. Shift Manager John is a witness to a small but important part of the whole. I am exploring the possibilities of a witness statement.

John “What it is officer, I’ve got to be straight with you, I’ll tell you about it, but there’s no way I’m going to court”

DC NJ “Why is that John?”

John “It’s the Thorpes mate. They don’t care about what will happen with you and the courts and all that. They don’t care. it doesn’t even bother them. If you give a statement against one of them, the whole bloody lot’ll be after you. Look, I want to do the right thing but they know where I live, they know where I work. I mean, I went to school with two of them. I used to live in the same street. They know me.”

DC NJ “Do you think they would?”

John “I don’t think it mate, I know it. Everyone in Alterdale knows it. You don’t grass people like the Thorpes because they’ll have you and they just don’t care. They’ll do you, they’ll do your missus and they’ll do your kids. I’ve got three kids. What can you do to look after them?”

My private self agrees with John. The Thorpes and families like them have been assaulting and intimidating the good and not so good people of Alterdale with impunity for many, many years. Nobody ever seems to make statements or turn up at court. Heck, nothing ever gets to court. Every month there is some Thorpe or other sitting mutely in an interview room waiting for nothing to happen again. The family solicitors must know what is going on. Does it never strike them as odd that we keep locking up people who have been Thorped but nothing ever ends up at court.

This is not a murder case. Serious but not a murder. The Thorpes don’t kill people, they just beat them up and collectively harass their lives into misery. That unspoken but widely known threat is enough. There are Thorpes in every town, lots of them and every town has caught the fear.

My public self wants the statement and I deploy every argument and persuasion at my disposal. Manager John is not buying. He will tell me what I need to know but he will never stand in a court. In his mind’s eye, he saw his wife distressed and his children hurt and in tears. He weighed the demands of a justice system that cares not for him and threatens nothing that the Thorpes care about enough to stay their hands. The justice system was found wanting.

Come On Lucky C 10/03/2009

2009-03-10T06:10:00.000-07:00

I am really so absolutely 100% glad that I spent time learning about cross border arrest, relevant time, review times, RIPAs and CHIS’s. I am thinking same time next year.

Something For The Weekend #1 07/03/2009

2009-03-07T06:09:00.000-08:00

In the finest traditions of bloggers with other stuff to do at the weekend who still want to put up something that the readers might find interesting, a few nuggets that have crossed my path. This might become an occasional series

This Royal Throne Of Kings - A gruesome assault case

Stanislav Young Polish Plumber - A trip to the vets

The Register - Sir Fred Goodwin does the 419 thing

Red Meat - The Comic Strips of Max Cannon

Carlton Sherwood - Emotional Tampon

Landover Baptist Church - Where The Worthwhile Worship

Not even a bit nervous about OSPRE Part 1. No sirree, absolutely un-twitchy and not on a short fuse this morning. I am calm, calm, happy calm, happy place….happy place…..breathe into the bag…….

Bullets Are Cheaper 6/03/2009

2009-03-06T06:12:00.000-08:00

I’ve been trying to find the right words, the right tone for hours.

For another victim of our night time economy there will be no justice.

People that should have been arrested much earlier were just spoken to and moved on. They were drunk enough, they were sufficiently badly behaved. That hacks me off.

P.C.S.O.s were deployed into potential, no make that inevitable confrontations that they were neither equipped or minded to deal with. Where they should have been supported by sworn officers, those officers drove by on the other side of the road without so much as winding down the windows. The P.C.S.O.s are dealing they thought, but as we now know, they were not even coping. That hacks me off.

C.C.T.V. that should have been monitored to be of any real use was not. Guess what that does?

Add to the mix alcohol control laws that don’t work, won’t work and add nothing to the smooth running of society beyond employing a few more printers. They were all in place but not in force. Has anybody anywhere noticed fewer drunken kids on the streets with less drink because I haven’t. Best stack it with those corpses already on the rotting pile of moribund approaches to youth crime, the ASBO, Parenting Orders, the Local Child Curfew and Dispersal Orders. Parliament can legislate any prohibition they like, even the text book exemplar of banning smoking in Paris, but to make it stick you need to enforce it.

Let the back story be years of pointless and undemanding intervention in the lives of this dozen or so violently criminal children. It turns out that it was all a near pointless waste of time and money. Their fingers left were poised on a half educated video violence attack reflex that had conflated “right to be heard” with “right to never be told no.” They strutted and binged round the streets of a small market town like occupying soldiers. They were just waiting for someone to try and stand up to them. The P.C.S.O.s visibly declined the challenge.Somebody with less authority but more sense of right made the mistake of trying to call them to order.

This is what happens when you teach and promote the stupid idea that you can have anything if you “just dream hard enough.” The Disneyfication of personal aspiration fails badly when even those with the dimmest of abilities can see that, from where they are, from the day they were born, only a very limited palette of dreams was really available. It makes a person sour but it isn’t the victims fault that you won’t ever be rich, attractive, intelligent or satisfied.

These children are gone somewhere beyond Omerta. I watch face after face, fresh from a half day of college, dodging the unemployment statistics. Each one sprawls at ease on the couches in the front room of Mum’s state provided house in their best Location Jackets and finest jogging pant. They find some collective dark amusement in knowing what happened, knowing who amongst them put another person in a hospital bed, knowing that there is not enough evidence for anyone to have to face the consequences. Once again they have gone out ruining other peoples lives, they have not been stopped and they are going to get away with it.

Uncle Tom 06/03/2009

2009-03-06T06:08:00.000-08:00

Over in the red sector of the blogosphere “Shame On You” is being called on Tom Harris the Labour MP for Glasgow South. Basically, as I am sure many of the readers here will be aware, Tom made a post on his personal blog “And Another Thing” about teenage mothers. Tom has given his opinion that teenage mothers are not a good thing. For those of you that don’t know about the post or haven’t read it, this is it.

The criticisms of Tom range from the simple “How dare you! Get out of our party” to those who rather blindly point out that Tom hasn’t constructed his blog post like an academic article with references, footnotes and policy recommendations. Of course he hasn’t, it’s a blog. What Tom has done is illustrate his thought processes with a personal anecdote or two. I should know, that’s what I do all the time. I think Tom Harris is right. I think it was brave of him to say what he said in the context of being a politician in a party where some people have absolutely bought into enabling other people’s bad decisions. I hope he is coming round to seeing rising rates of teen pregnancy as a symptom of a larger problem rather than an isolated single issue.

For what it is worth there is a relevant proper study, a big population, long duration reliable and reputable study. Over at the University of Otago, New Zealand they have been running the Dunedin Multidisciplinary Health and Development Research Project for nigh on 40 years. I have posted on them before but it isn’t particularly sexy and they don’t do sensational. They do thorough though. To those who doubt that there is interesting, recent and reputable research underpinning Tom’s opinion, may I recommend

Jaffee, S.R., Caspi, A., Moffitt, T.E., Belsky, J., Silva, P.A. (2001). Why are children born to teen mothers at risk for adverse outcomes in young adulthood? Results from a 20-year longitudinal study. Development and Psychopathology. 13: 377-397.

This is my somewhat simplified and non technical take on it.

This 20-year longitudinal study showed that the young adult offspring of teen mothers were at risk for a range of adverse outcomes including

Early school leaving
Unemployment
Early parenthood
Violent offending.

Does any of that sound at all familiar?

They also worked out how much was down to social selection (poor parents make more poor parents, teen mothers tend to have other pre-existing problems before they get pregnant) and how much was down to social selection (the consequences of being a teen single mother bringing harm to her children) and it was about 40:60. In other words we are all somewhat to blame including Mum. I would go further and conjecture that if we all became blameless, supportive and non-judgmental, there are still factors at work that make it a good idea to discourage teenage girls from becoming mothers. These factors do not include drain on benefits (although that boils my piss somewhat) but do include the substantially increased chances of raising a repeat generation of unemployable and violently criminal youths who will have more of their own.

They suggest (and I for one agree) that there is consequently a public interest in delaying childbirth and that we should be supporting at risk mothers and their children. Elsewhere in the Dunedin Project, another team found that your best bet for a good life for the child was non negotiable and intensive work on the child before the age of 8. Any later and don’t bother. Well, bother I suppose but its very likely a lost cause.

So for those who say “So Jack, you’re so down on the Evil Poor and dead eyed ratboys. What would you suggest?” I would suggest that when a teenage girl has a baby, we intervene in the life of the baby in a non negotiable fashion. We pay what it costs and we do whatever we need to do to try and prevent that child growing into an uneducated, unemployed, violent waster. I say this because it doesn’t matter how non-judgemental I am or how much I support Mum, chances are she had problems before the pregnancy that will significantly contribute to damaging her child’s chance of a good life in the future. Chances are that no matter how much she loves the baby, she’s not going to do a good job of raising it. Changing her attitudes, thought processes and lifestyle by the age of 15 or 16 when things have gone as far as a pregnancy is likely to be a non trivial task. Working with her children from birth is likely to bear more fruit. I want to know, what’s the score? Can we leave this particular child alone to raise her baby or do we need to replace her in the child’s best interests. I think the answer probably becomes apparent fairly quickly. I do have a concern that this probably involves Social Workers. I think they should be properly empowered, made accountable for results and deployed in sufficient numbers to do the job we want them to do. That job should be securing the best interests of the child.

I think we are probably blowing a lot of money on some Mums making them happy in the expectation that we will make them better Mums and sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes we end up with a happier but still bad Mum. I want us to be clear about spotting the difference and making the hard decisions early in the child’s life. . Maybe we should be concentrating ruthlessly on raising her children for her instead. On a purely Benthamite basis, we can’t really send the child back and we are all better served by ending up with a contributing member of society rather than another razor boy. Why should we take this duty, why should we insist on the power to intervene? Two reasons, firstly because we are paying and secondly because not intervening allows a bad anti-social situation to perpetuate and grow

Oh and “good life”, that would absolutely include educated, employed, not unusually violent.

And yes incase you were wondering, non negotiable includes removing the child for good cause rather than spending a fortune in holding the “family unit” together until the child turns 12 and ends up in care and damaged for life anyway.

Rant over, back to “Can’t Bilk an Bonk” and ” Section 4 Kick Down The Door” (Police revision in joke)

It’s Alright 04/03/2009

2009-03-04T06:07:00.000-08:00

I think that the studying is going well enough to make the News at 10 my study watershed. It all gets a bit blurry by then anyway. I am falling asleep to the dulcet tones of Tom Barron and Julianna Mitchell on the basis that something will go in subliminally.

So, I began my read round of the various government websites and came upon this little belter of a speech from Jack Straw over at the Minijust. Wedged in between the a potted history of the office of Lord Chancellor and the conclusion bit is a straight out warning to the Criminal Defence industry that the golden goose is dead. Not only is the goose dead but there are now no golden eggs stashed away. Jack has finally got round to looking at an industry that has enjoyed astonishing growth since the 1980’s. He speaks of the publicly funded defence industry. Since 1982, the legal aid budget has rocketed up from £536 million to £2 billion. Solicitors have grown in number from 32,000 to 108,000 in the same period. There must be some rich pickings for growth like that. Here we are in 2009 and there is 1 lawyer in every 400 men, women and children. So what did Jack say? Here is, I think, the guts of it

“Legal aid is the one of the largest public services delivered by the private sector, but there is an issue as to whether the legal services industry that provides it has been through the same process of reform, or subjected to the same market pressures as other industries.”

This translates as you need to do it cheaper and we’re going to make you do it cheaper or go bust. That means more clients and less time per client.

“Lawyers and law firms who are dependent on state funding – and I emphasise dependent, as there are many whose existence relies exclusively on the public purse – would be wise to reconsider expectations of earnings.”

This translates as those of you who depend on legal aid fees are in for hard times.

“So the publicly funded legal profession needs to take an ever closer look at itself, consider the service it is providing and think about how it is viewed in the eyes of the public….Whilst I am not drawing any equivalence in salaries or justification between publicly paid lawyers and bankers….. particularly at the top of the profession, and sometimes also in the middle ranks… there is an expectation that they should receive rewards comparable to those in private practice.”

This translates as you have been taking the Micky out of the system for quite a while. It stops now. Either get private clients or send back the Merc.

It has been long enough coming. It fits in with the idea of equality before the law by bringing the level of defence service provision down to that afforded to the prosecution. In discussions about preserving defence spending, there is an argument trotted out that we must have really well funded defences because they face the resources of some fictional all powerful omni funded state prosecution machine. Maybe that was true in 1960 but it hasn’t been true at any time during my police service.

The proof is plain to see. Look at the front tables in any magistrates court and at one you will see, amidst the piles of files, a lone C.P.S. lawyer desperately flicking through the stack of papers trying to come to terms with the cases enough to get through the session without embarassment. To the left, an empty table that will host a number of defence solicitors most of whom will have devoted sufficient time to mastering the facts and preparing a few cases at most. Luckily we get as many guilty pleas and cracked trials as we do because without them, the holes in C.P.S. capability would be patently obvious. Visit a C.P.S. office and you can feel the pressure and on a bad day smell the fear. Where I work, some C.P.S. offices are turning into the Bermuda Triangle of case papers such that papers are never sent by post but taken in person to the case worker. They are chronically overworked and underfunded, increasingly dependent on their HCA staff.

So, Mr. Straw is talking the talk and he is the man with his hands on the purse strings. Let’s see if he can move us from our current legal aid spending of £38 each every year to somewhere nearer to that in the haven of social justice Sweden who spend £1.

Mr Straw, if you really want a good way to cut the legal aid expenses, may I suggest that you take a good hard look at how discount for early guilty pleas is running. It should be that plea at first opportunity gets lots of discount and plea at the last minute gets next to nothing. Look at the results and you will see that this isn’t happening the way it should. Get the Crown Court judges on board because they are the people responsible for letting the sentencing guidelines slide by allowing maximum discount on latest possible plea. They say it is fairer. I say they follow the guidelines elsewhere, why not with this as well. At present there is nothing for the defence to lose by sitting back and letting as much paper come their way as possible, even one of those expensive and time consuming full files and disclosure. This is even the case where the client’s position is not defendable and never will be without praying for a “technicality.” The way you are funding the C.P.S. maybe that is not such a vain hope. I know you have tried to fix this at Magistrates level but the criminal defence lawyers have seen you coming and have worked out ways to keep putting off the evil day that confound the reforms envisaged in Streamlined Processing. As Learned Hands said, “Justice delayed is justice denied” unless you are the defence when justice delayed is just another good days work.

You are the man Mr. Straw. It’s your responsibility from that solemn oath you were so proud to take. I think that until you sort out that knotty problem of discount for early plea, you will be tinkering at the edges and reducing the number of people on both sides trying to do an ever increasing amount of work for less money.

No Situation So Bad 02/03/09

2009-03-02T06:07:00.000-08:00

You know that bit when I said it would take something blood boilingly bad to get me posting….

Social workers.

Bloody social workers.

Bloody awful social workers.

It is one of my unwritten rules of policing that there is no situation so bad, so dire, so beyond any possible recall that you cannot make it worse by adding a social worker. This time it’s Vale of Glamorgan Council who took it into their heads to place one of their customers into a foster family. Not just any run of the mill customer either, oh no. This was a service user with a bad history. 2005 sexual assault on a young boy, 2007 fired from his job at a bowling alley for an unfortunate (his barrister’s phrase not mine) proclivity for collecting phone numbers from underage girls, 2008 he sexually assaults a sleeping 16 year old girl. He is homeless, an emergency case. Got to do something with him and he’s from that hard to deal with population. I imagine a conversation as the emergency presented that might have gone a bit like this

Cressida “This is a tough one Jules and no mistake. Who in their right mind is going to let this guy under their roof?”

Jules “I know, lets put him in with that nice family with the two little children. They are really nice and helpful and they never say no”

Cressida “That’s a plan I suppose. It might be okay in an emergency as long as we tell the parents to never, ever, not ever leave him alone in a room with their children. “

Jules “No way Cress, if we tell them that we’ll never get him off our hands. They’re nice people sure enough but they’re not stupid.”

Cressida “Do you think that will be alright?”

Jules “Oh yeah, sure, sure, I’ll make the call, you get the next case file out. Ahhh sorted. Fancy a brew.”

Cressida “Are you sure it’ll be alright?”

Jules “What…oh yeah, yeah sure, sure whatever. Hmm. Hmmm. Cress…got biscuits?”

Inevitably a two year old child is raped and a 9 year old child is subjected to terrifying sexual abuse. The police are called, the system grinds.

The defence barrister did the usual bit of trying to lay of blame for the offending onto anything but his client “through no fault of his own was placed in an environment - his unfortunate tendencies not having been dealt with - where he was afforded the opportunity to commit these terrible offences.” Of course, why didn’t I guess? The bad man was not to blame because someone else didn’t deal with him rather than because he failed to exercise any self control. The bad man was not to blame because he was “put in an environment” rather than he was made an offer that he couldn’t believe . He was “afforded an opportunity” rather than he grabbed an opportunity with both hands. I am also willing to bet my customary next coffee that the defence barrister mitigated without using the words rape and toddler in the same sentence.

Oh the sentence, inevitably, IPP minimum 6 years, convince some people that your safe and back on the streets before you’re 30. Great.

Social services director Phil Evans said the council deeply regretted the harm and distress caused to the family, adding: “The council has instigated an urgent case management inquiry into the circumstances of this young man’s placement. Although the inquiry is at an early stage, it has become clear there was a serious error of judgement.” No shit Sherlock. Nothing there about the error being so great that the perpetrator has to go but at least he isn’t jumping on the “We have 3 stars” waggon. To be fair looking at the 2007 inspection report, Vale of Glamorgan Social Services are strapped for cash, really really strapped for cash. Trouble is, underfunding doesn’t make you stupid and it doesn’t make you careless about moving a predator in with somebody elses children. What does that is lack of professional competence.

The Ex Post (Facto) 01/03/2009

2009-03-01T06:05:00.000-08:00

“The Prime Minister has said it is not acceptable and therefore it will not be accepted. It might be enforceable in a court of law this contract but it’s not enforceable in the court of public opinion and that’s where the Government steps in”

Rt Hon Harriet Harman QC, MP 1st March 2009

Sir Fred Goodwin’s pension is certainly a hill upon which much political capital and clout is being marched. I understand that Prime Minister Brown has said it is not acceptable for Sir Fred to collect a pension that appears to me and to the PM to be bloated and undeserved. I am aware of the possible irony of my opinion, Mr. Brown…who knows? What does it matter that one bloated and apparently incompetent capitalist gets shafted by the government? Surely he deserves to be stripped of his pension because he doesn’t deserve it. He is a bad man who was given the opportunity to do “the decent thing” and he turned it down flat. It’s a recession, maybe another great depression and there is this fat cat pigging in the trough and set for a life of strawberries and cream. It is shockingly unfair, like “that rapist that won the lottery” or that other lottery winner of red top infamy the King of The Chavs Mikey Carroll. Yes there is certainly a lot of hate and envy being whipped up against the government’s least favourite banker. There is even talk of trying to animate the corpse of the Bill of Attainder to separate Fred from his millions.

Now I make no claims about being a constitutional lawyer. I am struggling to get my head round sufficient basic legal concepts to pass a 150 question multiple choice exam. Never mind. I am not a QC (not even an honorary one), nor was I ever a legal officer in the National Council for Civil Liberties, or even the proud holder of great offices of state like Solicitor General, Lord Privy Seal or Leader of The House of Commons. No, I am just a working detective with an internet link to Wikipedia but even I have heard of the concept of the rule of law and the principles that underlie it. You know the ones I mean, presumption of innocence, legal equality, habeas corpus, independent judiciary and down there near the bottom of the grab bag that laws should not be retroactive. Not retroactive in that if it is legal at the time that you do it, then the state shouldn’t be able to come back later and declare your actions illegal. In our democracy, with Parliament as sovereign, it is possible for Parliament to pass retroactive law but the principle is that they shouldn’t do it. It is one of those big principles that underly our democracy.

It even got written into the Human Rights Act 1998 as article 7.

(1) No one shall be held guilty of any criminal offence on account of any act or omission which did not constitute a criminal offence under national or international law at the time when it was committed. Nor shall a heavier penalty be imposed than the one that was applicable at the time the criminal offence was committed.

(2) This Article shall not prejudice the trial and punishment of any person for any act or omission which, at the time it was committed, was criminal according to the general law recognised by civilised nations.

I know it’s couched in criminal terms but there’s a principal in there somewhere. That principle is that the state doesn’t get to go after individuals who upset it when carrying out legal acts or indulging in legal deals by passing retroactive legislation. The state is entitled to close the loophole (and sure enough we have seen more loophole closing legislation than ever of late) but the state does not get to re-write history to create a fiction that the acts or dealings were always illegal. You and I get to go about our lawful business safe in the knowledge that when we do a thing that is not illegal, no government is going to come back at us in 5 years time and say “Actually, we’ve had a bit of a think and you’re going to be punished after all.” Retroactive legislation is what autocracies do. It is a hallmark of dictatorship. Our Parliament is constituted to be capable of wielding dictatorial power but generally refrains from pulling that particular lever. Any reach for the lever needs to be looked at very, very carefully.

So here we are with at least a chance that something as blunt as a Bill of Attainder is going to be deployed to take the pension away from a greedy banker. He has his pension legally. He is home free, it is distasteful but he is clear. Maybe Sir Fred deserves to be out on the streets stuffing yesterday’s free papers into his trousers to ward off the bitter chill of another night on Skid Row. Maybe he deserves to be hung from a lamp post with piano wire but there is no current lawful way to touch his pension pot unless we invent one that is retroactive. If the government will go retroactive on this, the balance between democracy of the people and dictatorship of the executive will have shifted again and not in favour of the people. Hate Sir Fred Goodwin all you like, buy a voodoo doll, send one to Ms. Harman and PM Brown. It may help them deal with their obvious anger and frustration with him. Do anything you like but understand that a government that will use retroactive legislation may not be working in your best interests in the long term. I cannot help but think that back in 1978 when she joined NCCL as a legal officer the 28 year old Ms. Harman would have wanted to give her 58 year old self a talking to.

As a last thought, I would be interested to know where I could go to attend a sitting of the “Court of Public Opinion” and also to know how it is constituted. It seems like a very powerful and unusual judicial body with both a particular jurisdiction over contract law and a main line to executive power. I wonder if it’s remit could be extended to, say electoral law, expenses claims, party funding, the death penalty, political influence peddling, castration for convicted rapists, sterilisation of negligent mothers, you know, some of the other interesting stuff that angers normal folk. Back in the real world away from the polite sophistry of the Parliamentarian, “The Court of Public Opinion” is just the nice way of saying The Angry Mob. It should not be cited or appealed to by one of our most senior politicians at any time. It is passing ludicrous to wheel it out over one aspect of a rushed takeover deal that has left the Government embarrassed (but little more than that). It makes my blood run a little colder. That’s because my colleagues and I are going to be standing between the Angry Mob and whoever they are pointed at next time.

Update . Jeff Randall got to a very similar place in the Telegraph with fewer words

Still Going Round The Sun 27/02/2009

2009-02-27T06:05:00.000-08:00

I feel a nosebleed coming on. The longlists for the Orwell Prize have been released and I made it onto the bloggers list.

I am chuffed, really really very chuffed. Mrs. Night is also chuffed but worried that Orwell nomination may lead to a bit too much light heading in my anonymous direction. The happiest people of all seem to be my Mum and Dad. Forty something years on and it’s like passing the 11+ all over again.

Anyway…

Two of the bloggers on the list are people that I read regularly and generally enjoy. Hopi Sen is always thoughtful and interesting. Iain Dale has single handedly created the behemoth presence in the blue corner of British politics. I am getting round to reading some of the other listed blogs.

Peoples Republic of Mortimer is such a good name, it is one of those blogs that I have heard about but not visited. I should have gone for a look earlier.

Heseriarch is a good read with posts on every topic under the sun except the obvious. His take on the list chimes with me “Still, enough about me. What of the competition? It’s a mixed bag. The biggest name still in the competition, blog-wise, is probably Iain Dale. There are also two top BBC types, Mark Easton and Paul Mason, and Oliver Kamm, now of the Times. So no pressure. Joining them are a couple of top-flight Labour bloggers, Tom Harris MP (who blogs far too much for a serving MP, in my humble) and Hopi Sen. And there’s a leavening of small fry, among whom I suppose I must count myself.” I am certainly with him in the shoal of fry.

Then there is Neil Robertson with The Bleeding Heart Show. He says “But where blogs might differ in their motivations, ideology, tone and voice, the one unifying thread which runs through this huge, diffuse blogsophere is that they’re all written by people who believe this country can be made better than it is today. In an age which is supposed to be more apathetic than those which have gone before, that’s something pretty special.” His better may not be my better but the blog is a very good read.

