When Will The Lying – From Police Statistics to the Economy Stop?

Plato wrote seven books on the training of people supposed to look after society – his Guardians.  I gave up after The Republik – you can get this free on line.  My rating of even this famous tome is dross – somewhere below a Zimbabwean high interest bond.  Students never came into my business maths modules to learn the maths and understand the limited application of such.  They were instrumental, after a piece of paper that would help them get a job.  They restricted their in class learning to being able to do the sums set in tests, not unlike the cops and others in ‘diversity training’ and other hapless nonsense learn ‘correct speak’.

Police statistics across the developed world show a consistent drop in crime.  Cops know there is really an increase in crime.  I’ve heard many comment that the burglars become ‘borrowers from  shops’, that there is a massive increase in fraud, the war on drugs is lost and so on.  What makes sense of the repeated claims that crime is dropping is a proper understanding of “performance management” – and ultimately the old Soviet style of performance management has taken over our societies.  Can you really say the word “targets” these days without wanting to spit?

Not long ago we were being told a new knowledge society was being formed – the left denounced this decades ago as a “risk society” and critique of mainstream neo-liberal, neo-classical and neo-con (there is no alternative) buffoonery stretches back more than a century.  Critique largely comes from people on sinecures of one form or another and largely fails to engage the population at large.

Pretty much any complex formal reasoning is beyond most of our population.  Universal education has largely failed in this respect.  I know plenty of people who can spot that police statistics lie and that bankers lie about their systems and the personal brilliance and risk taking through which they merit vast bonuses.  It is also easy to dismiss cops struggling in the day-to-day lunacy of the Swamp, Reservation and Everglades who believe ACPO are pathetic, careerist pen-pushers (think NHS, Care, Banks too).  This is “envy” or the attitude of malcontents.  The Catch 22 is that to avoid being envious or malcontent one must produce soundly argued critique and any such critique is broadly wasted because the population won’t be able to understand it.  Hence ‘dictatorships of the proletariat’ and other unimpressive top-down solutions that first require proles run towards bullets.

Most banks across the world have undergone ‘stress tests’ since the crash.  Banks in Cyprus passed theirs 18 months back and are now clearly worth as many multiples of a bag of rocking horse droppings needed to produce a big, fat, zero.  The UK and USA are very similar on the debt front on household, corporate and government debt per capita.  The UK has vastly higher financial sector debt.  I have seen no public exhibition on whether this financial sector debt is a good or bad thing, or even whose money is involved or at risk.  I can say, on the other debt, that a 30% wealth tax would put the UK and USA to rights  (i.e bring household, corporate and government debt to the supposedly optimal 180% of GDP).  When polices statistics get in the news it’s very rare for the material to be treated as performance management and the figures are taken at face value.

We are now 5 years post-Lehman and every six months or so the books get cooked again in front of us.  A magician tells us everything is hunky-dory and we get on with waiting for the next bail out – and now post-Cyprus for bail-ins that will take our savings accounts.  Across other performance managed tedium we wait for the next Hillsborough, next Baby P, next Nico Bento, next lousy hospital, next miserable treatment of the disabled and old – and so on.

The simple answer is that our “professionals” are lying to us as surely as any Soviet apparatchik (there the apparatchiks have become the entrepreneurchiks).  What we have lost, if we ever had it, is accounting based on reality.  A question I want an answer to is what would really happen if we collapsed the financial sector entirely, replacing it with small, local banks doing real investment and utility work.  Would we starve, not be able to have homes, medical care and things we really need?  This is a basic question about our security and one would think politicians and media-types would want us to know.

I regard many organisations as much worse than the police – social work, lawyering, accountants, banksters, politicians and my own academy.  The idea of a more “professional” police fore fills me with dread.  Our local bobby and CPSO are fine – the problems are in management and we should be looking at much less of this, not paying it more through professionalisation.

The bankers’ (and I think bankster now the better term) role in our society is not explained so we can understand what they do, and much the same can be said of our managers and politicians across our society.  They all seem to need vast amounts of produced wealth (sort of money) to do these jobs not explained to us.  There were claims not long ago that the financial sector might be producing as much as 40% of our GDP – but now it seems the accounting of this is in multiples of the bag of rocking horse droppings standardised in Value at Risk.  They can make up their accounts and do so based on various fantasies.

We need some good management – but I suspect we can’t get any until the lying stops.  In the police example we keep hearing the same performance management figures and such matters (if we look) as vast increases in the recidivist criminal population that suggest an opposite of any decrease in crime.  Our prisons are full, yet huge numbers of new arrivals already have a dozen community punishments.  Politicians may ponse on about human rights, but keep quiet about the UK (and US) as a very poor place to get legal help and access to justice in the developed world.

