Gosh! CPS ‘decide’ to prosecute TSG officers and let a jury work out guilt. Where will it all end? The allegedly beaten up guy is reputedly an Islamic terrorist with brown skin. If anything happened it was over 7 years ago. Not guilty one would expect. Babar Akmad, isn’t he the President of Iran, the one who fiddled the last election and is building nuclear weapons, the jury may ask, until they realise the ‘dinner jacket’ is missing?
We have no idea what the truth is and little chance of finding out, seven years after whatever happened. Should the real trial here be into why the authorities can’t come to a speedy conclusion on whether to prosecute? Babar will be subject to all kinds of innuendo on terrorism, the police officers TSG complainants record suppressed and so on.
What is the aim of this trial? Surely it’s not about the assault, if there was one. That would have been better dealt with at the time. So what is the point? To prove CPS decisions not to prosecute in other cases right? After all, killing innocent Brazilians as a result of idiot SMT fannying around inertia is OK and lies about ‘stop, armed police’ irrelevant when not heard by an civilian witnesses etc. The shooters at Stockwell should have been protected by the truth not the pack of lying cover-up that did ensue.
What mistakes did these officers make? I suppose they could have killed Babar and then brought in a bent pathologist to screw the evidence forever?
Keystone Cops make mistakes – everyone more or less goes Keystone when adrenaline kicks in. Why do we not recognise this in law? I’ve seen it, done it and know I’m less prone to it than most. Our cops do a lot right and plenty wrong. The ‘wrong’ on one poor lad in Manchester was not wearing a stab vest, though I guess IG and others can tell us these are not the best kit anyway. I was never worth any such consideration.
My guess as to what is really wrong is that cops cannot admit mistakes. People generally have massive trouble with this, so why should we expect better? Officers working in such contexts as terrorism can expect human bombs, hatred towards them and all kinds of threat. They may be asked to work on good or idiot intelligence – most in the latter category in my experience – but you can hardly go in expecting chummy to have fled, never lived where others claimed he was under 24/7 observation and so on. Officers recently got far too close to Moat in my opinion. They should have been able to give him the options of putting his gun down or being shot from 50 yards, the distance a sawn off is probably useless at.
We should come down very hard on unnecessary police violence, but clearly can’t do this in a manner that prevents decent decision-making and the use of force, or encourages entirely the wrong kind of cop not to take action in order to keep noses clean. There are plenty of these.
Police are probably the best bit our our sad justice system. Once again, officers face the fall, not prosecutors who made the wrong decision and not whatever jelly has organised the law as it is. Not least in this, we should be asking why Babar has managed to get all the legal support he has when Ian Tomlinson has not, and why victims in our system can’t get it either.
It could be that Babar is an innocent victim of police violence. It could be that four officers are the real victims. Seven years on the CJS has made sure we will never know. If we were on the jury, how could we seriously put what we ‘know’ of Babar to one side? How could we do the same on what we ‘know’ of the TSG? How can this trial take place given the publicity when others have been set aside for this ‘reason’? One assumes these officers have served for a further seven years without ‘smacking anyone else about’ – what of ‘rehabilitation’ if any was necessary? The news now is referring to Babar as ‘terrorism suspect Babar Akmad’ not as a bloke arrested against whom nothing could be proved.
One country I worked in (by no means the worst) locked up 10% of its male population overnight and tortured a few. This is a long way from a few slaps. Many of us would welcome the return of the ear-cuffing Bobby and tough action against the ‘evil poor’. We still send unarmed officers to weapon situations (and some get shot). There is a lot more Jihadi rot around than we admit to. Threats of violence are so common according to IG and our local cops that they are ignored.
The situation is a dire mess. We are in danger of leaving the argument between factional idiots of failed liberalism and groupthink denial. I regard most of my local town centre as off limits, and the ‘answer’ is to put up alcohol costs. The war against drugs is lost and now part of the very problem warred against. It can’t take seven years to bring a section 47 charge, except where the offender absconds, yet it just has. This is no justice whatever happened. All we can be sure of is lawyers making money. If this case can be brought, so can one against Paras for Bloody Sunday.
All we know is we can’t trust our complaints and court systems – but this is in all directions from failures with so-called antisocial behaviour to banker-smurfing, weeding out useless and lying cops whilst protecting the decent majority better and so on. On terrorism my guess is that any real, organised threat would already have us living in dread – look at how effective the IRA was. If society was a scientific research programme, we would have abandoned it long ago for something based on different assumptions. Academically, the legal-economic Lakatosian paradigm (enough said surely?) is thought to be in a state of decadence.
This trial will surely collapse as intended. The CPS claimed the bent first pathology on Ian Tomlinson would have prevented a conviction. What then of its own earlier decision not to prosecute – does this not give reasonable doubt in the same way? What’s the ‘new evidence’ – that judges and juries are not as dumb as they suppose in their deliberations?
The officers are, of course, ‘already guilty’ in the Guardian Court – http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2010/aug/12/babar-ahmad-police-abuse-verdict
If Babar is actually innocent this is an example of just how dire the system is. If he really is a terrorist the same is true, only in spades. I have no clue as I have seen nothing like evidence. I do know much of Babar’s defence would not be available to me – I’m atheist and do not qualify for legal aid. Somehow, being called a godless bastard doesn’t get into political correctness and speech crime.