As I have said before, I know that my blog is a very short lever. I estimate my chances of informing the big debates as slim to none. I am not “evidence based” and I don’t have any research projects or consultancy to sell. Making the long list in something like The Orwell Prize is as good as it gets. I started this blog 12 months and 200 odd posts ago, when I noticed that my responses as a reader on Inspector Gadget were getting as long as the Guv’s original posts. I caught the blogging bug and began what we called in my youth “stoking the fad.” Since then I have had the opportunity to join the lists in the many arguments surrounding the criminal justice system and I have had the genuine pleasure of reading comments from a lot of readers. The readership has slowly climbed to about 1,000 a day. I still get a bit of a buzz when something I have written gets linked by somewhere better known and the readership heads north of 2,000.

Take care everyone and see you after the Sergeants exams next month unless of course something particularly blood boilingly stupid comes out of the usual suspects or I wake one morning knowing that elusive secret to offender rehabilitation that has eluded us for so very long.

The Hunger 20/02/2009

2009-02-20T06:03:00.000-08:00

I thought I would take a look at LabourList. On the right hand side is what I take to be the Twitter feed of their blogmaster Derek Draper. You can imagine my joy when I read the following….

“On my way to durham union to debate nick herbert and eleanor laing. Twitter any info you have on them!”

It is a casual, unguarded, throwaway comment but the more I read it, the worse I feel. I am trying to be charitable but it reeks of casual and long practiced unpleasantness.

The debate is apparently on “This House believes only a Conservative Government can fix Britain’s broken society. Speakers include: Simon Hughes and Nick Herbert.”

Two things spring to mind

1. What has soliciting “any info” about two of the other debaters from a rival party got to do with debating the proposition?

2. It seems that some people in our political establishment are more keen to run ad hominem arguments than engage in debate in how to try and fix the many areas where our society is, for want of a better word, broken.

Meanwhile, we happy few in the Police will do what we can to preserve the peace, keep the wheels on the wagon and the pitchforks off the street. Politicians and their functionaries don’t make it any easier by wasting their time and energy playing the man rather than the ball.

(image missing)

“My opponent is obviously wrong because he has a tiny cock, or so I have been told.”

Anyway, having vented my spleen at the venality of debate, some Police stuff.

This Year’s Black Will Be “Lean”

Interesting times ahead because the new piece of commoditised research is the “Lean Principle” approach. We have been here before about 15 years ago when it was branded as “Organisational Change” but it’s basically process mapping and process management again. However this time it is rather more transparently about reducing staff numbers and cutting costs. Lean thinking says that continuous improvement of your processes to eliminate resources wasted will lead to reduction in cost and total number of staff. It really is as bald as that. Sound like more work for fewer cops to me but I may be wrong.

Last time we did this, we stripped out enough “fat” to seriously dent operational resilience in areas like dogs, traffic, armed response, public order and major investigations. Everyone suffered except those departments charged with implementing the many changes involved. I know because I was one of those Vichy Cops. Hopefully things will be a little more measured this time.

Suffice to say that National Police Improvement Agency are busy with the implementation framework (or reform delivery and capability model as they call it). That piece of work doesn’t get done until the metaphorical ship is on the slipway. As the ” Lean” concept has been around since the 1980’s when it was better known as the Toyota model, there should be quite a lot of second hand plans that can be dusted off and used but I am going to hazard a guess that the “reform delivery and capability model” will involve more time, money, laptops, consultants and jollies than you would have ever have thought possible.

The phrases that pay are now

“Empowering front line workers” Thats us that is. I think it might mean a return to discretion. I hope it does.

“Responding immediately to customer requests” Now that’s not fair because it bites hard on empowering the front line workers. “Hell no I won’t go” is not an option, neither is “It can wait.”

“Optimising opportunities” = Saving cash

“Business improvement” See Optimising opportunities

“What success looks like”= What the Home Office and HMIC says success looks like

“Cashable savings (WTF)” See optimising opportunities

If you hear anybody with two pips or more using any of the above phrases, this should be taken as diagnostic of an impending promotion board.

I wonder if we will have to sing the company song at the start of each shift.

Showing No Respect

2009-02-19T12:35:00.000-08:00

So its interview time again. Nothing special, nothing high risk. Its a low end affray that will end up as a high end threatening behaviour and everybody in the room knows it. The main attraction is a bit of a juvenile mouth breather from our local worst estate. Unlikely to ever trouble the far end of the SAT bell curve. Big for his age. In another time his personal limitations would not have been so plainly pointed up for him. In this time,he will be living the gangster dream before his 20’s. I have dialled down the vocabulary to double syllable and frankly, I am bored. Junior isn’t up for saying much of anything, just the odd grunt of yes or no or can’t remember. Who were you with is getting “No comment”

My smugness gets the better of me and so I ask “Do you know what Omerta is?” I get back the fact that it is the Mafia code of silence and its 0-1 to the mouth breather. Against the run of play, due to some sloppy play at the back, the home team are left shaking their heads as the opposition sponge boy rips one into the top corner from 40 yards.

What sort of life has Junior been living that he struggles to read and write, but has a working knowledge of organised crime? I guess you tend to learn things that are useful and important to you.

Close Up 15/02/2009

2009-02-15T06:02:00.000-08:00

Taking a late Sunday night break from crammers and practice questions.

Well welcome back to the handcart. The temptation to down the books and blog has been there a lot this month. So much to choose from.

Home Secretary Klebb is arranging her expense claims in a way that would raise eyebrows amidst the bean counters in Alterdale or Smallmarket. Shocking. Who would have guessed that as she arbitrarily pulled the rug on back-dating our pay rise, she was quietly trousering her own allowances to the max. There’s restraint in public pay for you. Nice to see Ms Klebb stinting herself in the cause of the public purse that she holds so dear. Still I am not bitter. Multiple rules and plastic principles have been the order of the day in the higher reaches of public service for some years now.

The, blow me down if free speech hasn’t just been kneecapped by the self same Home Office as they decide that there just aren’t enough cops to put in the coconut shy of another Israeli Embassy style peaceful protest over Geert Wilders. I can see the flying bottles and placards outside the House of Lords in my minds eye and lines of visi yellow targets. I may have got Geert wrong but rather like the BNP, I think that he is using “Islamic” as shorthand for “brown.” Still, last time I looked, his film “Fitna” was just like one of those carefully constructed BNP leaflets in that it is offensive without being illegal. He was clearly excluded for the pragmatic reason that all hell would be let loose if he was allowed past immigration. That’s not enough, as set out in an enlightening post over at Head of Legal. Maybe it would have been more honest for some of his fiercest critics like Lord Ahmed, Keith Vaz (or Jöran Jermas or Mahmoud Abu Rideh) to have debated Wilders on TV. Likely to have made for viewing of epic tediousness though.

There is now proper news coverage of children having children. I have a nasty feeling that Alfie and Chantelle will become the role models for their generation with instant fame, magazine deals, a phalanx of social workers and a six figure deal with one red top or another to top off the next tranche of benefits. The message is clearly “Have child crazily young, life sorted.” Why couldn’t it have been like that when I was a lad? Maybe because being a 13 year old dad really mucked up your life when I was a lad.

The Sundays have woken up to the fact that A.C.P.O. has a trading arm and is largely funded by the government. Lord preserve us from more Jim Stalker style adverts. Great that it’s all out in the open. It all looks a bit Stasi but if you really want a really scary take on Coppering plc take a look at Avon & Somerset and the wonder that is Southwest One Ltd. Avon & Somerset have basically sold off the civilian back office to a limited company. Reading the quotes from the great and the good about this, I see the unimaginable scenario of a privatised Police Service is getting another step closer. It shouldn’t be too hard to shuffle PCSO’s and all the rest of the extended police family off into Southwest One, Northeast Four or Ruralshire Seven or whatever. After that……….

Colin Port, chief constable of Avon and Somerset Police since Jan 2005, said: “This is a great opportunity for us to save stacks of money change, improve and transform policing….It is imperative that we save a stack of cash deliver services that represent value for money for council tax-payers locally and this joint venture gives us the chance to get me that knighthood and a QPM re-invest in frontline policing and secure the employment of our dedicated police staff.”

The local MP raised concerns in the House of Commons about the whole thing in general and the close involvement of Mrs Fort in particular.

Dr Moira Hamlin, chair of the Avon and Somerset Police Authority, said: “This is far reaching and significant decision as it is the first time any UK police service has joined such a strategic venture. (I am told all will be well but I am just not sure) We are taking this innovative step as we believe it can deliver demonstrable benefits and improvements in police services for local people.(We are really, really not sure but we are desparate not to have to up the council tax for more cops) This Police authority has vowed to explore wider options and drive out efficiencies (sic) without losing valued employees.”

Richard Jones, chief executive of Southwest One, said: “I am delighted at this opportunity to trouser a small fortune to welcome the Avon and Somerset Police Authority as a founding member to the Southwest One joint venture. We are very much looking forward to ripping the arse out of those straw chewing suckers working together with the Police to improve the already excellent services that they provide. This is a unique opportunity to maximise shareholder value share best practice and world class expertise between the police, Somerset County Council, Taunton Deane Council and IBM to deliver cheaper world class services to our customers in the Southwest over the next 10 years.”

Not the first wacky idea in that part of the South West on CC Port’s watch either as a quick flick through Wikipedia shows. In 2006 the force admitted it had contravened the Sex Discrimination and Race Relations Act when it deselected 186 white male candidates from its recruitment process solely because of their gender and sex. Ralph Welsman, one of those discriminated against, sued the constabulary for their breach of employment laws and he received compensation in an out of court settlement. Mr Port said “It was not, and has never been, our intention to discriminate against anyone who applies for a position with Avon and Somerset Constabulary. At the time we considered that this represented an untried and untested area.” Oh well. that makes it OK to discriminate on race grounds then boss.

The policy has since been scrapped.

Sometimes I despair.

Still, look on the bright side, from Monday I don’t need to worry about my profile in closeup anymore.

Overs 23/01/2009

2009-01-23T06:02:00.000-08:00

And I wonder, How long can I delay?

We’re just a habit Like saccharin.

And I’m habitually feelin’ kinda blue.

But each time I try on the thought of leaving you,

I stop…I stop and think it over.

Paul Simon “Overs”

You will no doubt have noticed that the gaps between posts have been getting longer as the Sergeants exams approach. Sure enough between the studying and some mildly beserk workloads, blogging has come in a distant 4th, maybe 5th in my life. That’s not all though. As I read back over the 11 months I have been posting here, there really isn’t much that I have not got off my chest. Should there be any doubt….

There are “communities” where amoral, criminal and antisocial behaviour is the norm. No amount of money or social intervention has ever sorted them out. No amount of policing has ever sorted them out either. At least we were not enabling the Evil Poor life. Now I am not so sure.
NCRS is a bad thing. If we are forced to abandon common sense and discretion to treat all crime complaints as equally valid then we will fail to be effective within society. If the government want us to inspire confidence, they might want to consider that public confidence is more likely to be engendered by a service that doesn’t come over as a machine bureaucracy staffed by unthinking automata reading from a three ring binder. -AS A CONSEQUENCE-
I am absolutely sure that we, the Police, have found that prosecuting “Decent Folk” is easier than going after the “Evil Poor” and just as countable and valid for the bean counters. We are increasingly following a path of least resistance. Policing is going to be just another business before we know it with a product consisting largely of cautions and the detection of miserable non crimes. We need to get back to using local knowledge and discretion before we stop being citizens in uniform and become just another imposition of the State.
A decade of reforms in the Criminal Justice System has found new and unexpected ways to inflict injustice on victims and by extension all of us. There is a pretence within the system that non-custodial sentences for recidivists are worth more than spit in the rain. There is no golden bullet of reforming criminals. If getting caught a few times doesn’t straighten them out, it’s time for containment. -HOWEVER-
The various daft early release mechanisms have managed to encourage the guilty to waste court time and money right up to the court door and to dilute any punishment element in custodial sentences to the point where people stop believing that Criminal Courts are providing justice. Once that happens, and I think the ball is rolling, we are closer to the angry mob model of justice. -MEANWHILE-
The Home Office / ACPO agenda for “Workforce Modernisation” is ratcheting us towards a three (or more tier) system with a target of providing cheaper policing with better accounting and audit systems rather than more effective policing. As we are being made more and more like a commercial business, I foresee privatisation of huge swathes of policing function. The “logic ” will become inescapable. In 15 years I have seen the civilianisation of communications, the privatisation of custody offices and the part civilianisation / privatisation of CID. Bought in high visibility, non-interventionist patrol is not far off. We have PCSO’s at the moment but once G4S or similar can offer the same but cheaper…….
Government (of any current flavour choice) will not rest until they have firmly embedded Party Political control into Police management. We are historically apolitical for good reason. Our independence from political direction, already somewhat shakey, will wither and die if the government get there way in this area. I have no desire to work for the Stasi.
There is no power in setting Police priorities stronger than a single issue pressure group with media access.
There is no power in Policing more effective than a locally known, local officer policing their own community over the long term.
There is an element within the criminal defence community that takes the piss.
For all that I “whine elegantly” (c. Hibbo) about my job, Policing is the best gig in town and to be allowed to do what I do, for pay, is a privilege. I have always wanted to be a detective. Now I am a detective.

In March, I expect to be back with free times two or three days in each week providing an opportunity to blog. I don’t know if I can be as prolific. I am definitely running out of “Only 24 hrs” stories that will not clearly identify me. I expect that between the Home Office, The Law Society, MiniJust, Social Workers and the Bar Council, there will be sufficient new idiocies for me to rail against.

Mrs Night thinks I should write a work of pure fiction in a police procedural vein. Maybe that’s what I should do and publish it chapter at a time on-line. I don’t know.

Anyway, over the next month or so I am sure there will be some sporadic posting but mostly, my head will be in the books.

Take care everyone

It Goes On 14/01/2009

2009-01-14T06:00:00.000-08:00

Who said the following at a barristers’ conference in London during October 2005 in a speech that was critical of the use of video evidence in the court? This speaker believed very strongly that the victim should give their evidence in person to a jury. This speaker was very wary of video link evidence because it might prevent the jury from properly assessing the witness by having the witness present and in front of them.

‘There’s nothing more effective than for a victim to say to a jury, “Look at me, this is what happened.”

In January 2009 when the same lawyer, sitting as a judge, heard victim identification evidence given in person, clearly and honestly did he

a) Marvel at the effectiveness

b)Kick out the case because this particular victim saying to the jury “Look at me, this is what happened” was a bit too effective for his tastes?

Anybody with half an eye on the papers over the last day or two will know the answer is b)

Come on down Judge James Patrick (call me Jamie) Tabor QC. Yes you have to ensure that the interests of justice are served in your court but surely you left it a bit late in the day to snatch justice away from the victim. I get it that you thought that the prosecution evidence was weak and that as a result, you concluded that the jury could not be trusted to sort out the case on it’s merits. I get it that the defendant was a typical Adibok waster (He has a Bebo site which is expectedly depressing). I get it that the jury hung on the victim’s every word and short of waving placards saying “Send Him Down” it was obvious to anyone with any court experience that Adibok boy was indeed going down after a 30 minute deliberation over a cuppa and biscuits. What I don’t get is how things got as far as they did before you killed the case.

I am guessing that beyond the fact that the witness picked out the defendant as having robbed her, the prosecution didn’t have a lot more in the locker. Yet there must have been enough evidence to start the case, there was certainly enough to call the witness and hear her evidence. There seems to have been enough for the defence not to have bothered with any applications before the case got underway. You had the discretion to kill the case by ordering it to lie on file or just kicking it out before swearing a jury and standing witnesses in the witness box. The case did get started though, the witness did get heard and yet with hindsight, there was never any point to any of it was there?

Would you have kept things running if the witness had been a stammering nervous wreck? Was there anything that the victim could have done or said in the witness box to convict the defendant? If not, (and I suspect not) couldn’t you could have saved us all a bit of money and yourself some unhappy headlines by coshing the case early doors.

It seems to me that in Jamie’s world, the jury don’t always get trusted to just listen to the evidence, assess the people in front of them and then decide. In Jamie’s world the jury only get to decide on slam dunks. He has drawn a line that tells me that exactly what identification evidence means to Judges. They don’t like it, they never have and they never will. They want something more than that no matter how certain the witness is. In Judge Jamie’s world the judge is there to make sure that the jury aren’t suckered in by the truth spoken plainly. Going back to the quote right at the start, 2005 feel the power turns to 2009 fear the power. How very barrister like.

So It Goes 13/01/2009

2009-01-13T05:59:00.000-08:00

Membership of the enquiry team that has occupied so much of my time over the last month or so is now resolving into regular partnerships.

Unlike the system so beloved of American detective shows, in my force detectives don’t really have a regular partner. In the first few weeks of the enquiry, the pool of detectives was pretty much thrown into the blender to see what stuck. Each day brought me a different partner. Some I have worked with before over the years and we fell into the easy conversations of evidence speculation and witness assessment.

Detectives on a good running murder enquiry really do spend a lot of transit time speculating on the evidence. What does it mean? What does it tell us? We evolve an constantly shifting “unified field theory” of the crime, always looking to fit each new piece of evidence into the jigsaw without ever having the picture on the box in front of us. Forensics, CCTV clocks and telephones are the fixed points around which everything else begins to coalesce into something like the facts of the case.

As for the witnesses, this is definitely one of those enquiries where almost every time I come away from taking a statement, I have that nagging feeling that every witness has told the truth but maybe not the whole truth. When that happens you can always expect a few unpleasant surprises from the defence nearer trial time. It’s never early with the defence. They always seem to drop the bomb at the last legally justifiable minute. It’s almost like they are scared to tell us as soon as they know because experience leads them to believe that most of the time we can negate the point sufficiently for a jury not to be taken in by it.

With a new partner there is always the “getting to know you” chat in the car between jobs and then the breaking of bread at the canteen. Some will stay and some will go. For a few there will be the never openly referred to shame of being told you are being returned to unit because you are no longer needed on the enquiry. The Senior Investigating Officer will thank them and as they leave, the speculation will start as to whether they are really surplus to requirements or if they have been measured and somehow found wanting.

My new partner, who is now saddled with me until the end of the enquiry is a local detective. Young in service and keen, ink barely dry on his CID qualification its like working with a younger and somewhat more energetic me. At least we didn’t run out of things to talk about over the last few days.

A major bonus with being teamed up with a local is that they always know the way to whichever confusingly numbered cluster of social housing the next witness lives at. It is safe to say that, for the most part, we are operating in territory where each room in every home looks like a still from Sex Lives Of The Potato Men. At every door the cheery refrain is “It’s OK, he doesn’t bite.” Between the dog and the obvious well dried layers of dropped food and drink, every chair invites a careful inspection before you think of sitting down. There is never a clear place to write as every horizontal surface if just clutter so you end up writing on your knee. Then comes the invitation, “Fancy a brew?”

So it goes.

Ozymandias 07/01/2009

2009-01-07T05:59:00.000-08:00

Policing pledges are upon us with all their fake promises of a shining new age of police accountability. Apparently the pledge puts the public hands on the wheel when it comes to what we do. Apparently “It gives residents an unprecedented say over how their communities are policed. It also allows them to hold the police to account if they don’t fulfil their promises.” Really. Lets see how that goes.

Maybe I will try wandering into the Chief Super’s office the first time we fail and make a personal complaint as a concerned local resident. I’m a resident, he’s the boss, I can hold him to account for failing to fulfil his promises. He’s keeping score and setting the targets though so my best guess is that the targets set will be met every time.

Maybe I can go to a public meeting and ask the local CBT to stop my neighbour’s daughter’s current beau parking his Corsa over my drive ever. They had better listen because I’m a resident with an unprecedented say over how my community is policed.

It really is utter and meaningless tosh. Sounds good, means little. We will still be deploying to way too many rubbish jobs because the book says that we have to. We will still have far too many sworn officers doing non policing jobs. We will still be risk assessing everything that moves until we cannot. We will continue to provide a dissproportionate response to anything that looks like a minority with a vocal pressure group and an ear in government. We will continue to blow budget on the self promotional short term vanity projects of ambitious and pushy middle ranks (lollipops, flip-flops, head massages to name but a recent few). Policing pledge or not, the idiocies at the heart of current policing will continue because nobody has seen fit to cut them out. Instead of the surgery we need, we have just been given another pill to swallow. Its another way to blow money on something that will change little and mean even less.

I could rail against it all but I have been in this game too long for that. I’m starting to take the long view. The policing pledge, like every other piece of massive structural reform will pass. Right now, it is a favoured hobby horse at the Home Office. Jacqui Smith is apparently “passionate” about it. Experience leads me to believe that in the think tanks and the Halls of Academe, the next big thing is already finding it’s way into a piece of research that will be commoditised, monetised and then adopted by government. Policing pledges will become old hat and one year, not so long from now, they will be quietly dropped for some new solution promising that ever shimmering mirage of the return to Dixon of Dock Greenism. The old pledge posters will stay on the walls, slowly obliterated by whatever comes next. Look on the walls of most nicks and you will find deep layers of initiative archaeology.

Not Drowning. Still Waving 03/01/2009

2009-01-03T05:57:00.000-08:00

I’ve been pushing it too hard. My stones won’t take.

I get up in the morning but it’s too early to wake

First it’s hello, goodbye, then push and then crash

But we all gonna make it in that million dollar bash.

Well I looked at my watch, I looked at my wrist

I punched myself in the face with my fist

I took my potatoes down to be mashed then I made it on over to the million dollar bash.

Bob Dylan “Million Dollar Bash”

You can but imagine my joy at the 9.30 call this morning that raised me from my first lie in for quite a while. “Sorry Jack” said the boss but we need you back at the office. Mustn’t grumble, it’s a recall to duty but I am already pushing 80 hours overtime for two weeks. I have become the family ghost who comes and goes whilst my house still sleeps. The evidence of my passing is a lonely trail of abandoned coffee cup rings and daily, a new crumpled shirt and socks on the washing pile. I have invested a portion of my overtime in a small violin shaped music box that plays “My Heart Bleeds For You.”

Still in the afternoon today I found time to put on a clown costume and get pelted with those hollow plastic ball pool balls by a small army of hyper excited 6 year olds. Puts the whole murder investigation thing into some sort of perspective.

At least there’s a red tape review going on. Woo-hoo but tell me how you plan to roll back the ever thickening MG files that CPS demand? Oh, what’s that, no can do? The review is just going to tinker with automating stop and search forms. So maybe it will look at reducing the mind numbingly over reliance on written risk assessments and policies for everything. Uh I guess not, we need that audit trail to keep the compensation lawyers and the judicial reviewers off our collective backs and out of our collective pockets. That would explain why I had to wear covert body armour this week to go and speak to a witness, that’s right, a witness, because he had a historical conviction for assault police. Now that is proper, work strangling, resource wasting, investigation slowing red tape. This way to the death of initiative.

By the time it finishes, I will bet my next cup of coffee that Jan Berry will manage to roll back ohh at least 2% of the additional burdens heaped on us over the last 15 years. Actually if Jan manages this she will be doing very well indeed. Me? I just look forward to getting enough time back into my day to make another coffee.

We’re still getting a bit thinner round the edges every day.

Oh and Rogerborg won the poster of the year poll. RogerBorg, email me an address and a small but interesting prize is on it’s way to you.

A Winter Tale 25/12/2008

2008-12-25T05:56:00.000-08:00

Back when I wore the blue suit of truth and drove an antiquated Land Rover round the streets of the Canonrail Estate, I pulled nights on New Years Eve. Not for me the bright lights of Alterdale town centre. Those delights were reserved for the “wham bam in the van” squads cruising slowly on the transits between night spots trying to pick up a fight between chatting to girls through the wound down windows. My job was to patrol the outlying areas mopping up house parties gone wrong, asking folk to “turn it down” so that next door’s baby can sleep, that sort of thing.

Round about 2am New Years Day, the call came through and PC Night was despatched to a report of a disturbance on the Local Authority Traveler Site at Carnley Park. My heart sunk as I turned the big old Lanny through it’s lumbering turning circle and headed off to the land of yappy dogs, rusty propane cylinders and untaxed Transit vans of dubious provenance.

As I arrived, I was met by a posse of traveling types roiling round near the entry gates. “Officer, officer, see what it is, he’s drunk too much, taken drugs as well and (horrified tone) he’s been damaging other peoples caravans.” That’s about as bad as it gets I believe.