I take the guess that financial services are almost entirely criminal and no use to anyone decent (we only need utility banking and would be better off with general rather than ‘personal’ pension plans – to cut fees that destroy much of the investment – and banks that could invest in facilities we need and not chase “international rates of return”).  No one is explaining to us how our contributions to bail outs is supposed to work and why the vastly competent super heroes of finance can’t use their own kryptonite.

We know damned well what would happen if we abolished the police force and I doubt even criminals would vote for that (the rest of us would kill them).  Abolishing ACPO is another matter, as collapsing financial services to utility status would be.  Getting on with management reform after collapsing the lies might even give us more cops and allow guaranteed employment (I’d invest in cattle prod futures on account of our more recalcitrant welfare spongers – including banksters newly separated from their ill-gotten gains).

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Winsor and the fitness of our police

Many police officers may begin to understand what ‘economics’ means from today.  It means working for Chinese wages or being replaced (outsourced) by the likes of my Zambian trained Laotian Guard who work for a couple of bowls of rice a day and shelter.  Our police have been overpaid since the Thatcher gold-seam when they were needed to cosh miners and could pay off the mortgage through overtime.  Of course, ‘overpaid’ is a tricky term when one considers bankster bonuses or compares the Re4sponse (not a typo – you’ll be working for Group 4 soon) officer’s lot with the work done by those in suits I mix with carrying warrant cards, but somehow not doing police work.

What happened in our factories and mines is now coming to the police.  The question not asked is why this has taken so long and who is responsible for that – the answer being the ACPO ranks.  In the factory model they would be delayered and sent packing because they have failed  for so long and would not be seen fit to use the new broom.  They have also failed to do anything to press for substantial changes in administrative law and the rest of the CJS.

There is little doubt we can recruit cheap cops and people with specialist skills, because the rest of the economy is well-shafted.  Muppets have degrees these days, so increasing the qualification threshold will be easy too, though I doubt the IQ average will shift much on account of this.  And cops will now be subject to fat notices and removal if their health fails, much like Boxer in Animal Farm when his health failed.  All  long overdue – so get ready to get down to Gadget-country job centres and take the jobs the Swampees refuse in droves.  This is what you turkeys voted for a couple of Xmas back. The vibrant, private sector cavalry economy.  It would be here even if we’d voted Nulabour in droves – our votes don’t count anyway.  I didn’t bother.

Asked to cost police pay against the labour market, I came up with a £15K basic on probation, rising to about £25K at the two-year mark – the latter only for those working shifts.  I don’t mean this is what I’d want to pay – but it is the comparator I’d stick with as a manpower services consultant.  There is no competition for labour and a glut in this market.   Cops were as badly paid as this until about 1974 when the labour market was tighter.  You can get academics for around £25K.

I doubt Winsor goes far enough for Gadget’s ‘dark lady’.  She should be interested in the unit  costs of police processes and bringing these down to manufacturing levels.  I’m sick and tired of efficiency in these terms.  It’s why Apple has so much offshore money and manufactures in dangerous factories in China – even using a nerve  agent to clean its i-Phone screens because it’s quicker.  We are dumb to believe any of it – but until now cops have been so  dumb they haven’t seen it  coming their way and haven’t cared at all seeing it happen to others,

We have no politics of anything else, so if you want to do anything about it, you’ll have to threaten strike action and then do it.  The standard response in industry is to declare the strikers in breach of contract and replace them.  There is no right to strike in the UK.  Hard times to come and not just in the annual fitness tests!  My best wishes and sympathy – but we all know where that lies in the dictionary.

I’m surprised the Home Secretary hasn’t prepared better.  I’d have recruited some large lads for weekend duty by now, in order to have a black-leg backup.  If you aren’t familiar with Winsor-type plans, there is always another one to come.  This one will be the most acceptable.  Once they have cheaper recruitment under way, they will expand into getting rid of more costly workers through redundancy.  No one cares I have years of varied experience these days because they can get my subjects taught for buttons by someone with a PhD who has never seen a factory – but then, they are teaching people who will never see one either.  You will find they don’t really care about your long-honed skills either.

Police are about to be the latest victims on the war on labour.  The stupid thing is we could all get decent living wages.  I’m off abroad.  I’m too unreliable to remember to switch the lights off.

Don’t Believe an ACPO Word On Modernisation

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/mar/04/chance-to-modernise-police-force – a link to the Lesser Odious Blair – this one the dork who ran the Met.

I spent some time doing organisational restructuring.  It isn’t pleasant and the major “tool” is sacking people.  People are usually the major business cost.  If you can get rid of them you can buy more advanced machines and this usually lets you get – er – rid of more people.  Terms like rationalisation, modernisation, squeezing costs and all kinds of kwality initiatives cover the basic function.

The idea is supposed to be about producing an overall economy that is high productivity, low unit cost.  We all benefit because we end up in smarter jobs, earning more as UK plc vanquishes external competition.  Obvious bolloxs – but most people seem suckered by this drivel – it has a compelling logic but more or less no corroborating data.

