Ambush Predator made the interesting point that ‘jobsworth’ has almost replaced ‘brave’ as a kind of public sector ideal these days. The newspapers are full of stories about emergency services’ people hanging around while people die for all kinds of dire ‘reasons’. No doubt much that is good goes unreported too, though this is much less likely in these PR days. My own view tends towards the idea that we are just seeing the tip of an iceberg and we aren’t linking the sightings very well – it’s not bad apples, but a rotten orchard kind of thing.
Most cops I’ve got to know since I left the job (long ago) don’t think there is much corruption in the UK. They tell me they just never see any. In my old days, we thought there was none in uniform, but probably was in CID and plain clothes (uniform officers in plain clothes). I did work with a bent uniform cop – he was a burglar. It struck me when I was a cop and now that anyone bent would be unlikely to tell me they were. I’ve worked under-cover and it is very difficult to get in to even minor networks unless you have rather special resources and a lot of time. The bent bastards, by their very nature, are a kind of secret society.
The “professionals” involved in the Baby P saga should be named, shamed and treated like criminals. Those cops found guilty of corruption should be treated in the same manner. So should our bankers and Enron merchants. I doubt more than the Telegraph’s ‘Saints List’ of our MPs and Peers should have survived into this Parliament. We should be coming down hard on the jobsworth and corrupt – instead we still come down hard on whistle-blowers.
It’s very hard to tell the difference between a good cop and a bent cop at times. Good cops have to break rules on informants to get information, but others are bent and really get used by certain types of informants. I imagine even social work can have its ‘Dirty Harry‘ form – nursing certainly does. I slept with someone once to get closer to an enquiry. It was no big deal (no doubt what she says!). I knew I was taking chances, in much the same way I had going into burning buildings before the fire brigade turned up and so on. I was as likely to change a spare wheel for a nun as the infamous Norwegian tourist with big tits – more likely to be honest, even though I’m atheist.
Cops who think there is little corruption probably don’t work where the loose money is. Whilst practised in ‘hard talk’, they are probably virgins who don’t notice what is going on around them. It took Dutch police to unearth very high level corruption in the Liverpool drugs scene and a lot of undercover work to pull out the pathetic bent cops in the Colin Gunn case. You have to remember in this that cops decide what gets investigated and often put forward diversionary cases they know will come up smelling of roses. Across the public sector, we need new approaches to investigating corruption, but also the wider incompetence form of jobsworthiness and its role in promotion and supervision.
In the UK, we have a habit of allowing the bet to supervise and investigate themselves – the City being the most obvious. We also make corruption investigations very hard by not allowing wire-taps and modern IT-based equivalents. Even where there is hard evidence, it is unlikely that an ordinary member of the public can get a fair investigation – we lack modern and sophisticated understandings of public scrutiny. The junk statistics on crime are a classic example. Crime rates have been falling forever, as the police force gets bigger and bigger, with no one really believing any of it. If we had independent projects running alongside a few random police dealings, we’d soon see they cuff the majority of crime and dissuade people from reporting it through jobsworthiness tactics that make people think it isn’t worth it. Burglaries have been coming down forever, but not my home contents insurance – burglary being the only claims I have ever made. You should get the reasoning. There are places to look other than police statistics. I joined just at the time shop burglaries were coming down like falling off a cliff. I was not personally responsible – alarms were making the difference and we saw an increase in ‘burglary dwelling’ – the villains just move their activities, and this is what they are doing now.
The jobsworth ACPOs do get bonuses and are on massively inflated salaries – so how close is this to corruption – indeed are they more corrupt than someone with fingers-in-pies old-style who does actually nick some bastards as a result? For “ACPOs” you can read all kinds of people across sectors, such as Vice Chancellors, Town Clerks and so on. This isn’t a police matter, it’s ripping the fabric of our society – indeed it may now even be stealing this and taking it abroad – the villas in Spain etc. (mine is far away from such loutish intrusions).
The key issue for me is the way we never really get open enquiry into our public sector. A few posts back I mentioned that California created a prison empire that costs it 11% of State expenditure and has not improved its crime problems. Prison officers and prison builders did very nicely, thank you. My guess on the UK is that we have a massive CJS feeding a lot of people very well, but which hardly catches anyone other than the desperate crime palookas who give themselves up every so often. I know I can’t have a fag in the pub, can drink the far more dangerous alcohol but not draw on some hash and that even willing cops can’t do much about crime inspired because of illegal drugs, and that I see (in passing) roulette games on television quoting the odds wrong, bullshit selling techniques all over that rip-off grannies and all kinds of crime nothing gets done about. My MP should be investigated, but he won’t be. They will keep on intermittently nicking very ill, very sad bastards and doing nothing for them, and nothing for the areas they are dumped in. This is corrupt. Who keeps making the money from it?
I’d shoot a lot of our low-life criminals in much the same way as I’d put down a rabid dog or a faithful old hound in pain. This kind of ‘social cleansing’ has been practised more than virgin liberal prudes can admit to themselves. The Nazis, incidentally, are only one example amongst many, from the unlovely Athenian Democracy, through Moses (Numbers 31) and god knows how many more from the Balkans to the Baltic and all over. You may wimp out at the ‘cull’ – yet would you if your pretty 14 year old daughter was about to be introduced to drugs (easier than you think) and become a slag-hag by 20? We probably don’t want to licence any State with such a ‘cull’ – but we need some thinking about it as a thought experiment that at least considers how victims feel. Police are often so crap victims would be better off killing the vile crooks and doing the time. Ghastly outfits like JUSTICE, Liberty-wankerdee and Human Rights Watch make things worse by focusing on to middle class concerns. They can afford not to want to kill the scum, always making sure they never have to live anywhere near it – or so they think until one of their kids is smacked and coked up and nasty drug dealers have them re-mortgaging. I wouldn’t really advocate killing; yet we need something to stop the roundabout of jobsworth-corruption. The point is that there is a solution. We might have to kill a million people, maybe two million. If the problem is this serious, then what should we be doing about it and why aren’t we? Where are the real employment schemes for not very bright, not very skilled people; what are we doing to stop the next lot of kids moving into the crime networks … and who do we dump these problems on because we can’t build enough prisons or grasp the Rwandan nettle? Liberals, of course, could always save the day by taking in scum families and removing the burden put on disabled and poor people. Just see them pigs fly!
tells the story of a bent cop who evaded PV. The burglar cop who was my colleague had CRO for burglary. The same mistakes being made today were around me 30 years ago. Nothing gets learned except how to keep conning the public.
If you want real corruption, nip to Nigeria – http://www.vanguardngr.com/2010/11/jackson-soyinka-condemn-corruption-in-nigeria/ – but notice Paul Boatang in the story and wonder what he has done in the UK. The UK and USA don’t take the lead – http://newsfeed.time.com/2010/10/26/what-a-rotten-world-it-can-be-report-says-three-fourths-of-world-is-corrupt/ – and we may have to face up to learning from other countries.
An awful lot of liberals get paid to keep the system much as it is, failing and stocked out with liberals telling us it ain’t. Cops are even pretending to be hard-liners, whilst actually going along like pussies eating at the establishment zoo, too scared to blow the whistle, bottling it as soon as their mortgage is under threat. These are the same people we are supposed to see as virtuous when they give evidence!
Related Articles
- What a Rotten World It Can Be: Report Says Three-Fourths of World Is Corrupt (newsfeed.time.com)
Allcoppedout's Blog 
This is a really good read for me, Must admit that you are one of the best bloggers I ever saw.Thanks for posting this informative article.
Pingback: Roulette Tops The Chart!! – Roulette For Real Money