So I am ushered into a very pleasant caravan. “Now officer, will you have tea whilst my boys catch him for you? No point you running around, leave it to my boys and we’ll sort it all out for you.” The fresh brewed tea arrives in some rather lovely Spode china cups. “Now will you promise not to hurt him. I don’t want him hurt.” I reply that I am not that kind of cop, there is a cage in the Lanny and if Old Mother O’Reilly wants, someone can even come with me to custody. It’s all about building trust with our minority communities and my incredulity meter is off the dial.

Tea and biscuits later there’s a knock on the caravan door and a voice comes from the darkness “We got him Ma. He was under Daveys van.” I step out to see a young lad being held by half a dozen similar. Then I ask the $64,000 question “What am I locking him up for?” Nobody wants to complain about damage to caravans until Ma pipes up. “Well officer, to tell the truth, if you check, I think there might be some warrants for him in Doncaster and Penrith.” She was right. Big fat white flakes of snow began to fall on us all and I opened up the back door on the Lanny with a smile. Funny how things work out.

Happy Christmas Everyone.

I Shot A Man In Reno 22/12/2008

2008-12-22T05:54:00.000-08:00

It feels like the real violence is getting more filmic or maybe it’s just the film violence getting more real? People are always killing people but some of the jobs lately have a sheen of plagiarism. The offenders have seen the film and now they want to play the game. How much of a beating does it really take to kill someone? Can you really torture somebody to death? How does it feel to really hurt a defenceless person? Is it more fun if there’s a group of you? Can you make a game of it, say find out who can hit the victim hardest? How long does it take to burn through someone’s palm with a blow torch? Does kick boxing work? How loud will a person scream when you set fire to their head? How far can you make another human debase themselves using fear and intimidation alone? All of those questions are being answered on a more regular basis than you would believe.

David got talked into the house somehow. He should never have gone. The occupier was David’s dealer. David had stolen some property from the dealer but had been persuaded by nods and winks that a payment of cash would make things right. David thinks that this payment plan is a better option than spending his life wishing he had eyes in the back of his head and being jumpy.

We will later find that David has been grafting like there is no tomorrow for weeks to get that cash together. No spirits aisle was safe, no bacon display remained unmolested. So here he is at the door with the wad of dealer gelt in his front pockets. “Come in Dave” “Come in the kitchen Dave” “Thank’s for the cash Dave.”

Then comes the blast of pepper spray to Dave’s eyes. There’s just the dealer and three friends. With a seasonal Leonard Cohen echo, David is taped to a kitchen chair and they wind tape round his face. From then on, it is an escalation of slaps, punches, kicks, then blunt instruments of ever increasing heaviness from kitchen cup to iron. There is a break whilst everyone leaves and Dave is pushed onto the floor, still strapped to the chair. The assailants play a little Play Station in the front room, some of them go out to buy some more drink and fags. Then they all go out to the small town club in Alterdale where witnesses will comment that they were all really “buzzing.” Dave’s money goes on pills and more drinks. It’s Party Time and there’s Dave round 2 to look forward to afterwards. Back on the kitchen floor, Dave isn’t coming round, Dave isn’t even breathing so well. Both arms broken, nose, eye sockets, cheek all broken. Bleeding inside and out.

By the time dealer and his boys bring the inevitable slack jawed giggling girls back to watch them prove themselves the masters of Dave, things are not so good. In films, the victim doesn’t usually vomit and aspirate. In films you can beat someone into a bloody pulp but they are generally OK in the end. In films, you don’t come back to find your victim beyond death’s door. Cutting Dave free and sending him naked, bruised, bloody and broken stumbling for home isn’t going to work anymore. It’s not funny any more. It’s time to wrap the body in a rug and chuck it away. Then it’s time to set fire to the house. That won’t save you from the cops but no harm in trying and no harm blaming each other from the dock in a classic multiple cut-throat defence either. Throughout the Court procedure, Dealer and his boys will keep the dead eyed faces up, not in some show of bravado, but because behind the eyes, there just isn’t anything alive.

Our current crop of jobs are nothing like Dave in detail, Dave was years ago but there are similarities in the casual and group nature of the violence. We now need a new yard for all the extra Mondeos.

Me? I have been living at work between short sleeps for too many days now. Even days off like today are just a chance to grab enough rest to knock my body clock back to “a bit weary”. The flu thing is still with me in the background, waiting for me to get run down enough for it to get better traction. I have a feeling that the shingles is preparing for a encore as well. I keep my trust in Beechams, coffee and those I love.

There are some souless wastes of skin out there and they do seem to have been extra busy this year.

Backwards to Christmas 18/12/2008

2008-12-18T05:52:00.000-08:00

In a volte-face of unsurprising banality, Mistress Klebb has rather noisily postponed her plans to have some members of the Police Authorities directly elected. This was one of her “make the police more accountable” proposals that seemed to be about making us more beholden to some political control or other. Now for me, anything that starts putting more politicians in our command chain or grafts them further into the decision tree is going to be a bad thing, a very, very bad thing indeed. She has apparently despatched the Blind Buffoon with a bucket of ice to think hard thoughts about police accountability for the next manifesto. That is something I look forward to.

As it stands the Police Authorities are a mixture of local council politicians (who are meant to reflect the local political mix already) and some independents. The Independents get a 4 year term, the politicians maybe a year and they kep getting shuffled to keep them reflecting the political mix across the force.

Anyway, with a view to helping Sheffield Brightside’s leading member of Father’s For Justice, I have a few thoughts on increasing Police accountability. I mean real accountability not the accountability that flows from those decreasingly attended Police and Community Forums. From the hard plastic seats of those drafty community centre excercises in lame engagement comes a predictable litany

1. Stop people parking in my space

2. Stop dog shit

3. Curfew children

Nor am I talking about the ersatz accountability of the Customer Satisfaction Unit. That’s just a sort of management by fear. Do the Cops generally come to your door with good news? Do we generally leave smiles and warm happy vibes in our wake? Not really in the nature of the job is it. So in what world is there sense in spending policing pounds ringing people up to ask how they enjoyed the experience of reporting their burglary. It’s a call centre solution to a problem that we don’t have. A gratuitous waste of time and money all round. Stop it before the departments start growing and sucking up any more resources.

I am not talking about the accountability that comes from having ACPO ranks that bend and shake to the strident demands and pronouncements of various single issue pressure groups. Engage them in debate by all means bosses but don’t just lie there, take it and then stick us with the results. You are by and large well educated and bright men and women with thoughts, opinions and in some cases really impressive practical policing experience. Argue the corner for Policing.

Firstly, last time I looked accountability means that people are entitled to ask us to account for what we have done. It is the ability to demand an account. There are a lot of people that can do that already. Courts, IPCC, Police Authorities, Lord Scarman, Uncle Albert, Klebby, HMIC, Audit Commission, local politicians, the press, many of our “partner agencies.” There is a mighty line of folks who could potentially call us to account already in place. There may actually be enough big top end accountability in place already. Voting in a few local party bright young things will not bring anything new or better to the party.

I think we lost all prospect of real local accountability round about the time that patrol cars became the norm. Can’t do the job without them now. Most forces have adopted central custody units that mean we can’t go back to every town having a station with cells. Most officers now drive to work. We don’t seem to be recruiting many people who want to serve in the area they live in and work a beat for a good enough chunk of years that they become part of the local fabric. There are some, I can think of a few in my own force and they are massively effective in that old fashioned “police as local sheriff” type way but they are a dying breed.

Competition Time 16/12/08

2008-12-16T07:21:00.000-08:00

Between a dose of full blown chick flu, you know the real debilitating bone deep stuff and a massive influx of Mondeos on the front yard, there’s been precious little studying going on and absolutely no blogging.

Anyway, I have a Christmas Competition. There are lots of regular commentators to the blog, for the one who garners the most votes from the readership, I have a small but massively ironic prize type item. So errrm vote away and may the best poster win

Back as soon as the influenza virus, the OSPRE syllabus and the demands of duty allow. Write ins allowed. If I have missed someone obvious, let me know, the poll can always be added to.

Wishing you all a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

The Smoke Goes Up The Chimney Just The Same 08/12/08

2008-12-08T07:21:00.000-08:00

So I am sitting in the Matron’s office in the big hospital in Alterdale. We are talking evidence continuity. Whilst I wait at the desk, I am looking over the rotas for Ressus and Major Injury, noting some people pulling double shifts, listening to the banter around me that indicates people working hard under pressure in a difficult job. It’s a lot like home.

I know that when someone very badly hurt gets dropped off in his department, they do all the clothes off, blood sample stuff at light speed and worry about the paperwork later. The cops will pick up the clothes and will gather in what is left of the blood samples. Eventually someone will ask, where did those clothes come from? Which member of the hospital staff handed it to the cop? The truth in this case is that for the clothes nobody really remembers or knows anymore and the person I need to speak to about the blood is on nights. It’s not ideal but we’ll get over it. I know and Matron knows that the main business that night months ago was done right and someone didn’t die when they had injuries that should have killed them.

Matron and I have been missing each other on phone calls all last week. Today we have found a 10 minutes on his schedule to speak and we are sat in his office with the door closed having a frank, open but friendly discussion about how very busy things were. I’m guessing that Matron is operating at Response Inspector level. That’s about the size of the team. He has the look of a man who works too long and too hard.

Suddenly a knock on the door, rapid and urgent and in barges an obvious member of non clinical middle management. No “Hello, who are you?” to the cop in the visitor chair. No niceties, no politeness just a nasty flat, whiney voice saying

“Matron. I’ve just searched all over your department and I can’t see the Patients Charter Cleaning Pledge posters anywhere. Where are they? I have looked everywhere and I expected you to have them displayed by now.”

Matron has a cooler head than me. Showing self control beyond heroic, he says “Sorry, I have given them out. I’ll check where they are later if that’s OK” only to get back the parting shot of “Well I do hope so. It’s important that you get those posters displayed. It’s the Patients Charter.”

The busy bodying oxygen thief departs and there is that uncomfortable silence between Matron and me until he breaks it, breathing in deeply, looking up from his desk and straightening his shoulders.

“Not one bean left uncounted. (sigh..pause) Sorry. Anyway, for the bloods you need Dr Singh, she’s on duty tonight, this is her number……..”

As the man said, not one bean left uncounted. Not knowingly anyway.

Reviewing The Situation 07/12/08

2008-12-07T07:25:00.000-08:00

Reading this fine Inspector Gadget post took me back to an indicative occurrence from about 12 years ago. It started with a report of theft of a CD player. I was still driving the old Land Rover with the bosun lights and a prisoner cage in the back. It was my old beat the Cannonrail Estate, that blighted outlier of the division. Even today it is warren of dirty yellow brick terraces and maisonettes although about half of it has been demolished now having degenerated into an irrevocable slum in less than 30 years.

I arrived to find a single female claimant aggrieved party alleging that somebody else’s 7 year old daughter had run in the open back door and nicked a portable CD player from the kitchen. As I sat there in the front room with the kids running around, I couldn’t help but notice a suspicious looking lump of stuff on the kitchen floor under a duvet cover. It wasn’t the usual pile of unwashed clothing or weeping, overstuffed bin liners. No, this pile had all the angles, corners, and blockiness of a rapidly concealed pile of someone else’s household electrical goods. I’m thinking “surely not” but sure as her undeclared co-habitant is one of our more active burglars, she does indeed have a pile of apparently looted stuff in the kitchen and it has been cunningly disguised with the statutory and inevitable Playboy bunny duvet cover.

Fair’s fair and she took her lumps. When reinforcements arrived justice was done, of a sort, and she was locked up. Her mum turned up to give us grief and watch the kids. Normal run of the mill behaviour that boiled down looking after some neighbour’s stuff for a bit whilst they tried to scam the insurance and us for a burglary claim.

Those of you with a Crime Management Unit state of mind may have spotted an un-investigated allegation back around the start there. Sure enough some hours later, together with a female colleague, I arrived at the alleged new home of the CD player. There it was, in the main bedroom, as described with “Bangin’ Trance 96″ or whatever still in the slot. Mummy coughed the job and signed the pocket book. In the absence of any father, another granny was summoned to hug the child whilst swearing and cursing at us about how we were traumatising the little girl by locking up mummy. Mummy was cuffed and put in the back of the Land Rover. I spoke reassurance to Granny at the front door as her concerns had turned to how long she would have to look after the child. Suddenly the Lanny started shaking and the sounds of incoherent rage begin to issue from within. I jumped into the drivers seat and the Mum has turned into a screaming banshee. She is damaging her handcuffed hands trying to get through the steel mesh grille at my colleague. There is real violence her scrwed up hate blinded eyes. There will be an interesting cage extraction.

“What did you say?

“Just three words Jack, Kid In Care“

“Yeah that’ll do it every time.”

You see no matter how bad the parents are, no matter how little good they do in their children’s lives, the experience of being made to look in that particular mirror is nigh certain to send them into blind rage. It’s as if somebody has been somehow validating them, slipping them unwarranted praise all their parenting lives rather than telling the truth. So perhaps being fronted with the fact that their child rearing skills are lacking comes as a horrible surprise. I am sure that this Mum loves her daughter even as she sends her up the street to steal. She may even have a “Worlds Best Mum” mug to prove it. I am sure the child loves the mother as she grows up in an atmosphere likely to ensure that she is another unemployed, thieving drone. Maybe over the years the daughter has transcended it all and is now at University studying medicine or poetry or something. Maybe but I wouldn’t bet this cup of coffee on it.

Course the child never did get taken into care. They never do and faginning your own kid, well that’s not so bad is it? Ask a Social Worker.

Pop Quiz 05/12/08

2008-12-05T07:13:00.000-08:00

1. Do you look upon cola and crisps as

a) Snack stuff. But I worry about my weight.
b) Some of the devil foods produced by the global capitalist conspiracy to keep the noble poor down.
c) Little Tasha’s tea

2. In the evening do you
a) Eat a meal with friends or family, take the dog for a walk, watch the news that sort of stuff
b) Chair meetings at the local branch of Concerned Activists From Somewhere Else Against Stuff
c) Park yourself on the sofa watching Sky on the 52″ plasma screen, chugging tins of lager and smoking industrial quantities of weed whilst the kids play Nintendo and have banging tunes hammering out of every window until 2am every night.

3. How do you get on with recycling
a) I try to get it in all sorted into the coloured bins but sometimes I fail. Sometimes I worry this will get me prosecuted.
b) I demand that the local supermarket accepts all the wasteful packaging that they wrap around their unfair trade produce. There is no waste at our house. I live on bruised fruit and lentils.
c) I stick it all in the garden innit, all ov it. Once the weeds get high enough, who’s gonna notice.

4. Why did you have children
a) We love each other, we have a good relationship, that’s what couples do.
b) Children? Oh I don’t have any of my own.
c) Well Tiffany, she got me first flat, then Charmaine well it was just a fling like but you know. Havin little Martyn got me the house and what wiv them all having ADHD and asthma I can’t afford to go to do no work. I’m disabled anyway, I can’t go outside. What is it? errrm errrrm claustrophobia or summit. I luv mi kids me.

5. How is your reading
a) I can read this. I can read most things. However I can’t read the papers these days without getting angry.
b) I can’t believe I am reading this right wing fascist drivel. Where do I go to complain. Oh and you’re also racist and sexist.
c) This is being read to me by one of me Social Workers. I never needed to learn nuffin and anyway school woz a waste of me time. I get paid my wages off the soshe anyway. There is an entitlement officer to help me with the paperwork. Working is for mugs. I claim everything. That’s my right. You got no right to judge me. Only god can judge me so you cant. It sez. Really.

6. What sort of car do you drive
a) Just a car, nothing special. Sometimes I worry that I’ll get speeding points for doing 34 in a 30 zone. I have 3 points already.
b) I don’t drive. Drivers are killing Gaia. I walk, cycle or take public transport everywhere except when I am off to the villa in Tuscany when I fly.
c) I take taxis me, everywhere, all the time. Its my right as well. On my kids lives.

7. What sort of house do you live in
a) Just a house, you know. Sometimes I worry about paying the mortgage. We both work. Maybe I need to get a second job.
b) I have a nice flat in Islington and of course the summer home in Tuscany.
c) Its a 4 bedroomed council house but they have to knock through to next door now to make it bigger cos now my Tiffany is pregnant again. Its amazing being a Grandma at my age. I’m shaggin Tiff’s ex boyfreind but don’t tell her.

8. How much do you care about things
a) Well, you know, there are some things I really care about. Other stuff I’m not really bothered.
b) I am deeply committed to obtaining and keeping our three star excellence in child care provision and I eagerly await the next Ofsted audit. Everything in my caring job is on an ever ascending and shining path of newer, better and cheaper.
c) Care? Care? wossat, u takin mi kids in2 care. Noway u slag. Geddout of mi howse b4 i kill you. I love mi kids.

9. How did you name your children
a) You know, family names, names we both liked.
b) Children? Oh I don’t have any of my own. I do have a nephew called Martin.
c) Got some kewl namez owt ov Heat and watchin Jeremy Kyle on Sky.

10. Do you have pets?
a) Yes, a dog, a cat that sort of things.
b) No. So called pet animals are just another form of slavery. Let the animals be free.
c) Meet Tyson. Nah don’t pet him, he proper ripped up my Health Visitor last week hahahaha

11. What are your ambitions for your children?
a) Just, you know, for them to be happy.
b) Look, for the third time, I have made the lifestyle choice not to have children. My nephew Martin should grow up to be a Human Rights Lawyer and fight injustice and oppression
c) For them to be famous and rich and all that. Celebs. Or lottery winners. Or maybe models or summit.

12. How do you feel about the police?
a) I want to believe they are there to preserve life and the peace, catch criminals and investigate crime. The way things are, I’m not so sure.
b) Fascist bully boys. They actually cause all the problems by picking on people with challenging lifestyles. What the world really needs is more interventions from social workers.
c) Bizzies. Not a problem. No comment. My brief gets me off and if not, its a community punishment or a fine out of my soshe hahahahaha

Mostly a) You are decent folk. You need to read this survival guide

Mostly b) You are a social worker. Get a proper job.

Mostly c) You are Evil Poor. You should know that people are getting fed up of paying for you.

Q.E.D

2008-12-04T06:15:00.000-08:00

No post for quite a few days. I’ve been busy. That’s the way it is. Feast or famine.

There are some folks that probably would not believe a word that I say about the Evil Poor even now. Most people have absolutely no idea. These people have held an absolutely wrong idea about the dignity and nobility of the estates. The noble poor are a beloved social worker fiction believed only by those who have never had to work somewhere like Dewsbury. Below is some classic middle class guilt tripping. It’s as if it is our fault that this Mommy Dearest saw her little daughter as a route to more free cash in one lump than she could ever get by bearing children. She bore them, but she could not raise them.

Poor little Shannon Matthews. Too poor for us to care that she is lost?
Andrew Norfolk in The Times

Her family may seem feckless. Neighbours can’t afford to run a PR campaign. How the public spotlight faded on missing girl. Sarah Payne, smiling in her school uniform; Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman, in their Manchester United shirts; Madeleine McCann, staring inquisitively with her distinctive bleeding iris
When Shannon Matthews vanished after leaving her primary school, there was an initial flurry of attention on the impoverished council estate in Dewsbury, West Yorkshire, where she lived. West Yorkshire Police knew that they were dealing with a potential case of child abduction and threw unprecedented resources into their search. As the community pulled together, the satellite vans of the national media arrived on the hillside streets of Dewsbury Moor and for a few days Shannon’s name featured prominently on newspaper billboards. But no longer. The search for a vanished innocent continues but Britain seems to have lost interest. This week the hunt appeared to have been classed as less newsworthy than the most minor developments in the search for Madeleine McCann, who disappeared nine months ago.

Is Shannon — a shy, timid, gentle girl — somehow deemed less worthy of our concern? Dewsbury Moor is no Home Counties idyll, nor is it a Portuguese holiday resort. It is “up North”, it is a bleak mix of pebbledash council blocks and neglected wasteland, and it is populated by some people capable of confirming the worst stereotype and prejudice of the white underclass. Karen Matthews, Shannon’s mother, has seven childen by five fathers. Shannon was thought locally to have a twin brother who lived with their natural father. It emerged this week that the two children were born a year apart. Their mother called them twins merely because they had the same father. When a female relative was giving interviews about the missing child on the day after Shannon disappeared, her husband loudly reminded her to charge “a fiver for a feel” \, then roared with laughter at his own wit.

The community has done its best to support the family and to raise awareness of the missing girl, but locals have neither the resources nor the know-how to operate the sort of slick publicity machine that has kept other missing-child cases in the spotlight. Contrast the media-savvy McCann campaign with the brave efforts of Petra Jamieson, 30, a friend of Shannon’s mother, who managed to persuade her local branch of Asda to donate 24 white T-shirts on which the girl’s photograph had been printed.

Most of the houses on Shannon’s road carry the poster in their front windows but one’s attention is all too easily distracted by the rubbish-strewn gardens, the smashed windows, the discarded broken toys. Some neighbours are distraught but others seem only too ready to treat the drama of a missing child as a sort of exciting game that has relieved the monotony of life on the poverty line.

A deprived background, a dysfunctional family and a down-on-its-luck Yorkshire mill town: none of this is Shannon Matthews’s fault, yet it seems that she is paying the price.

No longer newsworthy?

What makes one missing child stay in the media and public imagination while another does not - is it something to do with class?

Helen Carter in The Guardian

Pity poor little Shannon Matthews. After an initial flurry of publicity following her disappearance from school 18 days ago, she has fallen off the front pages and the media have moved on to other stories. Her mother is not photogenic and is clearly from a poor white background. Karen Matthews, who is 32 and has seven children with five different fathers, lives on the rough Dewsbury Moor estate.

But is Shannon any less worthy of our attention? I think not. Unfortunately, the harsh reality is that there is an inherent snobbery about Shannon and her family. They have little money, are not articulate, or middle class and attractive and they can’t afford to run a slick PR campaign to keep the public spotlight on their missing daughter. They have been limited to printing 24 large white T-shirts in their local branch of Asda with her face on them and making televised appeals. OK, so the Sun newspaper has put up a £20,000 reward to find her, but this is small fry compared with the millions of pounds which were raised for the likes of missing Madeleine McCann. Dewsbury Moor is no home counties idyll, nor is it a Portuguese holiday resort. It is “up north” - a bleak mix of council blocks and neglected wasteland populated by some people capable of confirming the worst stereotype and prejudice of the white underclass.

But just because Shannon lives in this environment is she any less worth of our sympathy than a child of articulate, wealthy and middle-class parents? Shannon’s mother said on GMTV yesterday that she believes she is still alive. “Wherever she is, she’s going to be frightened,” she said. “It’s just breaking everyone’s heart in the street. They just want her back as a normal child would be in her own environment. I don’t think she has run away. I think something sinister has happened. I’m convinced she’s still alive. I know she is.” Her partner Craig Meehan said he is taking no notice of fingers being pointed at him - which have implied that he has been somehow involved in Shannon’s disappearance. “I see her as my own daughter,” he said. “We get on brilliant. I just want her back.”

However, it is not looking promising that Shannon is alive, with no sightings since she disappeared.

I hope that Shannon is found safe and well but there is a sense of inevitably as every day passes that she will have come to some harm.

Missing children and the media: The wrong kind of family?

Cahal Milmo in The Independent

For 23 days since her daughter went missing, Karen Matthews has answered questions. Some, such as whether she can identify discarded items of clothing and toys found near her home on an impoverished estate in West Yorkshire, are distressingly necessary parts of a huge police effort to find nine-year-old Shannon.

There is growing disquiet that other questions, posed by the media, have gone far beyond necessity and lifted the lid on an uncomfortable hypocrisy in British society. Yesterday, Ms Matthews, 32, and her partner, Craig Meehan, gave an interview to BBC Radio 4’s Today programme about how they have coped during the three-week hunt for the missing schoolgirl.

Some 90 seconds into the interview, the presenter, Sarah Montague, sought to clarify why it was possible Shannon could have been unhappy and run away from the family home on the Dewsbury Moor council estate – a ramshackle but robustly proud community that even the local vicar describes as “an area of acute social deprivation”.

Ms Montague said: “Perhaps we should explain. It’s a slightly complicated family picture you have, isn’t it? You’ve got seven children, by six fathers?”

A rising intonation on the last two words of the question betrayed a degree of uncertainty on the part of the interviewer. Ms Matthews, a woman who her friends say has barely slept for the last three weeks and spends a part of every day in uncontrollable tears, could conceivably have answered in a number of ways. She might have asked what relevance such an inquiry had to the hunt for her daughter, who disappeared on the afternoon of 19 February while making her way home from a school swimming lesson. Incredulity, anger or a resigned silence may also have been expected.