Various countries have been stacked up as being better than this than the UK.  The USA, Germany, Japan have all been the lands of milk and honey in the myth.  They never were.  In other countries Thatcher is lauded for curing the British disease, but in fact “Thatcherism” pre-dates the Iron Lady by a couple of decades.

What smashed our working-class economy was international competition – largely a combination of cheap labour putting up with poor working conditions, huge improvements in logistics (particularly shipping), new production engineering requiring greenfield sites, the ability to embody skills in machines and greedy top managers and utterly hapless politicians.

Many sectors of our current economy are uncompetitive, but find ways to look as though they aren’t.  We seem OK with notions like textile workers having to compete with  South Asian sweat shops and child labour, but somehow OK with our cops being paid vast differentials over such distant counterparts – and judges, lawyers, professionals and managers.  There is no evidence they are more productive than their distant counterparts.

So now the cops are putting some of their work out to tender.  In any company doctoring I did, ‘modernisation’ largely involved finding out who was getting paid a lot and could be delayered.  This means cuts to the overall budget – and it does not mean, as Blair glibly states, that this saving will be spent on more vital activities.  It might mean this in a private company where redeploying the savings could increase productivity and sales; but it just will not mean this in the public sector where the spend is being cut.  It means jobs will go through ‘natural wastage’, redundancies and potentially a big axe on promoted jobs through promotion freezes, new forms of ‘area management’ (with fewer managers) and getting management done at lower levels without extra pay.  These are the rules of the game – Blair and other ACPOs hope to manage the process and keep their own fat pay.  If I was doing the job the outcome would be similar, except I’d delayer the lot of them too.

The obvious and rarely addressed problem with all this efficiency is that it only makes sense in an economy with employers hungry for labour and capital hungry to invest in productive economy.  In previous times it has taken the Black Death and world wars to bring this about.  Sent to Japan to see their miracle first-hand, I found low unemployment but also people doing all kinds of non-jobs in banks and government that made our Post Office look like it was running on a skeleton staff (1980s).  There were great conditions in key factories, but also many employed part-time (48 hours a week) on low pay.  It was clear even then they had no answer to maintaining full employment other than government spending.  Though their executives take more responsible pay, my liver is still recovering from expense account spending!

The essential analysis is called business process analysis.  In policing this reveals that much work done is clerical and can thus be done at a cheaper rate.  I would expect much of the management could also be driven down the ranks and senior jobs eliminated under a form of area management,  You don’t hire extra staff, but cheaper new  staff and although you want the management done, you want this to be part of the lower order jobs, not a LOMBARD class (lots of money but are right dicks).

I could knock out a spreadsheet on what changes produce what savings.  As a clue, you cost the average PC with her on costs (pension, redundancy entitlements etc.), get rid of 100 and cost the new staff (say 50 clerks) and their on costs.  You then cash-flow the savings to show break even points.  You bring in a new rank of ‘supervising constable’ (some are currently called area beat managers) and see how many sergeants and inspectors can go.  Keep doing this until you have rid the world of half of ACPO.

The upfront redundancy costs are laid off against future savings and reduced cash-flow.  You might create a new management level with all current ranks from chief inspector of chief super rolled into one and put out to interview.

Alongside this you would look to reduce the number of steps and any duplication in identified business processes – say getting some bastard to court.  Summons, for instance, beats arrest, custody and charge hands down in business terms.

I admit it is complex, but it always means fewer and less well paid jobs with lower pensions.  No one has ever worked out how to do any of this and produce new job opportunities with comparable pay and conditions.  Why would the private sector produce such when it can invest elsewhere at cheaper rates that bring it more profit?  The private sector cavalry is as mythical as Custer  is as a hero (basically he was a money-grubber who led his men on a cavalry charge into a volcano after an act of genocide).

Not only will the jobs that go never return, the ‘savings’ won’t help the economy either.  Wages have flat-lined since 1980 and cash in the hands of our bottom 50% (most cops) has shrunk from 14% to 1 %.  This is why our pubs, shops and so on have disappeared and why much small business can’t make its way – no one can spend unless they borrow and that bubble has burst,  The redundant cop with any sense will pay down her mortgage debt, not go on a spending rampage.  Most won’t get a sinecure in Bahrain to make sure nothing changes there!

I think most would agree our legal system needs modernisation and to be much cheaper.  We would like to see our economy more productive.  The way to do this is through full employment as a right and democratic-approved earnings caps in all sectors and a more equal society which retains (or improves) innovation motivation and getting the work we need done done.  I’ve always wondered why we are so scared of this and why, with chronic examples like the Soviet Union, we are so tamely on the road to serfdom under banking tyranny’s unseen politburo.