This is a show trial to cover-up massive incompetence. At worst, both parties are guilty and this cannot be proved, and the incompetence will never get into the open so we can do something about it. In the meantime, nothing will be done about immigration, other than some more propaganda about how good it is for us, good lads will die ‘protecting’ us far away amongst jabber about hearts and minds, aid will flush down other toilets in reduced amounts and the rich will get richer, the idiot cuts mentality will produce economic decline (as it did in Japan) and they will find a traditional solution to depression (world war) on some pretext or another. How can we expect any reasonable solutions when we allow such unreason as fundamentalist religions, or a reasonable jury of our peers when a large minority base their reason on creationist myths and a powerful Big Brother in the sky? One can have religion reasonably, but evidence is another matter. CCTV should be an aid in preventing false allegations. Soccer can’t even do this. Even on something as simple as this, we can’t get things right. Time for some home truths about our general inability to take part in democracy.
The Mail produced this on ‘the British’ – http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1302482/UK-slams-Irans-lack-respect-vice-president-claims-Britons-thick.html
There is, sadly,some truth in it. Iran is not exactly a fine place either, but argument needs to get at basics, not just have people ‘rowing’ as in recidivist domestics. Our level of argument is sadly as pathetic as the Mail article. We need the passion in, but there has to be some ability to know one is wrong in the face of real evidence. Very few have this ability, whether British, Iranian or whatever. This is partly why we have courts rather than mob rule, but it is time to do things differently. The evidence is of system failure.
The Telegraph reports the usual story of a large number of assault complaints against the officers (70) with only one not ‘in-substantiated’. Most were from black or Asian men. The call is for a judicial review, but it’s time for a Public Enquiry. Either we have a dire public complaining over sod all, and particular ethnic groups inclined to do so, or we have bad cops being encouraged to be bad and we need PSD and IPCC sackings. My personal experience indicates the latter, as does PALG, INQUEST and any victim I’ve talked with (not scumbags). Worse, I suspect PSDs and IPCC of only investigating the most idiot complaints and wasting our money on them – those involving clown officers and clown complainants – and evading the ones raising the real issues. Whatever the case is, and I believe the problems extend across the public sector dealing with crime, there is no capacity to investigate fairly, a matter than extends from the many victims who die or have their lives ruined, to innocent people jailed or mistreated because investigations are not impartial and thorough, but skewed towards prosecution.
One other possibility is that all complaints against police are false and our society is full of false complainants. This means nearly all of us who have dealings with cops (CIVITAS) and feel let down. The IPCCs local resolution nonsense makes everyone, including cops feel badly done to. Hardwick, the clown leader of IPCC, says this shows they are dealing evenly with everyone! The madness is in deep.
If these cops did what Babar says I have no problem with them getting the bullet (literally) – but how can we ever know? If it’s clear enough for conviction, it was clear enough for other cops to stop, arrest them and deal with it. It would also have been clear enough for the IPCC investigators. If these allegations (which have worked in the civil case) are true, it follows the complaints system is likely rotten to the core. One answer would be to abandon it and let the public go straight to legal aid supported civil action. Note a suspected terrorist can do this, but not some poor sod suffering years of anti-social crime like Mr. Askew and hundreds, probably thousands more left to live in fear.
Allcoppedout's Blog 
My own sympathy errs towards the officers in this case. Much worse has surely been done by others, and whatever they did (or not) is clearly not as bad as cover-up. I faced almost a year of investigation for rendering someone unconscious in an arrest – though not with the iron bar I took off him which smashed the window behind me. In truth, he got ‘shoed’ by others at the now closed nick I got him to on my own. I was too exhausted to stop this. Not what was said in court, so am I now liable? He nearly killed his family a few weeks later on bail. I saw very little unnecessary police violence, though some I did was farcical and very ‘Keystone’. The question is why the bad stuff is not reported by other officers and brought reasonably into the open.
Recently, a retired senior detective has published a PhD on cuffing, nodding, skewing and the rest – all true. A Kent PC,revealing the same years back was vilified, on the sick for ages and finally got rid of. What should worry us is the chronic system of lying and juking and the impossibility of whistle-blowing.
To blow the whistle, one needs to know the system will be reasonable. I usually thought it would not be and have only seen things get worse.
One has to wonder what the actual evidence on the assault is, rather than what courts determine, as our courts have a habit of ruling out much that is relevant.
“Should the real trial here be into why the authorities can’t come to a speedy conclusion on whether to prosecute?”
Oh, yes. Yes indeed.
I was the opposite of a brutal police officer. False claims were laid and never successful. But real complaints meet the same end. Crap thinking, crap system – the fatal nexus of politicians, professionals and managers rule through the unfairness. We can do better, but they have no intention of giving up their privileges.
Fantastic, insightful article. I wish more cops were like you.
http://peterreynolds.wordpress.com/2010/08/13/british-justice-on-trial/
Thanks Peter – but I haven’t been a cop for 25 years now. I still meet many who are perturbed in a different way than Gadget though.