Campaigners yesterday said that the tone – and dwindling quantity – of the coverage devoted to the hunt for Shannon betrays an ugly double standard and class prejudice in the media and society about how Britons respond to the grief and public distress of a family going through the grim limbo of a missing child. As one newspaper columnist put it: I wonder if our media aren’t just reacting to an unspoken mood in the country, a feeling that a woman who has seven kids by five different men and who isn’t living with any of them, must be a pretty dire mother and so must bear some of the responsibility for her missing daughter.

Lyn Costello, co-founder of Mothers Against Murder and Aggression (Mamaa), which campaigns on behalf of victims of violence, said: “It is a truth that few people want to admit to but the amount of publicity and sympathy you get if you are the victim of a terrible crime in this country depends on your social status. The question asked of Karen Matthews about the numbers of her children and their fathers is very typical. How is that in any sense relevant to what has happened to Shannon?

That interview was making a judgement on her as a mother and the way she lives her life. The media is vital at a time when a child goes missing but its values are skewed. If you lose a child and fit the profile of a nice middle-class family then the response is overwhelming.

“The case of Shannon shows it is somehow socially unacceptable to live in a council house and it is permitted to openly ask whether your partner did it. Whatever happened to being innocent until proven guilty? As a society, we are too quick to leap to judgements on people at a time of incredible distress.”

In the language of the chat rooms “Yeah, yeah, sure, sure, whatever.”

Now I Know

2008-11-27T07:46:00.000-08:00

Just a very quick post. Its late and bed beckons but I couldnt let this one go.

For this and a few other reasons, I am now pretty sure that although I did not join the Stasi, we are in fact being used as such by politicians looking to settle grudges just like the Evil Poor on the Cannonrail Estate. On the emerging facts of the arrest of the shadow immigration minister, this feels like one of those pointless, petty and spiteful My exes new partners mate has been harassing me by text situations. Jacqui Klebb (our boss) has been getting a lot of embarassing flack from some leaks to the Tories. Cut to an unwelcome but deeply persuasive phone call or meeting in person for some compliant A.C.P.O. rank with orders to pull the pin on the leaker on the benches opposite. Next thing you know 9 of our finest are knocking on the poor political bastards door, carting him off for interview and searching his home and offices.

Maybe Im wrong and maybe this Tory politician has done some act to strike at the fundamentals of our parliamentary democracy. I suspect it is nothing that Jacqui and every other politician are not bang at 24/7.

Political dialogue and debate has gone all to hell. Guess its time to polish up the Only following orders routines.

Update 28/11/08

The Prime Minister has said that it was purely a police matter and that ministers had not been involved.

I had no prior knowledge, the Home Secretary had no prior knowledge, I know of no other minister who had any prior knowledge. I knew about it only after it had happened when I was told by the Permanent Secretary to the Civil Service that this had happened.As I said to him, this is a matter for the police, they are carrying out an investigation. It is not a matter for Government ministers. The independence of the police is what should be upheld. I hope that everybody can feel able to uphold both the independence of the police and the statement that no minister was involved.

Curiouser and curiouser. I am looking for the weasel words in this but it seems to me that the Prime Minister is plainly asserting that

a) He was not in the know about the impending arrest and search operation

b) He doesnt think any of his ministers knew about it. In particular Jacqui Klebb didnt know.

c) He isnt saying that the civil service or special advisors were not in the know.

Much as it would be fun to continue seeing this as a Labour Party instigated nobbling job over the leaking of bad news by a political opponent, unless the Prime Minister is telling fibs live on TV, it begins to look like some of my colleagues have just taken on an enquiry on a find the mole basis and are now busy chasing down the evidence chain. The prior informing of David Cameron and Boris Johnson is still a tricky loose end though. Why were they told and the government kept in the dark? Perhaps somebody in government was informed, just not a minister. The complaint to police comes in from the Cabinet Office and then day to day liaison with the victim is carried out at Senior Police to Senior Civil Servant level.

I would be astounded if the leak enquiry is also not heavily informed by close and regular liaison with the Crown Prosecution Service. If it was my enquiry, I would want a CPS lawyer on standby and briefed into the enquiry from day one.

Thinking aloud, were Section 8 PACE warrants got and if not, why. If they were got, they have been subject to some judicial scrutiny in that information will have been supplied as to why the warrant was needed and what evidence / investigation / information backed up the application.

Anyway, looks like Jacqui Klebb can be suspected of, at worst, arranging to have the source of embarassing leaks in her department silenced and putting a chill on those who would publicise embarassing news about the Home Office. Sorry to have ever suggested that the Home Office, or indeed any arm of government would put the arm on the cops with political motivation. The leaking of bad news stories about the government is clearly a bad thing and not something that politicians busy saving the country from a serious global economic disaster and the threat of international terrorism should ever have to worry about. It is clearly time for all this leaking to stop so that the government can get on with the job of helping hard working families and ensuring British jobs for British workers. It is now clear to me that the arrest of an MP for receiving leaked documents is likely to be necessary and proportionate as such leaking is an unacceptable threat to our democratic way of life.

From The Independent 1994

THE all-embracing nature of the Governments root-and- branch review of the £80bn-a- year social security system was confirmed yesterday by a Whitehall paper leaked to Gordon Brown, the shadow Chancellor. Child benefit, the basic state pension, unemployment benefit, sick pay and industrial injuries were targeted in Review of Social Security: Second Stage, which sets out the terms of reference for working groups to investigate seven strands of the review set in train last year.

You Did What?…..How? 23/11/08

2008-11-23T07:08:00.000-08:00

What sort of guidance is it that 17 Police Forces can errrm misinterpret badly enough to entirely pooch the reliability of the serious assault stats? I ask, because where I work we spend a lot of time and money to get the stats right. We deploy a Sergeant and four with a couple of civilians in getting this stuff right in every division. Thats right, enough bodies to police a small town for eight hours spends eight 9 til 5 hours every weekday tending to the crime stats. Throughout the Force we employ enough Sergeants and Constables on shuffling crime stats to police one of our small towns full time with enough left over for a CID team. I am guessing it is the same for most Forces but it may be that we are particularly wasteful or maybe we are efficient. Maybe it is something that needs mmmm benchmarking to ensure Best Value. I digress.

The Sergeant has to be a 12th dan black belt at Home Office Counting Rules and Crime Classification. No sarcasm intended there, some officers have made a career out of absolutely understanding the arcana in this area. Somebody has to do it. Those returns don’t fill themselves in and if you left it to the officers on the street, there would be all kinds of missed detections and failures to properly record and report crimes and minority hate incidents. That won’t do. The team behind the Sergeants are also pretty good at their narrow remit.They sit in their spacious offices with the expensive high tech seating that Health & Safety mandate for the chronically shiny of arse. Their main stress of the day seems to be waiting to get to the front of the lunch time queue. Despite this, I say again, they know their stuff.

When a system gets so complex that enough Cops to staff Smallmarket, all puzzling things out together can’t understand the guidance on recording really serious crime, that tells me that the guidance is badly written and the system has become insanely complicated. It is starting to resemble the clues on that old quiz show 3-2-1* Show me how government policy and practice in this area has been anything other than ensuring that no 2 years crime figures are properly comparable and I will (and I never make this offer lightly) come to your nick and make the brews. The lengths and absurd contortions gone through to justify each rule change leave room for no other conclusion.

Jacqui Klebb says that the system got changed this time because “It’s just that I wanted to focus particularly on most serious violence and therefore we needed to be sure that everybody in terms of categorising it was categorising it in the same way, so that we’d be able to track whether or not all the things that we’re putting into place are making a difference.” The slight problem with that statement is that it strongly implies that those things that you’ve been “putting in place” haven’t worked. It is also possible that some of the things you have already “put in place” have made things worse.

The real story is that bad-serious-harm-to-folks type crime is up as are drug crimes and sex crimes. This is obviously in no way related to the government sponsored expansion of what we must now call the night time economy. I know this because we now enjoy a continental style of cafe culture and the young folks are absolutely not getting hammered on cheap booze and drugs in town centres until stupid o’clock every weekend. Because this isn’t happening, it cannot be contributing to an increase in drug consumption, sexual offences or savage drunken assaults. Ohhhh….

“Tell Them All About The New Guidance Update Dusty”

* A typical 3-2-1 Clue: “The Arches Might Provide A Clue, Not Strolling But He’s Going Too”, (accompanied by some sheet music.)

Solution: “Well the first three letters of arches might have been clue enough, but we also said not strolling but he’s going too. Well if you take away HES from arches, all you have left is ARC. If you rearrange that with the sheet music,
you’re left with ‘Music Maestro Please’. So what do think that means? Maestro! The British Leyland Maestro!
You’ve rejected the car!”

They Watched a Baby Get Tortured To Death

2008-11-11T07:43:00.000-08:00

Nightjacks Rule #4

There is NO situation so bad, so dire, so beyond recall or redemption that it cannot be made WORSE by adding a Social Worker to the mix.

For the rest, I can do no better than Theodore Dalrymple at The Times. Every word true.

Just in case you wanted to know who was at the helm in Haringey as Baby Peters life was slowly snuffed out this is her.

Sharon Shoesmith Director of Childrens Services, London Borough of Haringey, DCS

Sharon has been Director of the Children and Young Peoples Service since April 2005 following two years as the Director of Education.

Sharon first came to Haringey in April 2001 as part of the strategic partnership with Capita. Previously Sharon was one of Her Majestys Inspectors (HMI) inspecting schools and local education authorities. Sharon has many years experience as an LEA officer: as Principal Inspector in York, Senior Inspector for Special Educational Needs in Sheffield and Education Advisor in Trafford, Greater Manchester. All of this was built upon a career in teaching that started over 30 years ago and includes senior management experience in special, primary and secondary schools.

Well done Sharon

Only 24 Hours To Crack The Case (Part 11) 09/11/08

2008-11-09T07:06:00.000-08:00

Firstly, thanks for keeping on coming. Although the pickings are a bit thin at the moment, there is quite a lot of back catalogue. 200,000 is a lot further than I thought things would get. NJ ……anyway…….

……..Things begin with a 2am radio message. I am driving a small tatty underpowered car with stellar mileage between Alterdale and Smallmarket. I have been driving round the division checking in with whichever Sergeants are running the show. Check the handover packages are OK, dispense advice at scenes, chew the fat, cadge brews, fly the C.I.D. flag, that sort of thing. Smallmarket is in the safe hands of a 5 year service PC with Part 1 and Part 2 Ospre. I am 75% happy that she will have more than clue #1 if the wheel comes off. She has a nightclub bottling and I can sort of hear the beginnings of a flap when she calls me on the mobile. I give her a quick checklist but really I should be there.

Then Comms are demanding the urgent attention of November Juliet 10 (that’s me) at Carpmouth Station which is about as far away as I can go and still be in the Force. My presence is required by the night duty Detective Inspector. He is gathering together the various Night Jacks from each division and calling us in. APS Smallmarket will have to take her chances because the wheels have definitely come off the wagon at Carpmouth. The Night DI needs a posse and it’s a job for detectives rather than the local response. Worse still, it cannot wait until morning.

I drive, as someone once said, like a type A personality with rabies, but I still get to Carpmouth last. The station car park is full but I dump my tatty little car on the adjacent shoppers car park and head for the C.I.D. office.

It’s a DI that I know. “Jack, nice of you to join us. Right….”

Long story short goes like this. Karl is the long term casualty of a car crash. Big compo payment that bought a flat in the heart of Carpmouth. Regular payments of compo cash and disability benefits followed. Karl gets around just great and has lots of friends in the local branch of Alcoholics Unanimous. One of them has even moved in to help Karl look after himself and inevitably hoover up some carers allowance. Karl is what a less enlightened age called a bit slow. He walks slowly, his balance is a bit off. He doesn’t like bright lights. He took to drink. Karl has his acolytes. Bessie had her two children taken from her before either could walk. She continued to be a drink ridden 50 year old and I will come to strongly suspect that Karl enjoys her dubious favours in exchange for strong cider. David, another of the acolytes has not washed or changed clothes since the 90’s and can only be seen through a shimmering miasma of his personal stink. The rest are the flotsam of the towns street drinking community who have gravitated to the big simple man who can always be relied upon to sort out his “mates” with a drink and somewhere to drink it.

It has recently become apparent to them that Karl has a brother called Kevin. Kevin has been persuading Karl to “lend” him money every week in the expectation of child #6 arriving. The Acolytes have noticed that the cider fund has been getting a bit low recently and they have challenged Karl as to why he has stopped looking after them like he used to. On learning that Kevin is now harvesting “their” golden goose, the acolytes become angry. They harangue Karl without any appreciation of irony. “He’s just sponging off you mate.” “You should tell him to f-off.” “Lets go to his house and tell him no.” Sure enough, a parade of ragged drunks are soon shepherding a reluctantly engaged Karl through the darkened streets to Kevin’s council house. Like some scene from the Beggars Opera the shambling chorus arrive and Bessie hammers on the door. Kevin answers the door and she just hits him. Kevin and the mother of two of his five children begin to grapple with Bessie. Karl tries to pull them all apart, others join in and somewhere in there Kevin stabs him once with a carving knife causing a wound that will kill him before the ambulance can arrive.

This is why the DI wants us. There are statement to be got from the angry mob before they get the opportunity to sink back into oblivion. Right now, they are roughly compliant. Wait 12 hours and they will become whiney, evasive and forgetful. To a man and woman, their sole interest will switch from “Justice For Karl” to “Who will buy me a bottle now?” The DI has rightly assessed the statement situation as being a) now or never and b) requiring expertise and experience.

I get teamed up with the DC from Classter and we are assigned Bessie. We need her clothes and so Classter and I load her into his car and are soon in the local version of Cannonrail. It is 3.30am and hardly a devil dog is stirring as we walk into her flat. A single unshaded energy efficient light bulb casts it’s miserable light quality over her grease and dust surfaces of the front room. We need the clothes and she comes back with them in a bag, now clad in skin tight snow wash denim jeans and a grubby looking white t-shirt. She is drinking from a plastic bottle of cider that she had left in the bedroom. It goes down straight from the bottle. She scrathes through an ash tray and unpicks some fag ends before rolling herself another smoke. Does she really have to make a statement tonight? Do we really need her clothes? Can we stop of at Daft Brian’s on the way back to the nick because she left another half bottle there last night? Yes of course Daft Brian will still be up. Please can we stop at Daft Brian’s, please, please, please, another drink will really help her memory, honestly.

We go back and get the first account from her. As we pass interview room 1, I can smell David through the closed door. Thank you god, oh thank you god that we aren’t dealing with him because I could not be in the room with someone who smells like parts of him have already died under his clothes.

First account got we go to speak to the DI. Is she sober enough to statement? As sober as she will ever be boss. Walking back to the interview rooms we pass the lucky pair who have been dealing with David. His smell is on their clothes like the death of stale tobacco. And Bessie has fled. The PC detailed with gently preventing any of the drunken crew escaping before their recollections are rendered to paper just says “She asked to go out for a smoke and she can’t smoke in here.” Never fear, there she is half a mile away drawn as if on a string to Daft Brian’s and its promise of a half bottle of warm cider. We talk her back into the car and by 7am we have a statement and she is so pissed off and itching for a drink that it is uncomfortable to be in the room with her. I last see her fast walking away. Finding her for the court case will be someone else’s fun problem.

By 8.30 am I am heading home. That shopper car park, that one where they start patrolling at 8am, the one with my car on it, the car with the ticket freshly glued to the windscreen. More paperwork. Great. Must remember to put my clothes in the washing machine as soon as I get home because I am carrying the smell of Carpmouth all the way home.

This Is England 06/11/08

2008-11-06T07:07:00.000-08:00

It’s been long hours and not seeing much of my family awake since my last post. My department is a bit feast or famine and the tables are definitely groaning. Between the study, sleep and work, there isn’t too much time for this. Even so, here I am heading towards midnight too tired to read Blackstones but just about awake and irate enough to blog.

It has been horrifying lifting the lid on some of our finer local secondary education establishments and finding that it is in fact incredibly hard to get expelled these days. It doesn’t seem to matter how bad you are, how awfully you behave or how dangerous it is to be around you. Bluntly, there are no effective sanctions and the school discipline system is badly broken. The Police are seldom if ever called to deal with plainly criminal activities in schools. I do not mean the crap of common assault playground fights, name calling and text based harassment. Somehow we always get called for those and they waste a lot of our time. I mean drug dealing, carrying weapons, using weapons, actual bodily harm + assaults on teachers, sexual assaults of pupils and teachers, criminal damage to school property and robbery. I now know first hand that this goes on day after day after day in very many schools where I work. What happens to the perpetrators? Absolutely nothing that means anything to them. Oh there are Referral Units and Suspensions and Behaviour Contracts. There are lots of things that sound impressive but don’t deter the behaviour, punish the behaviour or modify the behaviour. It seems like some deliberate ghastly preparation for a post school life of drifting, shiftless chaos, crime and disorder punctuated by meaningless trips to impotent tribunals that do nothing. It is what P.J. O’Rourke called the Whiffle Life. Really, I could not believe how bad things are.

Why did it end up like this? I remember when I first started policing, there were some schools with a no Police on premises policy. God love them, maybe they believed that somehow society is different, softer and nicer in school. Perhaps it was clearer to them than it is to me that by nothing more than good education and pleasant thoughts, they could create utopian educational paradises free from violence, oppression and danger. It may even be that they thought that inside every evil little bastard there was a good kid trying to get out and that exposing them to errrm consequences would hinder the process. I really don’t know but it was a collection of dumb ideas and socio-political quackery back in the 1990’s and it seems there is still an ingrained reluctance to call the cops when really bad stuff happens now.

The other thing, where I work the whole multiculturalism thing isn’t working out as integrated happy kids busy respecting each other’s diversity. No doubt there is some of that going on but there are also fierce ethnic loyalties that I can only describe as tribal. Race based gangs and race based fights are here and utterly entrenched in the schools. I wish it were not but the racism on both sides is overt and hostile. It is a very Apnay / Goray world in there.

Teachers, I think you have a multiple choice to make.

a) Continue to enable and encourage young criminals in the belief that the sanctions available to you are worth more than spit in the rain.

b) Co-operate with the police and make young criminals face criminal consequences.

Do not come to us with name calling, black eyes, bloody noses and “ur a fat slag” texts. Come to us with organised gang fights, drug dealing, knives, robbery, theft, threatening behaviour in class, serious assaults, sexual assaults, criminal damage. Be a witness, stand your ground. Worried you’ll lose their trust? Take it from me, have a read of Bebo and you will quickly see that you have never had it.

If you have lost the classrooms, let us help you to take them back, properly.

Anyway, rant over. Nightjack tired. See you all later.

Tell Me I Haven’t Joined The Stasi 21/10/08

2008-10-21T07:09:00.000-07:00

Back in the very early 1980’s before the wall came down, I went on a day trip to Berlin. I changed my good West German cash into some aluminium and loo paper tokens and made my way into the east. I struggled to spend my new money. I ended up very nearly in Poland and had to train hop all the way home. That’s another story. It may be my jet tinted spectacles but as I walked round the East German capital I could feel the apprehension leaking off the locals. I stood out in my western clothes. Eyes slid off me, my personal space became very errrm spacious. It felt like a fear that I might somehow impinge on their life or that they might somehow be linked with some agent of the West. This was a steam age punch card surveillance culture based on the technology of yester-year. The State had simply decided it was bigger than its citizens and built a beast to watch everybody, as much as possible to be sure that there was nothing fishy going on. I am told that they encouraged citizens to spy on each other and that around 2% of the adult population was signed up. The State tried to collect, collate and analyse every piece of information it could on every single citizen. East Berlin lives in my memory as a miserable place full of watchfull, withdrawn and miserable looking people.

When I tried to get back to the train station I ran into a parade.It was Erich Honeker with Samora Machel if memory serves me well.

I think by now you know where this post is going. If the DPP has issues with where we are going then who am I to differ?

Right now we are at the point of ceding a whole lot more access to our personal information to our state. The computers are ready for the big database stuff, ID cards, DNA, retinal prints, tax records, medical records, social security records, phone subscriptions, call records, email, browsing habits, text messages, that’s going to happen. With it will come data matching and actively looking for suspicious patterns in a massive dataflows. I am less than entirely assured that all these toys will be restricted to the most serious and grave investigations. All the RIPA powers have clearly undergone some sort of mission creep to the point where it is now just another form for the Council to fill out before sifting the bins. It sounds like a joke, it is very Daily Maily scarey but it is happening.

Meanwhile the bad guys will learn about proxy servers, foreign ID cards and pay for foreign phones that don’t need to be registered. There will be some big traffic for penet.fi and nym servers. Someone, somewhere is going to build a data haven. There will be a healthy market in preloaded credit cards in any name you want. It isn’t like the ways of living off the radar are any sort of big secret. Its a big world and the ugly truth is that identity security is about as strong as that of the weakest nation that can get its people over our border. Same goes for mobile phones and browsing habits. There may be some marginal benefit in making things harder for terrorists, but massive data collection and analysis only makes things harder for them, not impossible. Same goes for the top of the tree organised criminals. Harder but not impossible. If anything, it makes them tougher to investigate as they retreat to secure and hardened communications. Tradecraft, again not a big secret.

So Jacqui, as you are putting together the perfect infobeast, try and remember that it doesn’t work very well against the people you say you want it for. When the next attrocity happens and the one after that, you might want to have an explanation ready as to why the system didn’t work.

The Babbage engine version of this sort of collection matched with a State bent on self preservation was enough to keep the people cowed in Stasiland for around 40 years. I believe things did not end well for President Egon Krenz when the wall came down.

Batesian Mimicry Fail 18/10/08

2008-10-18T07:10:00.000-07:00

A brief background

Apologies to those of you who find this a bit “suck eggs.”

The Police Reform Act 2002..was there a plain meaning in the name? It brought us the I.P.C.C. rakes of Secretary of State powers to direct policing from the top and the new streamlined disciplinary system. Crucially it gave a basis for the use of police powers by civilians. It actually calls them civilians. I thought that I was a civilian but hey ho.

From this basis came the motley kitted and variably empowered recruiting pool that are Police Community Support Officers. It’s only 6 years ago but it feels longer to me. Sir John Stephens was heading the Met, Tony Blair was the PM and his Home Secretary was David Blunkett.

Right from the start, whatever the people might say now, the top teams were not keen. Their head prefect Sir David Phillips, president of the Association of Chief Police Officers was moved to opine that creation of the new tier of officers had “little merit“, adding: “Very few of my colleagues are enthusiastic for the scheme. It seems to me the money would be better spent on more police officers.” So P.C.S.O.’s were not something that anybody at any level in the Police was calling for. At best there was grudging acceptance….oh except for the Vichy Cop’s Vichy Cop Metropolitan Deputy Commissioner Ian Blair, he liked the idea, he liked it very publicly.

It is fair to say that the P.C.S.O. idea was very much government imposed on Police Forces rather than something that we were crying out for. Look back through 2002 and 2003 and you find lots of comments about preferring two cops to three Support Officers. Of course, the fact that you can get three for the price of two must have seemed very appealing to a Home Office that had problems with their relationship with the Police. Jack Straw had been booed at the Fed Conference, officers were asking awkward questions about right to strike, public perceptions about crime levels and street safety were starting to go offside. So the Home Office response included taking the right to sack Chief Constables and foisting this new layer of policing-lite on them. I wonder how many took that as a not so subtle message on workplace modernisation.

My Views

I would rather have had the equivalent in Police Officers. What we got was the wedge end, no doubt in my mind. Once a camel has it’s nose in your tent, pretty soon you are sharing your tent with a camel. We are stuck with them and my main concern is that they are a block of unionised, uniformed, sort of trained, sort of equipped local patrollers who could easily be hived off to private companies rather as many custody staff have been. I can see someone like Wackenhut or some smaller outfit sniffing round the edges of providing uniform patrol support services. Moving the training, payroll, insurance and the rest outside the Police and gathering a few alleged savings might be a very attractive package as cash becomes tighter.

The places where we used to deploy the halt, lame and burned out are disappearing before our very eyes. Civilianisation is the mechanism. How long will we be able to look at the career as a 30 year stretch to a decent pension? What do we do with broken bobbies when the backroom jobs are all gone. I’m not sure this one was thought out.

Where I work, every week brings news of a new group of Support Officers resigning to join us or a neighbouring force. There is even a phrase for it, “Transferring to The Regulars.” That’s the main benefit I can see, it allows a bit of talent spotting. It may even allow us to get back to recruiting people who are not necessarily rank hungry careerists with a hankering to leave the streets after the minimum period possible. One of those knotty problems in policing is that it is increasingly being punted as a graduate occupation when a lot of it isn’t. Many of our best officers have never been near a college or university but they have whatever it is that makes them effective at policing.