Any money saved in police modernisation (I think ACPO so dire it will end up as a cost) will just be sucked into the swamp of money making money a long way from our shores. And our cops will end up demoralised, just as the communities based around mines still are.  The shining economic miracle of the Rising Sun is now the dead donkey of leading government debt.  If they couldn’t do the jobs business why should we think we can using the ideology that failed them?  Sound, capitalist Japanese will tell you cutting government spending actually made their earlier collapse much worse.

Face Of The End Of Policing As We’ve Known It?

This man will not be popular with police officers seeing numbers and resources cut.  The ‘plan’ is clearly to go further.  He has noted that all police pay contains an element of anti-social hours pay while most don’t work them.  I’ve long thought this pay should only go to those working the hours and in greater amounts.  This won’t happen – they’ll just chew out money from those not working the hours.

He’s against of officer class – yet we have ACPO?  He thinks vital lessons are learned as constable and sergeant, so there should be no direct officer entry.  Why not make the same true of the Army then?  Police have a meritocracy?  Not one I’ve noticed.  I’d say we need to recruit and keep good coppers close to the ground, not Peter-Principle them to bureaucratic office-incompetence.

Many jobs that people should hold a warrant card to do (in the sense of the discipline code) have little to do with Response jobs and there could clearly be direct entry to them.  It’s hard to see the ‘bouncers with warrant cards’ on booze-strip patrol needing to be other than part-time and with limited training either.

The complaints that evidence is ‘illiterate’ is bunkum – do we want our cops honest or like lawyers?  Does anyone know the relationship between honesty and skill with words?  Yet one could believe a decline in standards over 60 years because there has been a decline in the standards of our qualifications.  Modern graduates are hardly literate.

The full report is due in January next year.  The chance for meaningful reform will be lost – policing needs reshaping to modern democratic conditions and the basic uniform job needs to be one sought after, not one to escape from.  Much of the rest of police work, given so many end up not on the streets should be directly recruitable – it’s essentially bureaucratic, may require special technical skills not available in the uniform section, and right of passage into it from ‘plodding’ (the hardest jobs cops do) may simply leach the skills needed from this pool.  I’d contend this leaching has gone on to the detriment of coppering for 60 years,

I’d like to see coppering a twenty-year period with regulars supported by part-timers, and seen as the core activity.  Drawing all police jobs from this basic pool that is required to be fit and able bodied is to discriminate against the disabled – and worse against the wider pool of skills in the broad population.

This report, from the pinch-faced weasel, will just be about further cuts, with a little icing.  I’d guess we are paying many of our cops too much, and that this isn’t going to the ones doing the real work.  In the current economy, about to get much worse, we could probably cut salaries by 40% and still maintain the force – I say this because economics is shafted and we are back in 1920 when worse happened.  The chickens are coming home to roost.

Do we rally need to give career opportunities to the uniform preening ass-holes eating chocolate-dipped strawberries and sipping champagne at ACPO conferences – or get a service running with some solid, honest lads and lasses competent in what is actually (like most others) a limited job that demands character rather than skill in weasel words and arse-licking?  He ain’t asked these questions, isn’t Mr Weasel.

Cops I’ve taught as mature students hardly match the ‘think’ image associated with this reporting and when did we start thinking being good with paperwork such an important thing anyway?  It would be the last thing I looked for in a good copper.

Cops Taking Bungs

Stephenson taking £24K (Telegraph) to live in as much comfort as possible is obviously wrong, even though he was ill. It’s weird because he could afford to pay and could probably excuse the Met paying.  He has a long history of turning down bonus money way in excess.  There’s an error of judgement here, but I’m not sure who’s it is.  That it’s connected with the ‘in-crowd’ Wallis stuff makes it worse.  He’s not on the take in brown envelopes here – but could favours of some kind be asked in return?  My own view is that the fact that there was no one about to say ‘no John, think of the impression this could give’ around suggests that he was left with only sycophants around him.  ACPO failed to stop chocolate dipped strawberries and champagne in a similar spree of unawareness.

More interesting in terms of what we generally hold as criminal corruption, is that the former DPP has said it only took him a few minutes to know that ScrewsNews emails were showing ‘dirty cops’.  The ‘bungs’ available to me when I started plodding were cups of tea, the odd bacon butty, curry, drops from the undertaker (£5 for the call to him from a sudden death, £10 if I helped out with the body) and vehicle recovery people and a few offered direct bribes.  I’m not sure how much I was offered in a couple of years.  Later, there were other offers that would identify people if I talked about them like this.  I was told over dinner by a modern police woman that all this is gone.  We were going Dutch, but the owner wouldn’t take the money.  All nothing to do with any police connections – it was to do with me helping him build the bar years ago when he was broke.  I am guilty of eating some bacon and drinking some tea.  And then there was VLP – visiting licensed premises – we did that by lot.  Not having that kind of drink would really have made me a raw prawn.  And I took drinks from criminals for a variety of reasons.  This was the culture and the closer to real money you got, the more opportunities.  What I took in bacon and tea wouldn’t pay from an ACPO’s individual reception bill.  There were cops on much more of a take 30 years ago and I don’t remember more than half-a-dozen dealt with.  The vast majority were more likely to stick a bribe attempt up where it hurts.

The world is much more corrupt these days and there’s more money awash in criminality.  I doubt much has changed.  This isn’t the kind of thing you can get rid of through bureaucracy, though the undertakers and vehicle rescue people have probably been sorted and VLP has gone.  Society has become more corrupt from selling pensions and mortgages to compensation culture and the rest.

There has always been another way to be corrupt.  The boys and girls who have been selling stories to ScrewsNews only service a form of economic niche that wasn’t around in my day.  There will be others.  But this isn’t what I mean.  They changed the way up the greasy pole.  GF Newman’s Terry Sneed will now rise in the lily-white form of career portfolio builder, conference attending and image management smoozing that is unarguably more corrupting in my view and certainly costs us more money as tax payers.

These people are corrupt in the way Soviet performance managers were – there is only ‘accounting’ no real market testing – they start, like bankers being able to mark assets to models and not to real market prices.  In the financial world, the losses are ‘hidden’ in myriads of transactions that will only show up if the banks are asked to fess up and are forced out of the benefit culture.  In police statistics, the losses are stacking up in antisocial behaviour and other gaming.  We might say that we should return to ‘primitive’ banking and policing.  The corrupt top not only serves no purpose but is a major drain on the real economy and real crime busting.  Politics, of course, has its hands in both sets of this corruption, as is most of our media.  Too many of us suck at its teat.

There is currently as much chance of getting anything done about the real corruption as finding the evidence of mine – though I can think of some I’d like to be looking for the remains of the bacon butties and tea!

You have to admire John Yates in all this.  The timing of his resignation was sublime – done before the awkward questions about security from terrorists that should follow from the custard-pie man!  I suggest they put Wendi Murdoch in charge.  On Newshite tonight they claimed she prevented something even worse happening.  This is pretty frightening on the quality of our journalists – she jumped on him from behind in retaliation – that’s assault.  Not that my corrupt blind eye would have noticed.  The question the press should be asking is whether the £24K bung is worse than one of my cups of tea.  It is you know, but unlike the current blighters at the top, I wouldn’t expect to investigate myself.

The whole ‘Champers’ thing of Sir Paul trying to rush his return to work against all medical, family and general expectation, as the determined soldier, falls to the rot such stuff is when it turns out we can do without him and a major deputy overnight.  Part of the corruption is beginning to believe the ‘excellence’ bullshit and how vital you are.  Shagger Todd was the bee’s knee’s and yet Peter Fahey is now admitted to have had to cope with an utter mess when he took over.  We can now ring the police in Manchester and not be told they are too busy and to stop bothering them.  All this PR and cosy crud with newspapers has more to do with telling us the chiefs are supermen – for so they are until they fall or just fade away.  I doubt one in ten is even any good – we need these image-managers and their lackeys and toadies gone.  Police news could be delivered on line very cheaply.

Grim side taking on policing demonstrations

The recent riots in London with cops using batons, cracked heads on both sides and so on, and various takes on police and mob brutality leave me largely moved only to tears for anyone involved.  It all had the level of farce of the cop body searching my Dad at a rugby league match at Old Trafford.  He was more or less TT and had Altzheimer’s.  Dad was actually wearing my old police mac.  What trouble there was happened on the pitch and Widnes sorted out the malevolent Australians.  If only soccer fans had been so peaceful, my left side wouldn’t feel like Marvin the Paranoid Android’s.  If only, perhaps, we’d left the Irish shooting at each other.

Various counter-measures to the mob raised their inevitable heads.  Water cannon and tear-gas – what for – so we can have real riots like in Rome?  Should we go further and turn the whole country into Northern Ireland?  The cops, of course, claim they are protecting the peace and property, even the “right” to peaceful demonstration.  All true of course, yet so is the fact they are also protecting our bent politicians and “bankers”, what is wrong in our system as well as what we hold dear.  It was “cops” (and squaddies) who protected vile fascist and communist regimes and who opened fire on anti-war protesters in the USA.  And who “protected us” from the militant Suffragettes.  We might wonder what causes a policing army to turn round and face the same ‘enemy’ as protesters.

Nearly all questions about democracy are fraught by simplistic thinking on “perfection” .  Plato wanted the system run by Guardians who developed virtue and transmitted this through generations, but even he realised even this system would develop inevitable corruption and go sour.  In ‘Animal Farm’ it is the pig who controls the ‘attack dogs’ who ‘triumphs’, though perhaps Snowball escaped through a hole in the hedge and might return to bring back peaceful democracy.  To some, our police are run by ‘Napoleon’.  I don’t share the view, but it is the view I would have wanted to share at the time of the Peterloo massacre, and I do think police in Northern Ireland in the late 60’s contributed to ‘the troubles’ in a scurrilous manner.  I’ve done my share of peace-keeping, but this hasn’t skewed my view of the bent politics and suppression that made it necessary – or that it would never have been necessary had we been able to be sensible politically.