Out on the streets, it is increasingly clear that Adibok boy has learned that P.C.S.O.s are nothing for him to worry about. Once they are openly and regularly defied, all that lovely public reassurance starts to run into the sand. The more we have to keep them deployed away from friction, the more they become a limited value resource. For what they are paid, I think it is worth looking at whether it turned out to be value for money or whether it was an expensive way of getting daylight hours scene guards. Pairing them up with a regular is an expedient response but if their effectiveness depends on the presence of a sworn officer and daylight we really would be better of with actual cops.

Another thought, just a thought, my speciality surely will get an unhealthy dose of streamlining and re-organisation that will leave Assistant Investigators in the majority. It is “when not if” territory. Surely there will be one of those pilot projects in return for a QPM deals some time soon. The Assistants are cheaper and truthfully, there isn’t much we can do that they cannot. In some of the very specialist detective roles like financial investigation it may even make more sense to bring in a specialist Assistant Investigator rather than trying to grow one from whatever officers are to hand. Rather than recruit ersatz uniform officers, the Home Office would have been better off replacing sworn detectives and giving us some of those blue suits with shiney buttons and those fetching visi-yellow stabbies. At a stroke, it would have put experienced officers with a head for crime fighting back on the front line. Response teams would have been bolstered with lots of safe hands who know how to deal with a job. Now I did work hard to become a passable detective but if things are that bad on the street, it makes more sense to put people out there with the full powers and kit rather than pale imitations.

The Games People Play 15/10/08

2008-10-15T07:11:00.000-07:00

As I read with some unease that NHS Hull are considering sinking £1.75 million into purchasing the S.S. ASBO I cannot help but wonder whether somebody there has let a private enthusiasm morph into a publicly funded pipe dream. Are the burgers of Hull being asked to subsidise somebody else’s hobby / holidays under the thin disguise of rehabilitation? Down the years, I have seen all sorts of “interesting” initiatives aimed at reforming the criminal young and listless. Who could forget the ASBO Safari or the Adibok boy on tour in the Caribbean? Then there are the more mundane, “lets go climbing / rambling / canoeing / outward bounding, all very expensive, highly supervised and of doubtful efficacy. There seems no end of appetite for sticking this sort of intervention on the public tab.

Ask a solicitor or a barrister what really rattles the criminal’s cage and the most common answer is prison. Everything else is seen as a let off, a walk out. There was a judge some years ago who retired. Lets call him HHJ Leonard QC. At his retirement do, I am told, the following conversation took place after the speech and the present bit.

HHJ L “So, I’m leaving. You can tell me now, I know we all get given nicknames…..well…what was mine?”

Clerk “Errrm you probably don’t really want to know that“

HHJ L “No really, hahahaha what was it? It can’t be that bad?”

Clerk (dead pan) “They call you Let Off Leonard“

HHJ L (crestfallen) “Oh…..oh…. I see. Well thank you anyway.“

Clerk “Yes, in fact all the local solicitors tried anything they could to get cases listed in your court.“

HHJ (flushing) “No need to go on about it“

A sadder, wiser judge walked off pondering the quality of mercy and how he had spent a number of years believing himself to be just and kind man whilst the world of criminal advocacy had him pegged as the softest touch going.

I am also told that on those few occasions when Judge Leonard returned to harness after his leaving do, his sentencing moved rather towards the savage end of the spectrum.

One Less Vichy Cop

2008-10-03T07:41:00.000-07:00

So the Marshal Phillipe Petain of policing has finally run out of dancing room on the head of his particular pin but oh my word, didn't he take a long time tottering. I have been reading up on him. One thing I hadn't realised was that he tried a bit of glory grabbing for the Balcombe Street siege. His Guardian (inevitably)� account was that of the heroic unarmed cop directly under the guns of the I.R.A. Other people there seem to not recall him being quite so front line. He was apparently in one of the cars that tagged onto the back of the chase. In every station there is at least one indulged blow hard who talks a good job. It is worse, I think, to talk a good someone elses job.

I wrote him off around the time of his coments on the Soham Murders press coverage when he said I believe that the media are guilty of institutional racism in the way they report deaths If you look at the murders in Soham, almost nobody can understand why that dreadful story became the biggest story in Britain. This says a lot about conversation in the Blair circle of friends. Very Etat Francais.

Some people seem to have a problem with the local elected boss saying to the local top cop words to the effect of Sorry, nothing personal but there has been a mistake. You have had a good long run but you are clearly not right for the job. Personally, I feel that up around that level, there needs to be a summary mechanism for getting rid. Running any Constabulary is just too big a job to leave with a lame duck who has lost the room. I am so glad that somebody grabbed the nettle. Shame it had to be the Mayor on his own. It should have been the Home Secretary and the M.P.A. as well.

I guess Commissioner Sir Ian Warwick Blair QPM MA can always weep gently onto the broad and experienced shoulder of his personal financial advisor. I wonder if he will become an Edward Heath character bitterly sniping from the sidelines at those who enjoy the influence and lime light that he once basked in? My guess is that we have not heard the last of him.

Now Ive Swung Back Down Again

2008-09-27T07:40:00.000-07:00

In the tradition of being ever so slightly bi-polar in my postings, after the jeremiad of yesterday, today was a good day to be Night Jack.

As we have been predicting for some weeks, the weekend wheel fell off this morning at Reactive C.I.D. Due to some malign alignment of the spheres (and liberal drinking), Smallmarket, Alterdale and Stracton kicked off in unison on Friday night. Between them they managed to fill every available cell in the new super sized central custody unit and then some. With prisoners dotted around everywhere, and the inevitable massive dose of abstractions, courses and maternity leaves the detective cupboard was very bare. The chiefs to indians ratio was gone very wrong with some Detective Constables finding themselves with one to one supervision up to Inspector level.

A quick shufty round the Force quickly disclosed to us on The Squad that although people had been a bit wild, nobody had ended up dead or nearly dead. For all of 30 minutes we sat generally immune from the developing chaos around us. It was one of those lucky days when you get the sniff of a chance to address some of the dustier actions in the Major Incident Room queue. Meanwhile, downstairs in a small office without adequate ventilation yet still designed with postage sized windows, the Detective Sergeant in charge of the cell sweepers was gently weeping onto his keyboard as he surveyed the detention logs and then looked up to the empty desks of his largely absent team.� In the custody office, the phone calls were starting to go out to find out who was dealing with this tsunami of bodies? I suspect the phones were either unanswered or replied to with Errrrrrm..Ill call you back. Every reactive DC had been gathered in to the big central office and there were still more empty desks than full. It is entirely possible that Detective Inspectors were bracing themselves for a spot of tape spinning. Yes, it was that bad.

Then somebody did a deal, sold their soul or whatever and the emergency glass was broken. The order came to the grizzled murder squad detectives Get your bad selves down to the cells and pick up a job. Any job, just don't pick anything that you'll still be doing in tomorrow. Don't need asking twice and it beats the heck out of chasing reluctant minor witnesses round Smallmarket.

By the time I got to Cell Sweeper Central, there were Squadies converging from various unlikely and unknown corners of the station. Who would have thought so many of us came in at weekends? Cell Sweeper Sergeant was looking almost happy. I joined the queue and came away with an uncomplicated assault that had been half way decently written up by the night crew and a prisoner who resolutely turned down a solicitor on the grounds that he was guilty, remorseful and in the mood for a full(ish) and frank(ish) confession.

You know what, I had so much fun that I sort of hope it all happens again next weekend.

Vichy Cop Speaks

2008-09-25T07:45:00.000-07:00

The Independent sponsored a debate for the Longford Lecture this year. Now when I went to school, debates had a proposer and a seconder on each side and there was a proposition to be tested. This had more in common with current ideas of a consultation whereby stakeholders are gathered to be told which option will be selected and invited to comment on the decision. The title of this love in was We Cant Build Our Way Out of The Prison Crisis. The debaters were the Vichy Cops Vichy Cop Sir Ian Blair, noted Labour peer and leading human rights law specialist Baroness Kennedy of the Shaw and Philip Martin (Call Me Phil) Wheatley head of the National Offender Management Service. Guaranteed to be a great diversity of opinion and some robust debate there then. They could have got honest and called it all We Dont Really Want To Imprison People

So on to the wisdom of Sir Ian

One of the things we are going to have to do is move towards the very unpalatable situation where community punishments are visible.They are in uniform, on the streets, doing jobs and people can see people are being sentenced to community projects that do not seem very pleasant.

Thats right Sir Ian, public visibility of community punishments is errrm unpalatable. Maybe to you it is. Personally I think there is something to be said for a visi-jacketed chain gang. Maybe the public would find it visibly reassuring that there was some punishment there rather than watching some Adibok boys listlessly and grudgingly carting wheelbarrow loads of clippings round the local park.

Sure enough, Sir Ian explained that the public needed to see that community punishments were not a soft option. He added: If they dont understand its happening they will want people locked up.

Again Vichy Cop has utterly missed the boat with public opinion and believes that the problem is that people do not understand community punishment and thinks they are a soft option. Just so you are clear on this boss, the people doing the community punishment think it is a soft option and they tell their friends all about it. People talk. The perception abroad that community punishment is soft is based on the first hand testimony of those persons who actually do it.

Why do so many people think prison is the only answer? An element of the media and political community argues that the only good thing is to lock them up and everything else is namby pamby.

Again boss, thats because people arent being fooled any more. The great social experiment is playing out and all the years of looking for a softer, gentler, effective intervention that will work in the lives of the Evil Poor habe failed. There was no silver bullet. ASBOs? Mark of distinction. Fines? Fines? Paid off with a nominal benefits reduction or weighed off for a day in police cells. Community Service, see the above regarding the attitudes of those serving them. Asset confiscation? Failing in trumps. Right now, prison is an option that takes bad people out of the population but even this is being diluted with it being very hard to get time served of over 5 years no matter how bad you are. Cough the job when your bang to rights for the first 33% off and the Criminal Justice Act 2003 will lop off another 33% for you without your brief having to utter a word.

The Criminal Justice System has fallen into disrepute because it publicy fails in one important aspect. It does not punish adequately any more. Crime pays and it is worth it even if you get caught. The concept of prison as punishment has not been popular at boss level for many, many years now. Yet what victims seem to want is a bit of retribution. You remember that stuff, You have made our lives miserable, you have blighted the lives of others, here you go, have some personal bad times and misery all to yourself. The common perception of the modern prison is a sort of low rent Travel Lodge with Play Stations, mobile phones and hot and cold running drugs. Prison time is soft time and that has been an open secret for a long time. Maybe society is broken and one of the things that might help sort it is a certainty that when punishment is meted out, it is appropriate and accepted as such by society

They say that a fish starts rotting from the head.The stink is so bad now that everyone has started to notice.

When We Were Young

2008-09-25T06:32:00.000-07:00

Police standards and complaints are in the news again……

Years ago I was paired up with “Stick Boy.” Every station has at least one Stick Boy who comes equipped not only with the standard full “chandelier of gear” but a few exotic after market add-ons and pouches in black chrome leather or mat black rip-stop nylon with kevlar. We were out on the fringes of town, looking to catch a night time commercial burglar who had been uncomfortably busy.

We were in the usual and not at all obvious “cop goes hunting” combination of boots, jeans, fleece jacket and an allegedly discrete spiral wire to the ear. Stick Boy may or may not have had a custom ear piece from an American web site. Under the fleece we had cuffs and sticks in those fetching shoulder holster things in black nylon. I had seen Stick Boys’ on an earlier operation and to my eternal shame, I asked him to get me one as well. It was November, with that cold damp in the air that muffles everything and makes the quiet streets of run down brick terraces smell riddled with damp rot.

We had turned over a few likely looking wanderers and followed a few but not much was happening. One of those we turned over would be turning into a complaint. Everybody does things a little different dealing with the public. I tend towards “apparently laid back”, Stick Boy tended towards “in your face formal” or rude as it is commonly known. I have noted a correlation between “in your face formal” and repeated assaults on duty but it is not a scientific study. For now though, that complaint was still a day time sleep away.

Then there came the assistance shout within running distance. From the shops by the last taxi office in town, female colleague, “Assistance Magic Cabs” then nothing further. Give Stick Boy his due, the boy can run. I am a bigger unit, I sort of lumber. Gasping round the corner towards Magic Cabs having followed Stick Boy’s vapour trail, I see “Night Out” with his angry beetroot face, rictus of hate expression, cropped hair, Ted Smith shirt, Stone Island pants and brown Timberlands. In one meaty fist he has female colleague by the throat and he is trying his best to post her through a shop window by banging her against it repeatedly. His other arm is occupied by Stick Boy who is being lifted up and down off his feet whilst trying for some half remembered “Home Office Approved” restraint technique. A drift of passers by, mates and their girlfriends are watching and telling him to stop but Night Out is past the point of listening and none of his mates feel like getting involved to make him. He felt that it was not reasonable for the police to want to speak to him about pissing in a shop doorway whilst waiting for his taxi. Rather than make an official complaint about the rudeness of the officer dealing with him or complaining that she had humiliated him in front of his mates, Night Out has clearly decided on a rather more direct and immediate complaints procedure.

I join Stick Boy on the flailing arm and get a wrist lock on which then goes to arm lock. Night Out begins to realise that there are more important things in life than smashing windows with cops. His booze dulled pain receptors start to cotton on to the fact that bad things are happening to all of the big joints of the arm that isn’t assaulting a police officer. Female colleague takes advantage of the distraction and gets the other arm under some sort of control but it is still a ruck. He is as big as me, angry and strong. We all go down with the arm and wrist lock still on. I feel the soggy crunch more than hear it as Night Out’s wrist breaks very badly indeed. He goes to the station, still kicking off in the back of a van but is quickly on his way to hospital.

That’s the one that got me interviewed under caution, with a solicitor and everything for GBH. That’s the one where Night Out claimed that the injury was so severe he would never be able to plaster another wall. Issues of unreasonable force apparently. Allegation that I broke the wrist with my cuffs after Night Out was subdued. It was as little fun as I expected it to be except for the bit where I offered to demonstrate the wrist lock on the C&D interviewer and he declined. I was sent away for them to do further enquiries. It was clear that they had been told a tale of a drunk man having a simple shouting match with an overbearing female officer and then being jumped by two of her mates who had beaten him up and then callously and deliberately broken his wrist to “teach him a lesson.” I went home and was extremely worried for about a week.

That’s the one I walked away from when Complaints and Discipline recovered the unexpected CCTV of Night Out being arrested. They spoke to the friends again and then got statments about what actually happened. It was a weight off my shoulders. I don’t know if Night Out ever plastered again and I don’t much care. He tried to stitch me up and he failed. I do know that for all their bad reputation in the job, every C&D person I know spends a lot more time digging cops out of the poo than burying them in it.They tend to investigate thoroughly and they seem to have time and resources rather greater than any section CID I have worked on. I still wouldn’t apply for a job there though.

Voice Of The Jacqui

2008-09-21T06:32:00.000-07:00

It’s conference time again.

So what are the key points of the master plan she has designed to deal with the likely upsurge in crime that we are not really meant to know about except as a background, we’re not denying it, type leak.

Here are the key points for the cops. As you might expect, I have stripped out the tinsel and the tractor factory statistics.So the boss has spoken at her annual works do. This should be a reliable signpost to where the Home Secretary wants to take the law and order agenda over the next year or so (if she makes it that far). As far as I can see, she is setting up conditions for another bout of don’t blame the government, blame the Police.

1) The policing pledge is coming. It is clear standards and apparently people can expect us to meet the targets in it. Whatever is in the pledge will be local and nothing to do with the home office or any suggestions from HMIC. As discussed before, it is targets.

2) Local crime mapping is on the way so folks can find out what crimes are happening in their part of the world. That should help the vigilantes be a little more time on target if nothing else.

3) We’re going to get an army (sic) of Community Crime Fighters. This would appear to be one self or politically appointed “voice of the people” for each neighbourhood policing team. What we really need is deputies but hey ho, what is another local Kommissar more or less.

4) A rehash of the knife arch and knife wand announcement and some more weasel words that shoehorn knife and prison into the same speech without saying that one should be the consequence of the other.

5) Funding for some community groups to blow as they continue enabling in high knife crime areas with interventions of dubious effectiveness and unreasonable cost. This does not directly impact us save that they never ever seem to make things better and always, always side with the gangs of offenders if Police action is anything more than doing what they ask us to do.

6) Prostitution, kerb crawling, secure borders and immigration control. Here doggie doggie

7) Unspecified cuts in red tape. Always promised, never delivered, ever.

So, that’s it folks. Hardly a world shaking tour-de-force. I honestly expected better than that weak and insipid little package of puffery and last quarters’ reheated policy announcements.

The Federation are at the end of their tether with Jacqui’s refusal to negotiate or consult with us about anything. They are seriously considering going for full labour rights (incl. right to strike). The Superintending ranks are quietly rumbling as well. ACPO remains largely lodged in the Vichy continuum but a few are starting to realise that they can tell Jacqui and HMIC to stick it where the sun don’t shine without the sky falling in. The Met are busy fighting a destructive battle over whether some of their highest ranking and best paid staff are racist, corrupt, incompetent, untrustworthy or all of the above. There are sizeable chunks of our towns and cities where the Evil Poor are able to dominate the rest of the residents. There is an appetite abroad for firmer justice and fewer chances for the repeat offender. You have to pretty much murder someone to get serve more than five years in prison. People are scared to go out at night in a lot of places, even Home Secretarys in Pekham. If this is the Home Secretary’s response to an oncoming upsurge in crime, I have to wonder if she is living in the same world as I am. But then, I know she is because she would no more toddle off the the kebab shop after dark without a minder than Mrs Night would. She knows that my old stomping ground of Kensington and Chelsea is plenty frightening enough at night these days let alone Hackney or New Cross. Its a disconect. She knows that all this stuff is going on and she is punting Kommissars, knife arches and youth workers.

What was missing? I’ve said it before but I might as well say it again in no order and by no means exhaustive

1) An end to the Stop and Account form.

2) An unconditional power to search people in public places.

3) An end to performance targets be they local or national. That frees up a lot of budget and posts straight away.

4) A properly joined up national criminal intelligence system. We collect it and grade it so why the hell can’t we share it properly?

5) Start to unpick the damage that has been done to the Criminal Justice System by way of such idiocies as automatic sentence discount and allowing prisons to become so overcrowded that you are having to shovel bad people out early to do more bad things.

Is the problem that 4 and 5 are going to cost and cannot easily be hidden as a Private Finance Initiative? Are 1) 2) and 3) a step too far for a Labour Party that still sees the Police in terms of “The Man” and has never forgiven us the miner’s strike? I wonder.

April

2008-09-18T06:32:00.000-07:00

April is the cruelest month and April 2005 was a particularly cruel month for justice. Under the surely ironically named Criminal Justice Act 2003, from April 2005 those prisoners serving a determinite sentence were entitled to release at half time automatically. Put simply, in most cases, no matter what comes out of the judges’ mouth, it’s home time at half time.

It isn’t a total home run, the criminals go out and in theory they can be recalled to serve the rest of their sentence. It is anecdotal of course but I know of at least one offender in Alterdale released at half time who was blowing off his licence conditions and re-offending. Probation gave “consideration” to pulling his licence. It wasn’t, he raped. So it goes. It is only one example from one town but I would not expect it to be a great rarity.

The unexpected bounty of dividing every sentence by two would be undeserved riches enough you might think. You would be wrong. The system needed jigging again to reduce prison overcrowding. In a move of bran tub randomness, the End of Custody Licence scheme was born allowing prisoners to be set free an extra 18 days early. There are rumours that it will be stretched to 20 days as we keep filling up the cells.

Let me take you to an entirely fictional court room in a Crown Court near you. The judge has heard the mitigation. He has made clear that he finds the defendant’s conduct to be wicked and he begins the task of working out a sentence. Missing only a black cap, he gravely intones “I consider a sentence of 15 years to be appropriate.”

The watching victim is thinking “RESULT! the Daily Mail was telling fibs, there are judges doing the right thing“.

The judge continues “I must give you credit for your guilty plea and that is a sentence reduction of one third.”

The victim is thinking “But judge, the Police caught him red handed in the act of beating and raping me. His DNA was all over me. Why does he get 5 years off for admitting the obvious?” Still 10 years still sounds like a good sentence. Not 15 years but double digit at least.

The judge continues, “Under the terms of the Criminal Justice Act 2003, you will be eligible for automatic release on licence when you have served half your sentence.“

The awful truth sinks in with the victim. The judge thinks that the crime is worth 15 years and the offender will walk out of the prison gates in 5 years. But the pain isn’t over yet, the judge has one bitter pill left to prescribe. “As you have already served 6 months on remand, you will be entitled to release in 4 and a half years.”

Fifteen years bartered, beaten and worn down to 4 and a half years in under a minute. The judge has absolutely no choice in the matter. After he sets the big figure, the rest is just legislation. It has got beyond a joke. This way lies vigilante justice. When even 15 years worth of badness gets you 5 years worth of punishment at best what’s the point?

One of the questions we always get asked by victims is “How long will they get?” Next time I might just not bite my lip and try to fudge the answer. Next time I might just say “No idea but they probably won’t serve more than 5″

I Know Its Late

2008-09-17T07:39:00.000-07:00

Looking out over the prospect of a busy, long days week at the end of another long(ish) day, I took some time out to read some non-police blogs for a change. I found something that I like so much I want to share it a lot.

I stumbled onto this particular blog via a Gadget link I think (but it may have been UK Commentator, I have been randomly clicking and reading). On finding it, I stopped searching and started reading. It is a teacher blog and for post after post after post it is about the best thing I have read on the interweb this year.

The writer seems to absolutely understand and explain with icy clarity some very prickly issues around race and education. It is also just plain well written. So until the good people of Smallmarket, Trackton and Alterdale stop trying to kill each other and I get a moments peace to write up my next post, may I recommend to you all half an hour or so reading through this blog. Its all good. It is called TO MISS WITH LOVE.

A Cup Of Cold Coffee & A Piece OfCake

2008-09-06T07:38:00.000-07:00

Some days are better than others.

Today I had a bit of a lie in and then I took my son to Jitsu. I am chief assistant to the assistant chief at the kids classes. They use me as a demonstration dummy.

Look kids, see how the big cop flies through the air and lands with a thud. See how he winces with pain when you twist his arm just this way. The kids love watching and my son laughs like a drain as Daddy describes short violent arcs. I guess it it adds a little bit of credibility when they see the techniques work so well.

On the mat, there is absolutely no bullshit. I take orders from somebody who I know has walked the walk all the way up to a very hard won brown or black belt. If I zig when I should zag, it hurts. I have not been to many seniors sessions where everybody makes it to the end in one piece. I am on three black eyes, trashed elbow ligaments and a shoulder separation. My fault, should have landed better or moved quicker. Mrs. Night calls it blokes yoga and she may have a point because right here, right now I am absolutely at peace with the world. My instant coffee tastes that little bit better, I stopped off and bought donuts on the way back.

Come Monday and Ill be back doing what I do for a living and everything will have evaporated away save for some aches and a few yellowing bruises.

I have a troll who keeps asking why I dont resign, thinks I lack the courage of my convictions, thinks its all either / or. If it is so bad, why do I keep on doing it?

Fifteen years ago, I was on foot patrol in Strackton with my tutor constable. It was tipping it down. Thick rods of icy rain, the sort that bounces back up when it hits the pavement. A man drove his taxed and insured family car down the street and stopped on the double yellows outside a dance school. He was met by a gaggle of flappy, jittering rain dodging under 10s who piled into the car. He busied himself feverishly around the doors checking them all in. My tutor constable urged me to go forth and ticket the guy. I said no. Tutor wasnt happy but it was my call and my discretion. Damned if I was going to make a bad moment worse for the man. Damned if I could see he had much of a choice. It ended up on my evaluation as a mark down. Im just not that sort of Cop. My tutor constable is that sort of cop and is now of supervisory rank.

There was another duty that I had at football matches. I stood at the corner where the opposing fans could jeer, swear and flick Vs at each other. Each and every one got to use up about �50 worth of abuse and gestures before I even considered taking action. Theres a reason why most scarfer fans travel and a reason why some home fans choose seats near them. Theres a reason why they cough up hard earned pay. It isnt a prayer meeting, its a tribal occasion, a surrogate skirmish. There are some Cops however who will lock up at the first crossed words.

Each of us gets to decide what type of Cop we are going to be though there are days when I am more of a bastard than others. The C.I.D. officer in me would suggest that officers like my old tutor all join the traffic department (looks down and spits).