The questions we should be asking concern whether our own society is once again radically unfair and likely to face increasing turbulence and the misery of ‘interesting times’ (as in the Russian proverb).  I’d contend we are now as divorced from believing our politics fair as the people of Derry with a Unionist Council “elected” in a 90% Catholic town.  The properly grounded civil rights protests in NI developed into something like war.  Do we now face something similar, or is it just about some exploitative “anarchists”?  Many of the problems in NI concerned the unfair distribution of housing and jobs.  Do we have something similar here, hidden under pretences of meritocracy?  I suspect we do and it is class-based, with “education” a phoney cure.  There is much talk too, of ‘fraud as the business model’.  The “bankers” still want not only their bonuses, but to tell us they deserve them and our lives would collapse if they leave en masse.  This is Jabberwock.

None of this helps protect cops trying to police protests, or children in protests from police batons or mounted charges.  Police are using technology to make arrests, yet it does not seem to turn up evidence for the arrest of their own – maybe there is none, but how would we know?  Whatever is going on, the spectacle is disgusting.  If I felt my vote was worth anything, I’d be very much against the protesters.  I don’t, and I’m not.  I’m inclining to the view that our scurrilous politicians are turning our cops into their own protection force.  If this is true, we have a duty to stop it.  The current protests are more or less over nothing; if we start protesting over the lack of jobs, fair education for the non-academic and real injustice and immigration issues, I’ll be glad to be blogging from a small village in Portugal.  Politicians don’t care about cracked police heads.  I do.  And police unnecessarily cracking heads.  There is no side to be on here, only fairness and justice.  Vile stereotyping by some cops, propaganda posturing by ACPOs, is as vile as clown sloganing at the war memorial.

We always say there is no excuse for violence.  One side blames another.  If you aren’t with us, you’re against us.  Then the killing starts.  In the meantime some sell wrist bangles to either side’s supporters.

I wouldn’t wish mercury poisoning on them (Elected Police Commissioners)

I grow tired of the idea that electing people can do any good.    This is partly a fear that Colin Gunn might have been elected local police commissioner on the Bestway Estate, or we’d end up with Chief  Crackpipe on Gadget’s Swamp.  Reality probably isn’t much better.  Political parties will probably put candidates on the stump.  This is only likely to reinforce the unholy nexus of the one-party state and its ACPO toadies.  We need independent ‘Dirty Harrys’ who can stay honest.

I take the notion that we have a ‘one party state’ as read, given it’s obvious the political lot all sing from the same economic spreadsheet.  I wouldn’t quite wish mercury poisoning on whoever does stand in the latest waste of £130 million, put forward as a cure.  This makes some birds homosexual and depletes the population – see http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn19784-mercury-poisoning-makes-male-birds-homosexual.html?DCMP=OTC-rss&nsref=online-news

Yet something like this happens to our ‘leaders’ once they are off the stump and get neutered or corrupted by our political system.  It’s as sure as eggs is unfertilised eggs.  When a Clown fish leader dies, one of the small wimpy fish grows large and takes over.  I think the change there is male to female.  It’s ritualised in humans through promises which we should know never materialise by now.

I watched Ken Clarke in prison on Newsnight.  Pity his sentence was so short.  An ex-con made some sense about sentencing people to real jobs. One of the finest human beings I ever met, a charge office sergeant coming up to retirement, said he felt as though he was coming to the end of a long prison sentence.  A prison officer noted none of the prisoners going through the pace benefited at all.  Someone was given a few seconds to say that the communities the rag-bag of borrowers-from-shops were briefly extracted from got a bit of respite.  One governor got to say she manages to get her charges working, either in her prison or outside, but would need more staff to get this up to 40 hours.  She was talked down.

The real issues are work and enough people around to discipline and educate people into it.  The rest is about stopping the continual dumping of the problem into the same communities, and the vicious circle.  We have to give people the right to earn livings and support that right.  Life has to be more than getting pissed on the drunken mile, or drugs, ‘prostitution’ and cheap booze in a crack house.  We need to leap-frog the Dutch on this.

The answer is that we need to de-criminalise our society in a manner that gives us more control over nuisance.  This has to extend from bankers to the borrowers from shops, from politicians scamming expenses to the neighbourhood fence paying out in multi-cut heroin and boiled up and crushed prescription drugs.  Our cops do so bad things from time to time and they need to recognise this.  Yet anyone saying this also needs to know we need Gadget leading the Magnificent Seven to prevent the bandits taking over; and yet we need to bear in mind our police may be being ‘armed’ for all the wrong reasons – too simply suppress whatever the right protests we need to be able to make are.  The Suffragettes were militant and succeeded through ‘violence’, lest we forget and police were instructed to intimidate them.  We also disarmed police in Northern Ireland, some dying, some surviving only because they owned shotguns.