I really dont like the way some of my colleagues go about their job. I read, see and hear things that make me cringe every week. Thats how it is troll. Cant do much about them so I plough my own furrow just like them. Am I going to chuck it all in because some boss swallows the latest Home Office / A.C.P.O bit of publication review research? Will I lie awake at night agonising about where the job is going? Well no but I see it and sometimes, I go to the blog to write about it.

If nothing else honest coppering helps pay for days like this.

Feeding Time

2008-09-01T07:37:00.000-07:00

I was a bit busy over the weekend. It was one of those that we all have from time to time where you never see your family awake for a few days. As usual no names, no pack drill but I have a story.

Carousel Gardens was built in the 1960s. It is really a cluster of small blocks adding up to 40 or so single occupancy flats. It is just round the corner from the local nick and walking distance from the Alterdale town centre. The residential care home was built nearby. When it was built, it was for providing some social housing for retired people. You can tell. There are small courtyard type gardens, easy access everything, not a lot of car parking spaces.

Over the years a lot of retired people have lived in Carousel Gardens. Certainly many widows with a sprinkling of single gents who like to stay smart, have a few beers at the Social Club of an evening and will help the lady neighbour out with a bit of shopping or fixing a shelf. Their houses are pin tidy, sparkling net curtains, clean windows and on every toilet roll a cosy. It sounds horribly cliched but it works. It is the way we used to organise things before those who run social housing got the Rights Fever. Even 10 years ago, anybody of working age applying for Carousel Gardens would have been politely directed elsewhere.

I have had good reason to look at the current residents over the last week. Most of them are still widows past the age of retirement but I found the rotting teeth. There are good reasons why the older residents say that the whole place has gone down hill in the last few years. There are some very good reasons why they dont really feel safe after dark or alone outside.

Who in their right mind puts a heroin dealer / handler of stolen goods on a retirement estate? Every glassy eyed bag head in town will come wandering through the area looking for the next chance. Sadly two of them have already moved on and started to use their nice little flat as a convenient shooting gallery for their mates. Convenient for the local supermarket and you can flog the bacon and pick up a fix on the way home. Whats not to love?

What was the reasoning that settled the alcoholic prostitute and her ASBO hell child next to a quiet and retiring war widow?

When the applicant for tenancy is a 25 year old with burglary / theft convictions and M.O.s that run along the lines of After forming friendship with elderly woman, over a period of 3 months systematically stole all items of value from her house and withdrew all cash in her accounts why are you sending him to criminal heaven by giving him a flat on a retirement estate?

Did you really think that the 70 year old retired gateman would appreciate having a 22 year old career alcoholic, 24/7 banging tunes and a passing cast of non-stop party people mates living underneath him?

The local housing trust in Alterdale might as well have thrown a shoal of barracuda into a goldfish tank. They havent got a clue, dont care or worse still have no choice in the matter in the face of a rights and entitlement culture that is entirely one way. The rot has set in at Carousel Gardens. In a few more years all the old people will have been displaced and the Evil Poor will be fully entrenched. Roll bulldozers.

Hard Choices

2008-08-30T06:29:00.000-07:00

Talking about child abusers does seem to raise some very extreme opinions on what to do with them. I don’t have a solution yet. I spent two and a half years collecting evidence against them and another year trying to manage them in the community post release. In retrospect, they were not the happiest years of my life. There was so much work it was like trying to get a drink from a fire hose. We weren’t big teams. On the supervising offenders in the community side, for every one that we looked at, there were many more that went unwatched that day or that week.

What I do believe, based on involvement in around 500 cases is that of the many, many men who look at pictures of children being abused only a small number are actual hands on abusers. From the group I had to watch over, most were nasty picture lookers and they were normally pathetic people who had emerged from the criminal justice system shattered, sad and broken. Objectively, there was more risk of them looping a rope through the loft hatch than attacking a child. If Operation Ore taught us two things, it was that firstly there were far more people willing to pay cash to see nasty pictures of little girls than we ever imagined and secondly that the offending cut across class and education boundaries.

On the other hand, there was the one in a hundred (or whatever) that were an abiding and serious risk to children. For the most part, unhappy as it makes me, I draw the conclusion that we might as well leave the broken 99 to stew in their own juices post release and keep a general watching brief over them, no more than that. Really what we have already with the Sex Offenders Register. Are we really looking at a 9mm parabellum behind the ear? Do we want chemical or surgical castration? For all of them? Surely not.

What I think is this :-

I am lucky enough to be wired up to be attracted to women of about the same age as I am. That is what works for me. It also works for society. I dread to think how hard it would be if I was wired up to only be attracted to children. How would it feel if every sexual impulse you had was utterly forbidden by the society you live in? I am not saying that being sexually attracted to children is right or acceptable or excusable in some cross cultural way. It clearly isn’t and that should be true whatever society you live in. The fact remains though that some adults in our society are very, very sexually attracted to children. What can we do with them? The hands on, predatory, opportunistic, “will rape children given a chance” offenders are out there. They are rare but they are there. In the end, it boils down to kill them or lock them up until we are absolutely sure that they are no longer a risk to children. The sentence them and “release them into the community” approach is rolling dice with child rape. I’m not sure if we want to do that, particularly as I know that on any given day, there are too many bad men looking for a child and too few cops trying to keep an eye on them.

Kevin's Choice

2008-08-29T07:36:00.000-07:00

Over at CriminalSolicitor.net the debate about interviews has got quite heated recently. There are some Solicitors accusing us of flagrantly breaching PACE. There are some Cops accusing them of talking rubbish. Apparently some solicitors have noticed that some of their clients are not asking for them when they are arrested and are going to interview without them. This is hitting some of them, including the charmingly named fatcatlawyer in the pocket. They dont like it.

I have a theory to explain why this may happen sometimes. It may be wrong but it feels right to me. It ascribes to Adibok boy / girl the entirely self centered low cunning that they demonstrate in every worthless waking hour of their criminal lives.

For the sake of argument, lets say that Kev the Adibok boy is coming through the doors for shoplifting, other theft, drug possession, criminal damage or minor assault. This is the bulk stuff, the every hour every day stuff of police work. It is also the every day every hour stuff of the Evil Poor Life criminal.

Put yourself in the place of Kev, rightly hauled in for an offence that he knows he has done and he also knows that the case is good. He understands that it is not job of the century and his chances of going down are very slight. Whatever else poor uneducated, dyslexic Adibok boy may knows or understand, I have not met one yet who isnt able to calculate the true length of a likely sentence to 3 decimal places including the arcane calculations for early admissions, time spent on remand and in police cells. I can only assume that this is one of the remedial classes taught at Crime School. Let us assume in this case, Kev has calculated with laser accuracy that the CJS bandit will throw him the usual 3 cherries of some sort of non-custodial walkout. He also knows that his bail is not going to be knocked back for this one.

He knows he has done it. He knows there is more than enough for the case to stick. For him, it is just a matter of ordering his affairs to do the most he can to limit his time in a Police cell. The only thing that could possibly slow him down is waiting for a solicitor. If he does that then he must stew for the disclosure, then the consultation. All in all, this could cost him quite a few valuable grafting hours when he cannot smoke or drink or abuse any other drug of choice. Neither can he earn.

He has a well founded expectation that he can pick up a solicitor to give all the usual old flannel in mitigation when he goes to court. Another walkout will follow as night follows day.

For Kev, in the custody office, he needs a solicitor like he needs a hole in the head.

For Kev in the dock, it is just that bit more important. Continuing my thread on the outrageous things that solicitors will say in mitigation, may I offer the following recent gems.

Guilty bail bandit Mark Brady from Keighley stole a Metro and then drove like a complete cock, narrowly missing another car before crashing his. Defence solicitor Stephen Banks got straight into the sob story. Brady, who had suffered abuse at home and had been brought up in care, committed his first offence when he was 12 and started taking class A drugs when he was 16. (Hmmm) He has managed to maintain a lifestyle free from addiction but inevitably there are lapses. (So he didnt actually have a drug free lifestyle theninevitable.oh my sides) He does accept driving the vehicle having bought it knowing it was stolen, He added that for much of the incident in April Brady had been driving at the speed limit. (except when he spotted the cops) It was only when the blue lights came on and he was aware that the police were on his tail that he panicked, Mr Banks said. On the bail matter, Mr Banks said Brady had had no indication of being bailed back to Skipton Police Station.(Must have missed that form we gave him then.) It doesnt seem to be a question of a man evading the judicial system but a matter of someone not really knowing about the bail date, Mr Banks said. (This is pantomime.oh yes it does)

In Wales, James Eric Jones, 58, a retired assistant bank manager, handed himself in when the savings of Aberaeron FC in Ceredigion had all gone. He admitted stealing £25,000 over a 14 year period and 14 offences of false accounting at Swansea Crown Court.
Prosecutor Clare Templeton said Jones began stealing almost as soon as he was appointed club treasurer in 1992. Miss Templeton said Jones presented false accounts to the club committee and completely invented a firm of auditors to make it look as though the books had been independently verified.
Jones barrister, Paul Hobson, said it was accepted Jones was on the verge of being found out but he had confessed and had entered guilty pleas.He added Jones still owed £16,000 to the banks. One can well understand the reaction, in a small community, to what he has done. He has gone from being a popular and quite well known figure to where he is ostracised by many people, So Mr. Hobson, after 14 years, at the very moment that all the cash ran out,when the last penny had been frittered away, that was when he confessed. Local people are upset with him, tough luck that comes with the territory of thieving from your mates.
Anyway, theres a lot of Kevs and they all know the ropes. Maybe the solicitors can use the very early full and frank admissions in mitigation, after all the client could always have gone no comment and opted for trial.

Snake Eyes

2008-08-25T06:31:00.000-07:00

Young black people are being allowed to die because we aren’t paying for enough Youth Workers to stop them wasting their lives in gangs. Dr. Derrick Campbell says that “Black youths within this country have been left to die. And that’s a very strong statement but it’s a statement that seems to be borne out through evidence about black youths who seem to be at the top of the list when it comes to our youngsters being killed.” Am I alone in hearing too much use of the word “seems” and the despairing last throw of the dice by a patron who can feel the funding sands being washed away from below his feet? Derrick, it is not a big secret conspiracy against the Black Man. It is more that you, your colleagues and your collective works have been assessed and you seem to have failed.

What we have here I think, is an angry and disappointed man, looking on as the structure of jobs and careers of many of his friends, associates and clients in the Race Relations field is dismantled before his very eyes. He seems to think that there is a right to state funding if the cause is noble enough. There isn’t. More disturbingly he really, really wants to be the funding gatekeeper, he wants it so badly you can taste it. He ain’t never going to get it though.

Dr. Derrick has history with “Change Up” which was an attempt to insert a layer between funders and the funded advising the funders where best to put the money. On Operation Trident, he was against because it dealt with gun crime as a Black problem. On gay / lesbian adoption he is against. There is an article attributed to him in a Journal he is fond of using which quotes him as saying “In this so called tolerant society we spout that people have the right to express their preferences, choice and ‘free will’, but being forced to accept something that is abhorrent to true Christians, and clearly against nature, is a worrying situation.” As a concerned observer of equal opportunities, I think it is fair to play the homophobe card for that. If he wrote it, he is in my perception homophobic.

Let’s look for evidence of effectiveness in Dr. Derrick’s bailiwick in Birmingham. One stat that cannot be faked or spun is hospital admissions and they are currently running at one stabbing a day and one shooting a week. In his home ward of Sandwell overall crime has fallen 28% over the last 3 years. Violent crime was down a mere 2.5%. In the West Midlands generally, there is a big, current and growing problem with gang related violence.

Not to worry, there will be lots of diverted gang members coming forward to assist with enquiries……No?

Well maybe the gangs are withering on the vine in the face of Dr. Derrick and his clients…No?

Then surely Dr. Derrick and his clients have helped with advice and information so that the local Police can better target gang criminality….No?

Well then maybe Dr. Derrick and his clients have been paid a lot of public money for quite a few years now and, short of some publications and a growth in their personal client base what have they done? There isn’t much in the way of saving young Black Men going on that I can see.

Dr Derrick is a director of Rights and Equality West Midlands which has posted accounts recently. Yes there was definitely less money sloshing round the REWM coffers last year

Grants 2006 £609,132 Salaries 2006 £75,039 Travel 2006 £3,739 Conferences 2006 £3,344

Grants 2007 £244,760 Salaries 2007 £5,960 Travel 2007 £352 Conferences 2007 £244

In 2006/2007 they applied for grants of £419,147 and were knocked back for all but £80,687. Either a) there isn’t much money going around for Race projects these days or b) the applications were not up to much. I am guessing b)

There were redundancies and a reduction in office space. In both years the lions share of the grants received were paid out in some poorly detailed “Direct Project Expenditure.” REMW is clearly an important local patron to the littler local organisations. From the annual report, they seem to have paid out for

Supporting the setting up of more race cause orgainsations and helping them to apply for their own grants
Setting up Seminars with Birmingham University
Research into race issues
Campaigning and lobbying for more funding
Publications by Eric Seward
More research and studies

Sometimes, its not so much about doing as about watching others do and writing reports.

Whilst we may not be in Lee Jasper territory, I do begin to wonder when so much of the money goes on “sitting, reading and thinking” type activities rather “going out and doing” type stuff.

It isn’t just in the Midlands that Youth Workers have been sucking up a lot of money for damn little result. Look at the streets, look at the young people in gangs and answer a simple question. For all the Youth Workers employed and deployed, are things getting better or worse? Does anybody still believe that any Youth Workers have any magic key to the problem of youth gangs. Worse still, some of them go bad and become part of the problem. There are disgraceful and widespread examples of them enabling the very worst of youth behaviour and surrendering any attempt at moral guidance and diversion.

May 2008 Warwickshire Youth Offending Team worker Zoe Hutchinson convicted of whipping £22,000 in fraudulent benefits

August 2008 Manchester Youth Offending Team worker Clare Greenhalgh of the Intensive Supervision & Surveillance Program convicted of assisting one offender and harbouring another.

The wasters responsible for “Hands Up For Bacup“

As for Dr. Derrick, anybody going that high profile, that national is desperate. He must have promised big. You can hear the conversations now “Derrick, you promised us funding” “Derrick, you said it was in the bag.” “Derrick, I really need another research contract.” “Derrick, without your funding there will be no more Theater Group.”

Everybody place your bets, we have a new roller…………….

Grasping That Rail Again

2008-08-23T06:30:00.000-07:00

Is it religious and racial discrimination or an unfortunate combination of limited ability, arrogance and a rather unlikeable personality? The Tribunal will no doubt tell us what to believe in due course.

Rattling the various skeletons in the Ghaffur closet is no use now. He was promoted to his current position despite them. Nobody gets that close to the top of the Met without a good root through their personal file and a chunk of vetting. Many are an open secret in Police circles. Some of it has come out in a Mail on Sunday article by his first wife. It isn’t a new story, right place, right time, traditional values at home and a mistress down the pub. Obviously religion has become more important in his life these days. So has the compilation of a dossier recording every slight perceived. Nobody ever said “You’re good but not that good” and now it is too late.

Was it bad back in the day? Hell yes, I have a colleague who was told point blank by a Super to apply for a transfer because “I don’t want an f*kin Paki in my Division.” This was only 20 years ago.

Anyway, stand by for a Met Meltdown at their top table. Does anyone really think Sir Ian Blair is a racist or would act in a racist way? I think he’s better and smarter at that part of his job at least. Not smart enough to dodge Tarique though.

Big picture for most cops is that we wish a plague on both houses. Our shift Sergeants and Inspectors have more relevance to our lives than any of these Golden Pheasants busy making the job harder than it needs to be. Watching them blowing smoke up each others fundaments is amusing for five minutes and then you realise how much time, budget and credibility they are blowing on vanity excercises.

Hard Choices

2008-08-20T04:53:00.000-07:00

What I think is this :-

How Low Can You Go?

2008-08-18T07:35:00.000-07:00

What does a criminal have to do to get the maximum sentence that the law allows? When is bad enough, bad enough? It is just smoke and mirrors. 10 year maximum, dont make me laugh, it will never, ever happen. Im beginning to think that I will need to round up Magneto, the Green Goblin and the Reincarnations of Hitler and Stalin, all busy repeat offending, pleading not guilty and showing no remorse to get anywhere near a maximum sentence for anything.

As an example, I give you, after much hard work and a lot of legal hoop jumping, Philip Thompson (27 years old, lives with Mum) a man who made a very good attempt at collecting and distributing all the child porn. He was nailed by a top piece of work by Scotland Yard. Is this man merely a collector of child abuse pictures? Hell no, this man was the librarian for an on-line paedophile ring. He had hundreds of thousands of images with thousands at SAP 4 and SAP 5. For those of you with a strongish stomach, SAP 4 is penetrative and SAP 5 includes bestiality or torture. Ill just say it again, he was the librarian, the gatekeeper to an on-line international cesspool with thousands of members. He collected and he distributed child abuse material. He was at the centre of a massive international ring of child abusers and child abuse picture collectors.

What does his honour Judge Michael Taylor give him? Indeterminite with a minimum 3 years 9 months. The maximum Judge Taylor had to hand was 10 years. The judge said he was very dangerous and a significant risk to the public. What could have stayed the judges hand? Of course..there is a tariff guidance set by the Sentencing Advisory Panel. According to this 10 years is for the real sick cases who are re-caught filming themselves at work or distributing. This guilty man was a kingpin, a real life, international big hitting, child abuse picture distributing bad man. He can have had no doubt as to what he was doing or how bad what he did was. In any reasonable system, we should be saying he is bad enough for the top whack. If anyone badder comes along, they should be getting the top whack as well.

For me, this illustrates the problem with the approach taken by the Panel. They start from a premise that only the unspeakably depraved and evil deserve the top sentence and that anything less should not feel the full force of the law.

I think this must be wrong. It is always possible to imagine a worse offender than the one you have to sentence. Reserving the full sentence for this hypothetical diabolical criminal lets the courts water down the sentences for those who are just as deserving of the full term but not quite so evil. In effect, evil people are treated leniently because the courts have taken a view that there might be someone worse.

It hacks me off.

Further On Up The Road

2008-08-17T07:33:00.000-07:00

Spare a thought for our evil twins the Criminal Defence Solicitors. The most they can hope for is no longer the latest BMW, decent schools for the kids and something nice with 4 bedrooms out in the leafy suburbs or the Gucci hamlets. Processing their side of the criminal justice system and soft soaping the presumed innocent through guilt and into mitigation is no longer the cash cow it once was. After years of fairly blatant milking of the legal aid budget the goose that laid those golden eggs has been killed. The government really are pulling much tighter on the purse strings and looking for (and I have to smile here because we have had to dance this tune for years)� efficiency savings. They are also looking at (oh my sides) a Public Defender Service which I imagine as the PCSOs of the Rumpole Brigade. It is now quite possible that the solicitor that turns out to advise your prisoner to go no comment is on quite a bit less than you are. The government are helped by the fact that there has been no shortage of young folks willing to take a law degree and / or undergo solicitor training before turning not to the everyday fare of wills and conveyancing but to the redder meat of criminal defence work.

I hear tell of criminal solicitors re-training, of firms pulling out of criminal work all together, even of firms offering a somewhat reduced level of service to their clients. Even so, many of them are sticking with it. It cant be the money and I doubt it is the pension scheme or the varied and interested people that they get to meet. I am thinking that for most of them it is part vocation, part professionalism, part power trip, part fun and excitement and part security with the known job.

Dont spare your thoughts for the reasons above though. Spare them because they face exactly the same problem that we do. Exactly the same. They have the same monopoly employer, our government, and it doesnt want to pay up for the work it is having done. They have a single employer who sadly also gets to set the rate they are willing to pay for cops. The experiment with PCSOs has admirably demonstrated that there are lots of people willing to do a cop like job with a cop like uniform taking cop like risks for a lot less cash and pension than you ever have to pay to cops. There is still no national shortage of recruits into the cops as far as I can see. With the ever decreasing standards of health, education and physical fitness expected of recruits, it is only natural that we will continue to have a lot of people who are keen to wear the blue suit of truth or failing that the blue and yellow suit of general presence.� It isnt as if we are on poverty wages.

Now I have read about the Federation giving what I see as borderline shadey advice on working to rule and I have read about the Blue Flu idea. I wont be going along with them. Advice like that is just a big flag run up that the Fed arent at all confident in being able to negotiate us much more than the square root of bugger all. It was ever thus. When you are banging your head against a brick wall, you should either stop banging your head or resign yourself to becoming damaged. With the current administration, we are banging our head on a brick wall. Yes there is money out there to pay us annual cost of living matching pay rises. No there is not any political will to hand it over and there will not be until

a) recruitment and retention falls through the floor again

b) the government really, really, really needs us and cant use the Army.

I would not be relying on any groundswell of public opinion in our favour any time soon either.

My Dad used to say that eventually if the pain gets bad enough you do something about it. Sure enough there is the beginnings of a drift out of the job, just like with Criminal Solicitors. Copperfield has gone to Canada, I know of officers I joined with who have quit and moved jobs and /or country. As regards the issue of a government discovering via PCSOs that it can get a police like service for not as much cash, I am reminded of another of my Dads funny little sayings

Once the camel has his nose in your tent, pretty soon you are sharing your tent with the whole camel.

An Unholy Mess

2008-08-04T06:29:00.000-07:00

Slipping quietly like a U-boat from the pen on 22nd July 2008 came a report from the Justice Committee of the House of Commons called “Towards Effective Sentencing.” Apparently after years and years and years of tinkering, reforming, re-jigging and generally trying new stuff every six months it would seem that sadly, we are still on the road to effectiveness. If you have a day to spare, give it a read. It is a rocket up the collective backsides of every Minister and top boss who has been within arms length of the Criminal Justice System in the last decade.

It reaffirms that the rationale behind the Criminal Justice Act 2003 was to ensure that only the most dangerous offenders go to prison. According to the Committee, these new fangled Imprisonment For Public Protection sentences have filled the prisons to busting and the government has not got with the program by building enough prisons to take the additional numbers. The Committee were upset that the courts of the land were not abandoning prison sentences for community punishments when there was no issue of public protection. Where the Committee and I think public protection begins are not likely to be the same but I see what they mean. It doesn’t take a Harvard MBA to work out that legislation like the CJA2003 was going to send a lot more people down the steps for longer.

The key statements in the report for me though were

“There is clearly a dysfunctional relationship between those elements that are essential to the criminal justice system, stated government policy, legislation (including subsidiary legislation rules and guidance) and sentencing practice (in terms of decision taken by sentencers). This is not a new problem but it is now essential for the nettle to be grasped.” Of the CJA 2003, they said “The Criminal Justice Act 2003 is a particular example of legislation which was not thought through and had inadequate provision for its implementation.”

Actually, it seems to me that this is a pretty new problem. In the last decade we have had how many Home Secretaries? By my count it is 5 of them. Each one proposing reforming and re-shaping legislation that just kept on coming to stand up the talk of re-focus. If my glasses needed refocusing this often, I would be back to the opticians for a refund, pronto. For re-focus, I think it is safe to read “apparently populist and vote winning”

If the report is right, and it feels right to me, there has been much doing with little thinking or planning these last ten or so years. Look at knife crime. Does anybody know if there is any settled view or guidance on prosecution or sentencing that will last until next weeks Mail on Sunday? I don’t.

Any idea what next year’s fashion in Policing will be? Me neither but sure as eggs are aggs, some commoditised research will drip from the Home Office to ACPO and Neighbourhood / Community Focus will be chip wrappings. “What were we thinking? How could we have been so wrong? The new way is clearly so much better.”

We live in an time that seems unable to draft a law that does what it says on the tin for the big stuff. Keep a dangerous terrorist suspect in check? No can do. For the little stuff, we excel in stitching up Joe Public. Overfill your bin, that’ll be £110 please. Don’t like the way you parked, reach for your wallet please. Just and idea, why not get the people that draw up all this small stuff legislation that hacks people off but works with swiss watch efficiency to write up the big stuff?

At the risk of repeating myself, the Criminal Justice System is big society and life changing stuff. If you are going to mess with it, it is always a good idea to think things through from the front to the back. I think the concept was called “joined up government.” In practice that was just another sound bite.

#Stop Press#

House of Lords Constitution Committee looks at the proposed legislation for 42 days detention. I quote “Far from being a system of checks and balances, this is a recipe for confusion that places on Parliament tasks that it cannot effectively fulfil and arguably risks undermining the rights of fair trial for the individuals concerned.”

The government’s desire to increase democratic accountability was “understandable”, but risked “conflating the roles of Parliament and the judiciary, which would be quite inappropriate”. The peers also said the “elaborate” decision-making process would give a far greater opportunity for legal challenges to arise.