There is surely no answer in giving ConDoomed or Nulabour commissars tin stars.

Dennis O’Connor Tells The Truth: police and politicians have been lying for 30 years

BBC News is giving air-time today on a belated report and research by HMIC. Police have given up our streets to antisocial crime over the last 30 years.  In the meantime of media space they air a ‘death by Powerpoint’ sketch demonstrating academics have realised they are so dull it is a good idea to give presentations in underwear.  I have so far constrained my own activities in this area to telecommuting, in trollies but sans webcam.

Dennis O’Connor is right.  Our police have become an utter disaster, though this extends far beyond their inability to form decent response teams.  Other agencies are as bad or much worse.  Courts, Town Hall agencies and politicians fail us almost entirely, and this is often in spite of officers trying to do decent work.  The silence of human rights institutions on these matters, crucial to our own people’s well-being, whilst pratting about on immigrant issues, sexism and diversity is a crime.

The jaundiced eye, made so perhaps by suffering as a victim, might see Dennis Connor as very conveniently late and post ZanyPFNulabour, wanting boots on the ground just as ACPO will want to remove them to protect its chocolate-dipped strawberry budget.

What we need is new, working legislation, legal representation for victims, and for victims to be brought into the resource equation, forcing bureaucrats to do the right thing by them with the thought of severe compensation claims when they dump recidivists next door.

Dennis is not really talking solutions.  Neighbourhood Watch and the rest have already failed.  We need legislation to stop noise, threats, abuse and the presence of behaviour that makes us feel threatened.  The BBC gave air-time to an ACPO fool and a Police Authority clown.  They rolled out the usual platitudes and were not asked any of the serious questions or directly confronted by victims.  Both men should be sacked.  I heard every one of their feeble excuses years ago, as nothing was done over more than seven years.

What we need starts with cops who can and will do something.  They need to be able to seize noise making equipment (with aggressive  noise, and noise that intrudes into other people’s homes being something we effectively ban) and treat disorder like domestic violence and street gangs on the basis that it harms others who have to witness the rubbish.  If kids won’t pay attention to elders and treat them with respect and are engaged in bullying, we need severe censure of what allows this, including non-parenting parents and schools.  Evidence, and how we gather and present this, needs to be effective, and we have to stop people just being able to lie about what they are doing and ‘going no comment’.  Cases need to be properly recorded and collated, and the collated evidence needs to be usable in a manner that stops repeat perpetrators and all the agencies from escaping responsibility, blaming victims and claiming (like Inspector Gadget) nothing can be done.

Once again, we are in a situation in which the very people who have been failing for 30 years are put in charge of change and can lay claim they have been doing something new and we should wait for the outcome.

Gadget, Copperfield and contributors to such blogs are not wrong per se.  They get that the situation is crap right and that lots of silly crap is reported by idiots.  Their bosses are clearly overpaid toadies.  Yet there is very little focus on their own role in not being able to report this openly and get things changed.  They are cowards, but this needs to be seen in the sense that we all are, confronted with the threats of losing our jobs and what whistle-blowing really means.  We need reporting systems that understand this ‘cowardice’ and do not have them.  IG and his mortgage slaves are only like the rest of us, and we get pretty nasty once we get into denial and the protection of our own interests.  Indeed, we know from research and deep in our hearts that we blame victims for their plight, and are scared to publicly report what we feel as the truth.  If this was not the case, we would not need confidentiality in research to get people to respond.

A key issue that is not addressed is that of lying complainants.  The existence of these clowns makes it difficult for anyone to complain, not least because relevant authorities will smear anyone suggesting they are not doing their job.  Cops and other professionals lie to, and the presence of bureaucratic bullying and its extent is a scandal.  Evidence is key, yet the difficulties in gleaning it expose victims in almost every case.  The authorities use this to their own advantage to suppress complaints.

The whole model needs to be reworked, starting with work on who will do the reworking.  What we get in this country is bureaucratic non-solutions that could never address the real problems.  The IPCC is a classic example, probably meant to fail in case we ended-up with an organisation that could do anything about stopping miscarriages of justice.  There was plenty of good talk, then all was lost because we have to complain to police forces for a decision on investigation.  It’s even worse in forensics, where no investigation of bent evidence is even in the remit.

What we should do is get evidence of very serious cases out in the open and work out how to stop them happening again, admitting that they do despite (and because of) ‘senior promises’ they won’t.  Gadget et al need to be out in the open too – not personally – I agree this is mortgage capability suicide – but through a proper reporting system run on behalf of the public and victims.