For this mess the Government ran a 3 line whip? This was the big well thought out 42 day detention system? Ahh well its not like this reform was important or anybody was watching or interested. If it ends up being a dogs breakfast, who will ever know?

Doing Something Right?

2008-08-03T06:56:00.000-07:00

I learn that I have been voted number one law and order blog by the Witanagemot Club website. For those that voted thank you very much. It has been a while since I won much of anything (An R.E. Prize of all things some 26 years ago).

Same Old Same Old

2008-08-01T05:28:00.000-07:00

A round up of some of the better things defence lawyers have been saying in the courts this week

Fox Shot

A couple convicted in Liverpool of causing multiple fractures to a 1 year old child. What do the mouths have to say in mitigation?

For Her : Nick Ryan, defending, said that the woman has no previous convictions. She has been in violent relationships. She is still in a relationship with Curry and her daughter is in care and to be adopted.(muted hooray).She had become isolated from her family but her sisters were present in court so possibly bridges could be re-built between her and her family. Result, a walk out. Well done Mr Ryan.

But oh dear, waiting to shoot Mr Ryans fox outside court were those self same sisters. Ready to build bridges? Errrm not really. They expressed fury at the fact she was not jailed. One of the sisters, who had traveled from Manchester for the case, said: She has always been a liar. She has always caused trouble and is not vulnerable as claimed.The picture painted in court is not her at all. We wanted to see her jailed. No doubt Mr. Ryan was merely representing as he had been instructed by his clients (or accepting and flowering up any old guff as I call it).

Septic

In Doncaster there was a 30 year old American gent convicted of sending naked pictures of himself to a 15 year old girl. He even sweet-talked her into meeting him at an airport and a hotel.

Enter the mitigator Richard Haigh, defending. He said the girl had told police how much she wanted to be with Smith, describing the relationship as a level playing field. (She's 15, Mr. Haigh). After the hearing, the teenagers mum said Smith had ruined her daughters life and she hated him for what he had done. She said: Her friends told us she had gone to the airport to be with him. Thank God they told us because who knows what would have happened to her. (I have a shrewd idea Mum. I bet Mr Haigh does as well).

Treading The Boards

In Devizes a 49 year old theatre director is convicted of molesting a 14 year old boy. He gives the boy fags and booze. He is already convicted of exactly the same thing in 1996. He has gone to the cops because he thinks his victim and the victims girlfriend will try to blackmail him. Neil Saunders, defending, said it was important to note how the offences came to light and that at no point did the victim not consent to what happened. (Well no Mr. Saunders he was 13 and 14 years old at the time, he was obviously giving unconditional informed consent). He said his client had not groomed the boy for the abuse in any as he had shown friendship to many youngsters he met through his theatre work. (Free fags and booze conveniently overlooked in mitigation, how errrm unsurprising).At the time of the offending he said Young was depressed after the breakdown of a long term relationship. (Of course he was and how better to cheer yourself up than abuse a child).

Up In Smoke

In Wales, a burglar cuts himself at the home of a pensioner victim and leaves blood at the scene. The victim finds a trail of blood in her hallway and all four rings on the gas cooker turned on. On top of a radiator was a box of matches with one burnt match underneath it on the carpet. The clear inference is that the person who had cut himself breaking in through a window was prepared to cause the property to blow up or burn in order to disguise the fact he had left his DNA all over it.

Serial burglar Wayne Charles Mathias, 22, was later arrested and admitted going into the house but claimed there was a second man with him. He told police he had left first because he was bleeding so profusely, leaving the mystery accomplice behind and said that man must have turned on the gas. Jeremy Jenkins defending, said: He accepts his blood was on the match and matchbox but says that was because he went outside to have a smoke while he was there. Mr Jenkins, words fail. I suppose at least your client was going outside to smoke in his workplace.

Nothing much changes week to week and I will guarantee to find similar on any given week. There is a total lack of shame and, so it seems, no comeback.

You Pays Your Money..

2008-07-31T07:33:00.000-07:00

Thanks to Hibbo I have a new strapline.

Nightjack - Whining Eloquently Since February 2008 �

I think it has a ring to it. As regards YLAALOH (aka DaveH aka Tuppers aka Tupperware PC), its time to re-instate the tough on trolling, tough on the causes of trolling policy.

I woke this morning to Radio 5 and was not at all surprised to hear that defence solicitors were just a little bit upset about all the penalty notice giving and cautioning that is going on at Police Stations these days. As I understand it one of their sources was a specialist Criminal Defence Solicitor Digby Johnson of The Johnson Partnership. They possess a very amusing and informative website. They never prosecute.

Proving that anything can be made Daily Mail ready with the right spin, the line is that some offenders are getting off lightly by being PNDd or cautioned when they should be charged and sent before a court. Hmmm.

Digby said: The criminals play the system day in day out. They admit the offence quickly to qualify for a ticket, which is the fastest way of getting out of the police station. Nothing to do with costing you fees for representing them at court then? They are going to play the system anyway, so why not let them do it in the way that inflicts least demand on the public purse?

I have my own spin which is that Police, CPS and Court time is being freed up and costs reduced by the expedient of dealing swift, summary justice to those minor offenders who admit their crime. I look forward to a time when the C.P.S. lawyer actually has some time to read the file in front of them before they attend court. I hope that officers will be back out on the streets faster with a caution than with having to fire out a full file and then deal with the inevitable CJS and CPS memos before wasting half a day not being called at court. I hope that courts will be able to give longer and more careful consideration to the facts and arguments before them.

Most of all I hope Criminal Solicitors and Barristers have a good long think about killing the goose that laid the golden egg by screwing the system for every penny possible until fixed fees and central contracts caught up with them. Every defendant deserves the best possible defence? Sure, just as soon as every victim gets the best possible prosecution. Roll on the Public Defenders Office so that both sides can be represented by underpaid public functionaries.

Given that we are now hauling in people that we never used to, in cases that may be criminal strictly speaking but are so minor that they should never see the inside of a court, caution has got to be a good way forward. Where it goes wrong is lots of cautions for the same person and the cautioning of those who should rightly be prosecuted. I am sure there will be some very errrm expedient cautioning decisions made out there by various Inspectors. Some folk say that we do it to jack up the detection rates. Maybe we do when the alternatives are

a) Let them go / look the other way (see credit card fraud)

b) A toe curlingly awful meeting with the CPS followed by putting together a big file for a small job, followed by lots of memos, followed by a wasted day in court being called a liar by the representative of a guilty person.

c) Swift caution / PND and back out for some more coppering.

Can't Get There From Here

2008-07-28T07:32:00.000-07:00

The comment so often thrown at Police as we haul the latest public order / minor assault arrestee away from their loved ones is Why dont you go out and arrest some proper criminals like murderers and rapists. This makes it sound like there is some large pool of murderers and rapists that we could be bothering instead. There is no such pool and the arrest rates for murder and rape are pretty good. We put a lot of time and effort into murder and rape. I think people want us to do that. That cynical comment from the public is however a pointer. There is clearly a perception abroad that we work only to meet arrest and detection targets. There are meant to be desperate coppers thirsting to meet their monthly detections allocations and thereby criminalising matters that should have been left with a word of advice. A lot of people seem to feel that the Criminal Justice System has stopped producing any justice.

On a totally unscientific sample of readers over the weekend, one of the reasons for the developing fracture between the Police and the policed is the strongly felt perception that in order to meet arrest targets we tend to go after the easiest targets. I dont think this is the case. I think the truth is that we are going after targets we never have before and some of them are very easy to pot because they comply. They comply because they are decent folk who dont know any better.

At the risk of repeating myself, let me once again rail against the National Crime Recording Standard (N.C.R.S.) and the resultant automatic criming of many trivial incidents. This happened because those who govern the nation, those who control the law and those who manage us do not trust us. Why should they? We went political for Mrs. T over the miners strike, we generally dont vote to the left, we tend towards an un-nuanced view of politicians expenses claims, we are harsh and blaming towards criminals and sceptical of non-custodial interventions. there are reasons enough. They began to suspect correctly that we cuffed crime. Here are some anecdotal examples.

When I joined 15 years ago, it was acceptable to attend an incident of domestic violence where there had clearly been an assault and to mark it off as no complaint and advice given.

There were towns where there were no windows broken by criminal damage, only accidents where a stone must have been thrown up from the road by a passing car. In 1994 I was bollocked by a local DS for criming such a broken window even though the window was broken with a thrown car jack.

Youths attending certain stations would be offered bail in exchange for writing off a certain number of crimes. We werent too ethical about whether they did them or not, we just used Taken Into Consideration offences to bulk out the detected crime figures.

Playground fights that the participants walked away from were never ever crimed. Heck where there had been any minor assault that was basically an agreed fight, we would hold off writing up the crime report, speak to both sides and see if we could persuade them to drop the matter, then write it all off as advice given.

Excellent local performance in detections or in crime reduction could be the result of a little local book cooking. A new Detective Sergeant would realise that abandoning the bad old ways might mean a crime figures catastrophe that they would be blamed for. The system was thus to some extent self perpetuating.

Now perception is important, and over time, what with the McPherson Report and the like, those who employ and manage us became convinced that we were unfairly ignoring and otherwise failing to deal with crime allegations from minority groups and other socially disadvantaged types. They looked for a way to ensure that everybody got a fair shake of the stick and so was born the hated database specification and control procedures that we call N.C.R.S. It was signed by ACPO in April 2001 and fully implemented by 2002. It was designed, and has grown, to be an auditable straightjacket of procedures designed to ensure that every crime from a slap in the face to a bullet in the head got treated the same. Report, Record, Investigate, Arrest, Detect. Thus it was that the detection became King.

These are the principles in it.

2.1 All reports of incidents, whether from victims, witnesses or third parties and whether crime related or not, will result in the registration of an incident report by the police.

2.2 Following the initial registration, an incident will be recorded as a crime (notifiable offence) if, on the balance of probability:

(a) the circumstances as reported amount to a crime defined by law (the police will determine this, based on their knowledge of the law and counting rules), and

(b) there is no credible evidence to the contrary.

2.3 Once recorded, a crime would remain recorded unless there was additional verifiable information to disprove that a crime had occurred.

Note the language will result in the registration of an incident report will be recorded as a crime. You can take it from me that from 2002 onwards, Her Majestys Inspectorate of Constabulary absolutely hammered any Constabulary that did not have such a system in place. From then on, it was just a matter of time and ever increasing criminalisation of behaviours. As soon as Tracey realised that she could get That slag Donna properly locked up with a phone call complaint, guess what Tracey did? Better than going on Jeremy Kyle, nearly as much fun as Springer UK. Every green biro merchant and bitter ex with a grudge now generates an incident report and if the facts in the report can be shoe-horned into a crime, a crime is recorded and allocated to some an officer who is tasked to investigate it. That officer must either solve it or write it off somehow. The system of compliance auditing has tightened so much that even the old sweats (5+ years) with a black belt in writing off rubbish jobs find it is now more work to write jobs off than run them to conclusion. Writing a lot of jobs off is not a career move either.

So when your 12 year old daughter gets arrested for a playground fight, it likely isnt some keen officer thirsting for an easy conviction to round off the month. It may be, but the likelihood is that for the officer it is just another complaint ground out of the N.C.R.S. sausage machine and s/he just wants to get it dealt with so they can move on to the next one.

A Survival Guide for Decent Folk 24/07/08

2008-07-24T06:26:00.000-07:00

A Survival Guide for Decent Folk
Paul has posted a number of lengthy replies on the “Modest Proposal" thread. In these days of us increasingly having to deal with law abiding folk who have fallen foul of the “entitled poor” and those who have learned how to use us to score points and exact revenge, I thought it would be a good idea to give out a bit of general guidance for those law abiding types who find themselves under suspicion or under arrest. It works for the bad guys so make it work for you.
Complain First Always get your complaint in first, even if it is you who started it and you who were in the wrong. If things have gone awry and you suspect the cops are going to be called, get your retaliation in first. Ring the cops right away and allege for all you are worth. If you can work a racist or homophobic slant into it so much the better.
Make a counter allegation
Regardless of the facts, never let the other side be blameless. If they beat you to the phone, ring anyway and make a counter allegation against them. Again racism or homophobia are your friends. If you are not from a visible minority ethnic culture, may I suggest that that the phrase “You gay bastard” or similar is always useful. In extremis, allege sexual assault. It gives us something to bargain with when getting the other person to drop their complaint on a quid-pro-quo basis. This is particularly good where there are no independent witnesses. When it boils down to one word against another and nobody is ‘fessing up, CPS run a mile and you, my friend, are definitely on a walk out.

Never explain to the Police
If the Police arrive to lock you up, say nothing. You are a decent person and you may think that reasoning with the Police will help. “If I can only explain, they will realise it is all a horrible mistake and go away”. Wrong. We do want to talk to you on tape in an interview room but that comes later. All you are doing by trying to explain is digging yourself further in. We call that stuff a significant statement and we love it. Decent folk can’t help themselves, they think that they can talk their way out. Wrong.

Admit Nothing
To do anything more than lock you up for a few hours we need to prove a case. The easiest route to that is your admission. Without it, our case may be a lot weaker, maybe not enough to charge you with. In any case, it is always worth finding out exactly how damning the evidence is before you fall on your sword. So don’t do the decent and honourable thing and admit what you have done. Don’t even deny it or try to give your side of the story. Just say nothing. No confession and CPS are on the back foot already. They forsee a trial. They fear a trial. They are looking for any excuse to send you home free.

Keep your mouth shut
Say as little as possible to us. At the custody office desk a Sergeant will ask you some questions. It is safe to answer these. For the rest of the time, say nothing.

Claim Suicidal Thoughts
A debatable one this. Claiming to be thinking about topping yourself has several benefits. If you can keep it up, it might just bump up any compensation payable later. On the other hand you may find yourself in a paper suit with someone watching your every move.

Always always always have a solicitor
Duh. No brainer this one. Unless you know 100% for sure that your mate the solicitor does criminal law and is good at it, ask for the Duty Solicitor. They certainly do criminal law and they are good at it. Then listen to what the solicitor says and do it. Their job is to get you off without the Cops or CPS laying a glove on you if at all possible. It is what they get paid for. They are free to you. There is no down side. Now decent folks think it makes them look like they have something to hide if they ask for a solicitor. Irrelevant. Going into an interview without a solicitor is like taking a walk in Tottenham with a big gold Rolex. Bad things are very likely to happen to you. I wouldn’t do it and I interview people for a living.

Actively complain about every officer and everything they do
Did they cuff you when they brought you in? Were they rude to you? Did they racially or homophobically abuse you? Didn’t get fed? Cell too cold? You are decent folk who don’t want to make a fuss but trust me, it pays to whinge and no matter how trivial and / or poorly founded your complaint there are people who will uncritically listen to you and try and prove the complaint on your behalf. Some of them are even police officers. Nothing like a complaint to muddy the waters and suggest that you are only in court because the vindictive Cops have a grudge against you. Far fetched? Wait until your solicitor spins it in court and you come over as Ghandi.

Show no respect to the legal system or anybody working in it
You think that if you are a difficult, unpleasant, sneering, unco-operative and rude things will go badly for you and you will be in more trouble. No sirree Bob. It seems that in fact the worse you are, the easier things will go for you if, horror of horrors, you do end up convicted. Remember to fake a drink problem if you haven’t developed one as a result of dealing with us already. Magistrates and Judges do seem to like the idea that you are basically good but the naughty alcohol made you do it. They treat you better. Crazy I know but true.

So there you go, basically anything you try and do because you are decent and staightforward hurts you badly. Act like an habitual, professional, lifestyle criminal and chances are you will walk away relatively unscathed. Copy the bad guys, its what they do for a living.

The Hungry Sheep Look Up

2008-07-22T06:28:00.000-07:00

I keep seeing little green shoots that I hope are recovery of some of what might make our society work a little better.

The prisons are brim full, crime is at record low levels, there are record numbers of Police. I am thinking that somebody somewhere might care to connect these three facts. Despite the best efforts of Jack Straw and the Sentencing Guidelines Council to persuade the magistrates and judges not to send convicts down, we keep building good enough cases and they keep getting sent.

The D.W.P. is talking about removing the crutch of unconditional benefits payments from those who would want to let us pay for their lives forever. It’s still just talk mind you but at least they are talking. They are also beginning to get interested in how many sad smack heads we are subsidising and looking for ways to get them into treatment.

In Portstmouth, the council has made a big U turn over a little matter. It was only £500 for a charity that helps wounded servicemen back here. At first the council wrote a mean spirited little letter full of “could cause offence to ethnic minority groups who may also have experience of injury / violence due to the war.” Now I am no expert at literary criticism or redaction but I will bet my next cup of coffee that the person who wrote that nasty little post-script has at least thought of showing solidarity with the “Stop The War Coalition. As usual, they are trying to take out their angst on an available, but wrong target. Anyway, the local and national press got after the story and the council paid up and made a grovelling apology.

It’s a little thing, a small step back in the right direction and it made me smile after a long day interviewing a “special needs” suspect and then planning for a “borderline fit to interview” suspect. How busy? Busy enough.

Rejoice, Rejoice!

2008-07-18T07:31:00.000-07:00

What an interesting week to be a Cop. Gordon Brown and David Cameron sounding tough on the Evil Poor. In that vein, I really like the Rogerborg phrase Entitled Poor.

Then the Home Office announces Radical plans to cut red tape and give the Police more time to get on with the job of reducing crime.Then I looked at the Green Paper. Ah Stop and Account, so clearly a really bad idea, has been given another 6 months of half life. Why?

To cap it all, the Crime Figures are out and thanks to the clear minded, consistent and principled political leadership and guidance bestowed upon us over the last decade or so, we have somehow managed to reduce crime in just about every way that you can. Im going to stick my neck out here and suggest that record numbers of cops have clawed back some of the ruinous back office stat collecting waste of hours and that we have indeed filled the prisons to bursting with the right people. What works reliably to reduce crime? More Cops and fuller prisons. Its a fact.

Then I read the detection rates and well overall down 2% on last year. Specific clear up rates are

Violence Against The Person 49%

Sexual Offences 30%

Robbery 20%

Burglary 13%

Car Crime 11%

Not very high really. Still, the overall numbers are apparently dropping away so although we are a bit less likely to solve your crime this year, you are less likely to suffer crime in the first place.It isnt as if anybody believes the crime statistics anyway. How do you measure fear?

Its just quiet, too quiet. Sitting here waiting for the other boot to drop, I have this horrible foreboding that the main reason we were allocated the hand held data terminal P.D.A. thingummys was so that we can do our paperwork out of the station in the car or in doorways thus pumping up the time on the streets percentage. Actually they are a good thing, just not as good as working at reducing the actual amount of paperwork. Oh and bad bad news to lose and about as secure as you might expect.

I also have a feeling that the apparently abandoned top-down targets will be replaced by locally accountable targets enforced locally. I expect that locally elected Police bosses will be just as rancid, just as soon as they figure out that the public will vote for cheaper or nastier.� That is of course if the public dont vote in some extremist ideologue with an agenda somewhere between Happy Talky Talky and the Gestapo.The arbitrary targets big stick wont go away just because the Home Office stops doing it, because the Home Office have just passed the big stick to somebody else. Sure enough, here come the challenging, locally set efficiency targets in Chapter 7. Local Police kicking for local people.

I still dont see anything about returning discretion and encouraging risk taking coming back, just more about recording what we do to show we are accountable, necessary and proportionate. More policy, more no-one ever got in trouble by doing it by the book leadership and direction.

You know what? Police Reform Green Paper, same stuff, different bottle. Increased civilianisation to lower costs, more blame allocation mechanisms dressed up as accountability, more erosion of the office of Constable. Look, Jacqui, the miners strike is over, they lost. No, it is true that we dont tend to vote Labour. Sorry didnt know you took that so personally.

Ninety Nine and A Half Wont Do

2008-07-16T07:30:00.000-07:00

Well, no post yesterday due to going out for beer and curry with Mrs. Night. Today, I have had a chance to read through the Home Office report into Youth Crime. So what has stuck in the memory from this?

5% of young people commit about 50% of youth crime

Non-negotiable challenge and support

Make the parents take responsibility for their children

Make custody better at reforming youth criminals

No prosecution for knife carrying for the under 16s unless you get caught twice. (Hmm havent heard that one touted much in the media)

Groups of Street Social Workers and Ex-Gang Members to roam specially selected streets doing outreach. (Am I alone in having some concerns about whether this approach is going to deliver much value for money?)

I think back to some of those weary and resigned conversations that I have had about the youth crime problem. They are the sort of conversations that go on in Police cars and canteens the country over. What it is, the young offenders, there are just not that many that arrive out of left field with no hint in their upbringing that there would be trouble ahead. Oh there are always a sprinkling of tearaway toffs looking for a bit of glamour and credibility on the dark side, but they are not common. What is common is becoming a career criminal when everyone over the age of criminal responsibility in your family has a CRO number (criminal record). The banter usually goes that it would save everyone a lot of bother if we took Juniors prints and DNA early. The chances of a child from one of our local generational criminal families coming out straight is just unbelievably low.

Having been in the cops for over 15 years now, I am in the sad position of starting to see the children that I first saw as littleuns during house searches coming through the custody office doors taking on where Mummy and Daddy let off. Take the Garners from the Cannonrail Estate, Ma Garner had a good number of bad sons all of whom were busy burgling and beating from puberty. School exclusions were pointless in that they never willingly attended anyway. The only daughter managed a dynastic marriage to the estates number one cannabis / amphetamine dealer. The sons of Ma Garner left a slew of children across the estate and all of them soon developed the swagger and arrogance that comes from knowing that you can do what you like and there will be no comeback.

I am guessing that the above will strike a chord with other officers. There are Garners in every town and I am hoping that these are the families that the government are aiming at. I do foresee a problem with this though. It relies on hardened criminal families who live by graft to knuckle under and take their kids in hand. I have my doubts about whether this will happen. If it gets left to Social Services, I have a near certainty that everything will go wrong. Now there are Social Workers who will stand up, be tough and be non-negotiable, but there are many who are supine to the point of being enablers. Social Workers just dont tend to do confrontational. When faced with aggressive, assertive and anti-social parents, they tick the box and run for the door or in extreme cases, they just make up the paperwork and hope nothing bad happens.

There are definitely parents out there who need a good dose of challenge but I am not sure that Social Services are up for the job. To be fair, I'm beginning to worry that there might be a few Police Officers not up to a bit of non-negotiable challenge either but thats another story.

The report calls them families in chaos but from where I am, there isnt much chaos, just a cold eyed, professional calculation of what they can get away with. By and large we are dealing with people who have an encyclopedic knowledge of the more complicated recesses and allowances of the benefits system and a decent solicitor on speed-dial. Eviction from the estate will not hold many fears, just as long as someone else keeps paying for the roof over the head and of course, someone else always will.

Ow! Ow! Ow! Ow! Ow!

2008-07-13T05:25:00.000-07:00

Mummy, why is Daddy banging his head on the wall over and over again?

Well, that is because Daddy has been reading about the the Home Office response to knife crime and it upsets him.

Aversion Therapy! That's the big idea, aversion therapy. Now I thought that aversion therapy was generally regarded as dangerous and pointless by professionals but I must be wrong because the government seems to think that showing knife related offenders people with knife wounds will stop the offenders from offending any more. Should work a treat, just like it did in the 1960s with gayness. Apparently seeing gruesome injuries is a much better deterrent than being sent to prison. Stop wasting money repeating tactics that have failed. Do something that works.

Let me say it again but slower and louder.

Let us search people on suss again.

Make carrying an offensive weapon in a public place a serious no bail go to jail offence.

Sit back and watch the knife (and other weapon) crime rates fall.

Thats it. Create conditions where it is too much hassle and too much risk to carry a weapon in a public place. You want less knife crime then act like it. Parading criminals round the A&E Departments of the UK is a daft idea and I think you probably know it. Tasking the Police with doing their bit and giving them back appropriate powers to stop and search that is a good idea and will tend to reduce weapon carrying. After that its down to families and schools to get the message in young.

A Complex Issue

2008-07-11T05:24:00.000-07:00

On 9th July 2008, the Home Office and ACPO announced new measures to improve conviction rates in sexual assault cases. It is clear from the wording that they are actually concentrating on rape. The British Crime Survey tells us that 5% of all women have been sexually assaulted and that of this 5% only 15% report it to the Police.