The solutions are about partnership working, but the problem is also about easy bullshit about partnership working.  Senior promises are that it all bliss and excellence, the reality that it is like platting snot, says the ‘partnership inspector’ over a pint, planning his return to shifts after only a month with Town Hall dorks.

A huge problem I’ve been taking a look at is that our cops are working in a state of exasperation about louts and ‘evil poor’, and have lost the kind of tolerance needed with ordinary people in an odd bit of trouble, or have become victims.

The problem, in short, is that we are too cowardly even to discuss the real problems in the open.  Much that  appears ‘open’ such as media debate is , in fact, very closed.  It’s actually a disgrace that ACPO clowns and similar get the air-time without being surrounded by victims with axes.  One might not want quite that in practice, but we don’t get the real problems out.  One get today started to bleat on about policing being complex and having to balance terrorism issues and needs against dealing with antisocial criminals.  That’s right, “get”.  Another “get” went on about who victims would feel better if they knew cops knew who the troublemakers were and fixed them up with support when they weren’t there.  Cops already know who the troublemakers are and tell victims there is nothing they can do (only to lie later that they did say this).  The ‘answers’ on offer have already failed.  If our senior idiots think they can get away with this, the answer is to sack them until one paid fool comes up with something that works.

Victims only tend to be believed once they are dead, or can be made into politically useful pawns in speeches of promises, or given ‘jobs’ like Sarah Payne or Helen Newlove.  These two excellent women sound  far more convincing and just as ‘professionally’ competent as the overpaid dullards in politics and senior positions.  We should be learning from this and working out we don’t need ‘super-individuals’ who need massive sinecures to be ‘motivated’ to take jobs – they and attitudes towards pay are part of the problem.

Much as I am disgusted by ‘evil poor’ behaviour, the real problem lies amongst the rest of us and our ignorance, selfishness and ‘morality’.  We possess the first two, lack the latter and foist the pretensions of politesse and etiquette soaked-up as moral on all argument, killing it dead.  Tell me that some dork on £150K a year and free trips to Japan to read dismal papers a nurse thought up trying to qualify herself out of the job driving her up the wall as her own, who kills Baby Q is not more criminal than some low IQ thief who might be otherwise with a factory job.  The rest of us have become turkeys who won’t vote for against Xmas because it comes every day for us on the back of other people’s work and misery.  Baby Q scapegoats even persist in telling us the systems they claimed to create while in sinecure, were wonderful.  How many crap senior cops told us the same in the last 30 years and must have been lying on antisocial crime, killing the Askews and Pilkingtons of this world?  How many politicians knew they were lying and found this entirely convenient?  My own MP is one and still a “member” (think dick) of our illustrious, honest new Parliament – the one about to throw several million on the dole scrap-heap, with LibDems hanging around like professional wailers at the funeral.

To get at real solutions to rotten orchard problems like policing, we need new thinking at radical levels.  I mean new, not some clapped-out Marxism or even Vince Cable (likeable as he is).  My guess (and we need guessing) is we need thought experiments.  If robots were like Data and could do all the work, what “morality” would we want to extract from a “work ethic” – one for robots?  We would hardly build them to look down on us as evil poor, nicotine stained, idle scum, would we?  “Robots” do a lot of our work for us now.  We could currently import ‘cheap cops’ from abroad (Bahrain does this).  We do this throughout the rest of our system.  Sure it makes ‘sense’ to bring in IT skilled people who can count (most of us are really not very numerate or good at logical thinking) from India.  Bringing in in smarter people seems to make sense until you realise 90% of our taxi drivers are imports too (even if second generation) and know the white denizens one used to see are not likely to have become university teachers (though I did), and the people who would otherwise be taxi drivers are probably unemployed.  No I’m not racist, grow up.

The links in this blog come from Zemanta – useless, but an example of what technology might do for us once we get it right.  We need to deploy technology in our public debate to stop the overpaid liars who dominate it now continuing with the pretences in which we remain spectators.  Newsnight and other middle-class dross is some modern version of the gladiator circus.  Paxman is actually a limp arty-farty, not Spartacus, a palooka there to set up politicians to look as though they can box.  We have become so dumb we don’t realise today’s report means everyone who told us police were doing their job has been lying.  No, don’t take this to mean I think all are cops are useless shirkers and liars, grow up.

The real solutions probably involve freeing people up from financial dependence on jobs and new forms of discipline.  What we are doing is continuing with a core programme of dud assumptions about life that doom us to failure.  We can’t even get a cop to the door to sort out noisy neighbours, bullying, intimidation and petty crime, and only deal with petrol bombers after they have been signalling intent for 20 years.  “Success” is simply about earning enough to live away from such problems by containing them where we aren’t.  This makes us more evil than any “evil poor”.  Imagine Fiona Pilkington’s story told as Preistley’s  ‘An Inspector Calls’, and then think that some overpaid arty-arses at our National Theatre have reworked the play without thinking this up.