Of the reports that come to the Police, 70% never make it to court and of the ones that go to court only 6% are convicted. Now all of the women that report a sexual assault to the Police are not necessarily from the group who mention being sexually assaulted to the British Crime Survey. I can say as a matter of certainty and personal knowledge that some of the women who report sexual assault to the Police are making malicious, vexatious or charitably, mistaken complaints. I just dont know how many of them there are as a percentage of the total of complainants. (See post below it may be in the worryingly high region of 40%).� Some women do lie about being raped but that shouldnt be a reason to assume they are lying from the first. Leaving the liars aside, it still seems plain that an awful lot of sexual assault cases are not going anywhere near a prosecution. Rape is a serious offence so this a matter of real concern.

What the Home Office and ACPO proposes is as follows

Sexual Assault squads. (Well I think it is, but it may be only let your good investigators near a rape enquiry.)

We never visibly doubt a complainant ever.

Acknowledging that most sexual assault allegations are between people who know each other.

An extra £2.5 million funding per year split between Safe Centres, Sexual Violence Advisors and Victims Charities.

Strip the problem down to the core and it comes down to investigating the issue of consent. Regular readers will know that I investigate my fair share of rape allegations and it is fair to say that the stranger rapist cases tend to be more straight forward because consent is usually easier to negate. Bluntly, if you have to beat her up on waste ground behind the supermarket first, consent is not going to be your best defence. Where things get horribly complex is where the victim and offender know each other. We have already redefined consent to make it harder to assert you believed there was consent. I cant think of anything else we could do that wouldn't be overpoweringly unfair to defendants.

Juries are just notoriously reluctant to convict where the woman can be shown to be drunk, flirtatious and / or in an existing relationship. Where the couple know each other and are going out or otherwise together juries want a lot of convincing. They are told to look for reasonable doubt and so they are looking for it. This leads me to the conclusion that the only way we are going to deliver this new ambition is to get on with some quality investigation and push the burden of failure onto the C.P.S. and the Courts.

The first question in the C.I.D. office when a rape comes in is Is it a proper job? Now this is shorthand for does the victim, suspect, circumstances and available evidence fit into what experience tells us is a genuine case or are there some of the warning signals going up at an early stage that the allegation is errrm problematic. The answer to this question can,and frequently does, prejudice the course of the investigation. If the investigating team don't believe the victim, what chance for a jury?

I think we should suspend judgement until we have a good pile of statements, scene examination, full victim account and any CCTV at all before deciding anything. Then punt the whole lot to the C.P.S. for charging advice. At that point, the case will never get any better and if they wont authorise, then that is the end to it. No amount of Home Office or ACPO foot stamping will encourage the evidence fairy to sprinkle magic dust on a job that doesn't have enough evidence for a jury to convict on.

Understanding context is all. I have had a case where the victim was absolutely drunk and went with the offender to a hotel but the context, witness statements about before during and after, scene, CCTV, camera phone trophy pictures, were all together sufficient to convict of rape. I have had another case which looked like a proper job when it came in, early complaint, tearful drunk victim, offender known to victim and also to her current boyfriend. It fell to rat-droppings with the recovery of CCTV of the victim leaving the club with her hand down the suspects pants and her face all over his. This detail was entirely absent from her account. It is always the cover up that kills you.

Consent is as easy to allege as rape, investigation is what supports one account or the other. We are good enough to work out the difference most of the time.

On re-reading, this post is a bit like a paper from the Department of The Bleeding Obvious - University of Neasden but I stick by it. Sometimes it is good to state the bleeding obvious

I Said Can I Get A Witness

2008-07-10T05:22:00.000-07:00

Everything is going so very well, the witness has remembered every detail in Kodachrome detail. As I listen, the wide screen movie is rolling in my minds eye. If the jury could see these moments, see that what is coming out is recollection, not invention, if they could feel the power of the witness putting themselves back in the moment.Then comes the tricky bit as I say OK, now we need to get this as a statement. Far too often these last few years, I see the dark clouds roll into the witnesses eyes, then they look away from me and don't ever look back. The shoulders dip lower, they shift in the seat unable to find comfort, it is body language of the fear setting in and the words I dont want to go to Court with this or similar are spoken quietly and pleadingly. There seems to be an infectious fear abroad in the land that to be a witness is to put up you and yours as a target for retribution. At the top end of offending, where we deal with the organised and drug gang related criminality that may be a well founded fear. Lets be straight about this, there are groups out there who kill grasses and routinely set out to intimidate and discourage witnesses as part of their way of life. There are very good reasons for witness protection programmes and witness anonymity. If the reluctant witnesses were confined to these types of crime, I could understand it, but people appear scared of saying anything on the record about anything these days except.
Cant you just lock them up with what I told you?
I dont want to get involved
I cant sleep for worry
I am scared I might meet them, their mates or their family in the street afterwards
Cant somebody else tell you?
I am too scared to go to Court

If I have heard these once, I have heard them a thousand times. Nobody wants to be a witness. I am not surprised by this turn of events. It isn't as if the Criminal Justice System treats witnesses and victims as anything other than potential liars who can be messed around and abused at will. In a legal system like ours where the defendants are assumed not to have done it, any witness who says that the defendant did do it must be initially regarded as lying to the court or at best mistaken in what they say. Conversely, any assertion of innocence by the defendant is accepted at face value unless disproved beyond doubt. There is an inbuilt, unspoken, underlying, systematic prejudice in the system against prosecution witnesses. We drag you around the country and cancel you at no notice. We sometimes make you sit with the suspects in the generally unpleasant atmosphere of Court waiting rooms. We expect perfect recall of events and statements 6 months after the event because we are incapable or organising a Crown Court trial any quicker. The system will look at your background and your personal life. I have known some of the larger criminal practices take on private investigators, not to research the evidence, but to research the person giving the evidence. It is all part of the system, part of testing the credibility of the evidence.

As for where the balance of truth lies, well look at the Criminal Bar, some barristers have a queue down the corridor and some are waiting for the phone to ring like a down at heel P.I. That is because some are better than others at presenting a narrative of guilt or innocence to a jury. Some are better at gaining a conviction and some better at staving it off and they are known by their reputations. I digress.

We have an adversarial system, an us versus them system and now the people are coming to realise how it works and often they want no part of it. Conscious decisions are being made every hour of every day not to get involved in the Criminal Justice System. There is nothing good in it for prosecution witnesses, only problems ranging from inconvenience to extreme intimidation. Yet one thing that a defence team dreads is a witness box parade of credible witnesses all pointing the finger at their client. The prospect of that happening is enough to provoke a proper guilty plea in many circumstances before anybody has to get in the witness box.

Well, perhaps its now past time for us all to start making choices about how we want to live. Do we want to stay living scared and see things get worse or do we want to turn the corner and start swimming back to the surface? It feels to me like some of the mechanisms of civil order, like willingness to testify, are starting to slowly slide away. Are you going to let fear of criminals and thugs rule your lives, blight your family's lives and pick away at all that is still worthwhile? The solution is in your collective hands. The Police can help you get to those sunlit uplands where you can live without paralysing fear but you need to understand that we cannot carry you there.

It remains a fact that we dont enforce the law and uphold the peace as some perverse, autonomous excercise in controlling society, we do it because you ask us to do it for you. The alternative, in the end, is to live behind your doors hoping that the locks are strong enough. For us to do our work properly, we need you just as much as you need us.

Oh Dear, What A Pity, Never Mind 03/07/08

2008-07-03T09:11:00.000-07:00

The Police Station Representatives and The Criminal Bar are mortified. Letter have been sent to editors, complaints have been made to governors, maybe there will be questions in the house. What has got them so very fired up? It’s a TV program, a piece of court procedural drama written by, wait for it, wait for it, one of their own, a barrister. It’s all the work of Peter Moffat, the same guy that wrote Kavanagh QC and North Square which were altogether cuddlier in portraying the legal classes in their noble fight against corrupt and / or incompetent cops and CPS Lawyers. Moffat has had the temerity to suggest that sometimes criminal solicitors and barristers will shape and suggest a defence to fit an accusation. Who would have thought it?

There are some very high horses being climbed on. From the Bar Council’s Timothy Dutton QC we have

“The drama shows barristers acting in breach of their professional obligations. In episode two a QC encourages a client to provide a false defence to a court – a grave breach of professional conduct that would be grounds for the barrister to be struck off. The Bar Council is very concerned at this portrayal of a profession which works to the highest ethical standards.”

I am thinking “What all of you, all the time? Pull the other one Mr. Dutton for you will find it adorned with many tinkling bells”

Then Mr. Dutton adds

“Publicly funded criminal defence practitioners continue to serve the public in the most difficult circumstances. Even though the system is chronically underfunded, they act to the highest standards. Counsel’s first duty is to the court and to the interests of justice. Criminal justice is not a game and it is a travesty to suggest practitioners see it in that way.”

And I am thinking “But Mr. Dutton sir, when we talk to each other off duty with beer, that’s exactly how we talk about it, as if it is a game. When we talk to your colleagues during breaks in the case and at the case conferences, that is also how we talk about it, openly, without embarrasment, we laugh and joke about how much of a game it can be in the courtroom. You seem just plain wrong and badly informed, almost like you don’t get to talk openly to the many specialist criminal lawyers that deal with the every day criminal cases.” Sure enough, criminal law is not listed as one of his specialities. His bag is Administrative Law, Professional Discipline and Professional Negligence. He seems to do a fair chunk of work for the Law Society when they take on malpracticing solicitors. None so blind as those that cannot see.

From the Law Society we have a rather more dignified and credible silence. They know they have a small but noticable problem that I may have mentioned a bit before.

God forbid that anyone would think that some of the station reps, solicitors and barristers at work today are bent, lazy, incompetent and wedded to taking the expedient option every time. Everybody knows, because the lawyers keep floating the idea when there isn’t a proper defence, that it is the Cops that are lazy, incompetent etc. etc.

It doesn’t feel nice does it when you all get tarred with the same brush?

All Quiet 02/07/08

2008-07-02T09:23:00.000-07:00

A day spent navigating the familiar waters of the middle reaches of our judicial system (Crown Court). I am not done yet, home for a bite to eat and to re-introduce myself to the family then off again into the night to explain to a victim and family what has happened and what is likely to happen.

It’s always better doing this sort of thing face to face. Justice of a sort has been sort of done, well as much justice as this victim is getting, which is less than they wanted, but all they will be allowed in the public interest. To be fair my big boss has offered to take the bullet as has the C.P.S. Prosecutor and the barrister but my back is broad, I have few career aspirations and I can tell it straight.

See you in the morning, don’t wait up, this could be a long night.

The Redundancy Of Courage 01/07/08

2008-07-01T09:06:00.000-07:00

So another march in London by some hundreds of friends of another knifing victim. I heard them on the news on the way home, all talking about how this must stop and young people must be dissuaded from carrying knives. It isn’t futile, it just feels like it. It will feel futile because when we wake up tomorrow, the streets will not be littered with discarded knives and guns. Indeed a few more people may have chosen to carry knives because the news scares them.

It will be a long and slow road back to a position where young men (and that is mostly where the problem is) always settle scores with fists and feet rather than knives. Using any weapon in a fight between lads used to be seen as a sign of weakness and cowardice. Not any more. The knife is a great equaliser. Bigger, stronger, fitter, more skilled fighters will win a fist fight but a knife can counter a lot of physical advantage. How did we get here? Acceptance, refusal to punish properly, the hamstringing of stop and search to serve a political motive, a court system that treated knife carrying as a smack on the wrist type offence, allowing drug dealers that fell between the gaps in the National Intelligence Model to prosper unwatched for a decade and allowing gang culture to spring up in many towns and cities without ruthlessly breaking it and beating it down.

The Police are at least in part to blame for the situation. I don’t think we saw the problem until it was upon us. Whilst our bosses were busy ticking all the new boxes, rooting out racism and drawing up five year plans, we lost focus and we lost the streets. I could be wrong on this, but it feels that way where I work. We didn’t do it on purpose, neither did the judiciary, the lawyers, the teachers, the parents, the social workers (well some of them) or the government, we just seem to have missed a massive growth in knife carrying in young people and allowed drug gang culture to become established country-wide. We all messed up.

Would you believe that Ms Cherie Booth QC has been talking sense today on this very subject. She was at the House of Commons and said when asked about tackling knife crime this is what she said…

It was a tough one, she conceded, but the answer was to take the “glamour” out of crime. Too many young people equated respect with weapons – the idea that “the ones who get the girls and the flashy cars are the ones who carry knives and guns”.

“Respect is a word that comes up a lot – but it’s not the sort of respect that the government’s respect agenda is talking about. It is almost a distortion of the word respect,”

“I think this idea of taking the glamour out of crime and making a highly visible police presence which actually cracks down in the way we have seen in Hackney, and actually harries the criminals is actually a good approach,”

She’s right about the ones with knives and guns getting the girls and the flashy cars, she may not know that they are also the ones nearer the top of the local drugs market. Also it is not almost a distortion of respect, it is a distortion of the word.

I did like the bit about a human rights lawyer urging me to harry criminals though.

She has apparently recently been talking to people who are actually affected by knife crime or dealing with it every day. Amazing what a dose of reality can do for a person. Maybe the message is getting through. Maybe we’re near the bottom and heading for the surface again.

To quote another blogger “Say Not The Struggle Naught Availeth”

Gone…Gone Now 29/06/08

2008-06-29T09:21:00.000-07:00

On the Saturday morning when the ambulance arrived she was already going to die. Nothing could save her but she was still conscious and speaking. It had started of with a phone call “Come quickly, my wife has set herself on fire in the kitchen” The ambulance service copied it in for us because they know we are always interested in an Asian female burn victim. Asian, female, early 30’s, married, 2 children, burns over 70% of body area.

Her husband was also admitted with bad burns to both hands. On his release from treatment, he was to spend a less than wonderful 14 hours in a Police cell not of his choice because as the only other adult in the house at the time, it was felt that he might just have had something to do with his wifes’ condition.

It is amazing how quickly assumption can set in. When I did a countback on day one of her painful road to death, she had been asked the same question by the ambulance paramedic, two doctors, two police officers and four nurses. They all asked “Who did this to you?” and to each and every one, she replied along the lines of “Nobody, I did it to myself. I want to die.” I don’t think any of them entirely believed her.

In the following weeks we had a number of anonymous phone calls from people who wanted us to know that just before the lady was set on fire, her husband was seen by a friend of a friend going into the house with a petrol can. There were also anonymous calls that there were rumours that after we bailed him, he had made admissions to setting his wife on fire to un-named friends I got the job of chasing these vital and informative leads down.

As the “Blue Mackrel” count got to the point where either he had done it or someone was trying their best to fit him up, I did a bit of background. Turns out the unfortunate husband was a nephew of “An Important Community Leader.” Turns out the information came from relatives and friends of “A Slightly Less Important and Not At All Bitter About It Community Leader.” The rumours of confession were a time absorbing utter dead end. I never did find the person who saw the husband with the petrol can either. Not very surprising as her accelerant of choice was bar-b-q lighting fluid. I say her accelerant of choice because the scene and the forensics told their own sad tale. Depressed but not taking her medication for some weeks, she had gone to the loft, fetched down the bottle of lighter fluid and drenched herself in the bathroom. From there, she went to the main bedroom where a number of burned out matches on the carpet by the bed told their own tale of either frustrated failure or failure of nerve. More dead matches on the stair but no signs of ignition until we get to the kitchen. She used a gas ring.

Well alight, she ran into the living room where her husband and two children were watching Saturday morning TV. Too late already, her husband knocked her to the floor and beat out the flames with his bare hands. That's how he got the burns. One child fetched a bucket of cold water and poured it over her. Another fetched the phone for the father which brings us back to where we came in.

I guess it is a lesson about a little learning being a dangerous thing. Everyone pushed the honour killing button straight away because everybody reads about honour killing and far fewer read about the actual suicide rates. You can usually tell one from the other, it just takes time, care and investigation.

Thumper 28/06/08

2008-06-28T09:20:00.000-07:00

It’s been a busy few days at the office. No names, no pack drill but I have been very occupied with finding a stranger rapist and I think we found him. It is now 3 days since I had any meaningful contact with my family. That is however “The Job” and if you can’t get fired up to work a stranger rape case, you should quit CID for something less taxing.

We got our man by Mark 1 bobbying and then had it confirmed on the DNA.

Three hours into the interview, it became, as it often does, an issue of consent. Did he get extraordinarily lucky with a woman he just passed in the street or is he a liar? The jury hasn’t even been sworn yet so I don’t really get to have an official opinion. He is not devastatingly handsome a world class comedian, famous or rich.

What I will say is that in every memorable interview, there is a “DOH” moment when you point out the flaw in the cunning plan or the killer fact that does not fit in with the story to the extent where it demolishes the story. This interview had a big “DOH” moment and the suspect’s face went through surprise, horror and anguish in about 3 seconds before he dropped his head and began to cry.

From then on, his left leg was trembling and shaking so much that every rabbit in the county was looking round nervously and fleeing for the burrow.

Cop U Like 26/06/08

2008-06-26T09:19:00.000-07:00

Hat tip to the Binary Surfer for spotting this bit of blue sky thinking 10 year plannery. The full report can be downloaded from here. The key words seem to be “mixed economy of provision” and “user led culture” with some references to “10 year franchises” and elected police chiefs. As I read the deathless prose of this politcal kite flying paper, my eyes grew heavy and my sight grew dim…….

….”Right people” said the Chief Investigator, “these are the new corporate ties. You should already have your new id cards, see me after if they haven’t arrived. OK, thanks. The old CopperCo paperwork goes in the bin from today, from now on we are D-Tect Inc. You’ll get your induction packs at the meeting this afternoon. Now if we could just settle down for a minute, this is the new induction cast.”

He fired up the office wall screen and over some suitably dramatic music, a couple of young, attractive actors in shiny new visi-yellow and black easi-clean combat patrol kits were pictured driving through a bleak estate in their newly liveried Vauxhall Volta.

“Oh sorry people, that’s the one for Effico, they start providing the uniform response here next week. Jack could you sort this out? Whilst we’re waiting if you haven’t heard, there are still some teething problems with the custody suite. Apparently the CabooseCo people left things in a bit of a mess down there when they went bankrupt on their contract and whilst ClinkInc are doing their best, the new software isn’t really working yet so its back to paper.”

Having dialed up the right presentation, we watched in silence as our American Executive VP told us how proud we should be to be providing detection and investigation services in this great new franchise. Graphs showed how D-Tect Inc had been able to bring cheaper and more numerous detections everywhere they went. All I knew was that as one of the few ex-sworn officers left in the office, I was mighty glad that my pension and commutation had been ring-fenced when we were forced into the new contracts. I didn’t really talk about the pension in the office, not when so many colleagues had come in on the crappy company scheme.

The company presentation segued into another PR piece from the Chief of Policing Services. She’s up for re-election for another 5 years on a platform of visible, cost effective policing. There were the usual shots of her visiting places, seeing people, doing stuff and then a “to camera” bit about this visionary and strategic partnership with D-Tect over the next 10 years. We should all be prouder to serve our communities and D-tect and the Chief would help guide us towards serving them better, (but for less money). No mention of the revised cost and performance targets yet but that’s only because her and D-Tect don’t want to scare the horses just yet.

Maybe I should have gone with the transfer to the National Security Agency (Regional Group C) with the other guys but you know, I always felt good about policing the place I live in and the commute into the city is a real killer. It hasn’t got any cheaper since the road tolls came in either. Thats where the “real cops” the ones with warrants are these days, Regional Group C Area Office 2, but we don’t see them round here much. I see some of the guys from the old days when they do come over to our place but they don’t have much time for chat and they always look sort of ground in tired.

Some of the Supervising Investigators have just swallowed the pill and lost their paid overtime and we had also lost two “Junior Jacks” who had their contracts canceled early. Good people but apparently not needed in the new process model. That’s real workforce flexibility for you. One thing that’s stayed the same, we still can’t go on strike. Damn but it was too hot in the office, well we had started hot desking 5 years ago when the Property Company doing the lease back on the Operations Centre hiked the rent and CopperCo moved us into the one office.

“OK people” said the Chief “Show’s over, back to work hahaha.” I laughed politely. “Oh and one last thing, I’m afraid we’re stuck with the old canteen franchise for another 2 years..Yes I know but they keep coming in with the cheapest bid.” ………

I woke sweating and uncomfortable
It could never happen here……….but then again it migh

Smith #2 25/06/08

2008-06-25T09:18:00.000-07:00

You may not believe it but at work today I was still thinking about the Smith appeal. Coming back to read such a lot of interesting comments was a genuine treat, thank you all.

I have a few additional observations

There is little in any of MOP’s posts that I take issue with. The idea of an independent CPS lawyer could be modified to a barrister to assist the judge as an “honest broker.” No axe to grind and perhaps more palatable to the wigs and gowns than C.P.S.

It is always good to hear opinions from the defence side of the tracks and I have personal sympathy with the views that Ben put forward. One of the very effective things that a defence can do is to test the credibility of a witness as a means to undermining the credibility of the evidence. Sometimes, for example keenly contested rape trials, this can leave an unpleasant taste in the mouth of all concerned and it can degenerate into character assasination and the parading of underwear. At the same time, it must be said that Iain Smith floated the idea that the anonymous testimony was organised by an embittered ex-girlfriend as a way of settling her score with him. Obviously without knowing the identity of the witnesses, there was no satisfactory way found for his defence to test this assertion.

In their judgment, the House of Lords did openly acknowledge that there is a live and serious problem with witness intimidation and that it was open to Parliament to legislate to allow witness anonymity in certain circumstances. They also pointed out that even if Parliament takes that course, the jurisprudence of the Strasbourg Court is against it.

Also in their judgment, they made reference to how successive reports into Northern Ireland failed to find a way past the common law to witness anonymity. I reflect that there is a good case to be made that in those conditions, the worst excesses of sectarian gangsterism went largely unchecked and in the end, the bad guys won a very handsome settlement at the negotiating table.

Jury trials are great and get it right a lot of the time, sometimes in the teeth of the evidence. It sometimes feels like they are the embodiment of Lord Denning’s rule “The little old lady always wins.” A properly directed jury is a powerful thing and we should do all we can to retain it. They are a decent weathervane as well. I think back to the change in the law regarding death by dangerous driving prompted by widespread refusal of juries to convict on the more serious charge of manslaughter.

Rogerborg and Hibbo raise the spectre of Police / noble cause corruption. Only a fool would deny that it goes on. I cannot support it from either side. The system we have is adversarial but relies on the particpants keeping within the rules. Take that away and it’s just another tyranny with added perversion of justice.

Paul argues “the thin edge of the wedge” and of course it is. My guess is that when anonymity became briefly usable, there may well have been some people who saw it as a method of settling old scores and doing down the opposition. Some may even have seen it as a short route to compensation (though how that might work I am not sure.) Some may have cut a deal for parole or reduction of existing sentence. I think everyone in the world is always a little suspicious at the jailhouse confession but still these are sometimes punted up to us as a lead to be followed. However, I also think that it allowed many witnesses who were in genuine well founded mortal fear to give truthful evidence safely without having to undergo the traumatic upheaval of witness protection. I also think that those people made up the majority. Lets try a thought experiment on the Smith case. Did the witnesses come to the police with their story ready burnished or did the police find them only as a result of diligent enquiries and manage to get them to say what they had seen only after much persuasion and the assurance of anonymity? I don’t know, but the trial judge did know or could properly have asked for the full circumstances. I believe he did. Context is important and we are not all thick cops who would jump on any band-wagon trailed before us. Score settling and perjury are issues that our Senior Investigating Officers are very alive to, more importantly so are trial judges. If we get legislation, my gut feeling is that it will be left to the judge on the facts of each case.

The bad character legislation has gone some way to allowing equality of arms in letting the jury know about the relevant bad character of defendants. The defence were always keen for the jury to hear all of the relevant evidence about witness convictions and police disciplinary findings but for some reason were very reluctant for a jury to hear evidence of the defendants relevant convictions. It was one of those long held legal principles of the common law that previous convictions didn’t count, you came to every court appearance with a clean slate. This change was, I think a good thing and a good enough example of how a long established sacred cow was looked at carefully and sent to slaughter

The accepted wisdom / cliche about our system is that 10 guilty men go free so that one innocent man is not convicted. It is a noble idea but I think that if the 10 guilty men are murderous sociopaths, for example, there is room for a debate as to whether society wants to continue bearing that risk. They have a right to say no we don’t. The law is not set in medieval aspic, neither is it some shibboleth. We have set our faces against trial by combat, evidence by torture, the ducking stool, The Witchfinder General and the Star Chamber,they are all long gone. Sometimes, a law needs changing. Sometimes after very careful thought, a long held principle may be found to have become inappropriate to current circumstances.

Has this bulwark against the tyranny of the State become a bulwark protecting the tyranny of the street?