There was and is a cover-up and conspiracy at the Met

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/interactive/2011/jul/15/letter-from-the-guardian-to-dick-fedorcio

Senior Met figures have a long history of wining and dining with News International.  There’s a spreadsheet at the Grauniad.  When the same figures meet Guardian staff it’s at the office.  It’s clear from the letter published (link above) in the Groan that the Met tried to put the arm on Nick Davis and stop the truth coming out.  Now they won’t answer fair questions from the Guardian using standard PR damage limitation techniques to give them time to get a story together.  They should be read the PACE guidance on what they may rely on in the future.

The IPCC should already not be giving the Met hierarchy time to collude.  Taped interviews should have been taken instead of half-assed stuff led by the dubious Vaz.  Police officers lie and some of this is justified.  A reasonable account can be found here:

http://deadlyforce.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/Lies-and-Deception-PQ.pdf

That matters are out of hand can be seen in George Monbiot’s referenced piece here:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/apr/12/police-truth-blair-peach-tomlinson

I doubt Gadget subscribers would do the required reading, but the complex lying behaviour cops enter into is fairly standard across organisations now.  What’s needed isn’t sackings, but an opportunity to come clean and identify the real bad guys.  This clearly doesn’t happen in our public enquiries – even the WMD farce was not admitted.  In the absence of coming clean I would sack a random few Admiral Bings to encourage the others.

Police officers tend to get hard-boiled and think no one understands the complexity of their situation.  There are many explanations of their behaviour that are complex and do explain much of what I knew to go on as a cop.  I found a dozen academic papers on police lying and a hundred more on administrative lying in the space of a couple of hours.  Some are pretty good and public argument should shift to their more intelligent focus.  The following snippet gets to some of the enigma at the heart of being a cop.  There’s more actually, but I’m reserving my paper for publication.

This is standard material on police lying from ‘academic cops’:

‘

Police officers often tell lies; they act in ways that are deceptive, they manipulative
people and situations, they coerce citizens, and are dishonest. They are taught,
encouraged, and often rewarded for their deceptive practices. Officers often lie to
suspects about witnesses and evidence, and they are deceitful when attempting to learn
about criminal activity. Most of these actions are sanctioned, legal, and expected.
Although they are allowed to be dishonest in certain circumstances, they are also
required to be trustworthy, honest, and maintain the highest level of integrity. The
purpose of this article is to explore situations when officers can be dishonest, some
reasons that help us understand the dishonesty, and circumstances where lies may lead
to unintended consequences such as false confessions. The authors conclude with a
discussion of how police agencies can manage the lies that officers tell and the
consequences for the officers, organizations, and the criminal justice system.'
However complex the situation we can't have cops trying to prevent the publication 
of stuff they don't like and must know is true when they try to can it.

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Met, Press and NoPolitics All Dire – But Public Interest Fades

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/07/12/us-newscorp-detective-idUSTRE76B1BD20110712    (contributed by Colin)

If News International lied to cops in the ‘investigations’ into hacking crime, where are the arrests and charges of those responsible?  Or is this an investigation the Met can’t resource – or would rather not look into because it might remove a convenient excuse for its own failings and expose more about them?  Just like the last one …

11,000 bits of paper evidence is not a massive amount.  Less than a week with only 2 working on it would be enough to sample it pretty rigorously.  In the Morgan case, 750,000 bits of evidence were collected, but presumably not digitised and sorted into levels of disclosure.  The case collapses because material cannot be disclosed to the defence.  Decent detectives can and do do better than this these days.

I got the impression watching the ‘evidence’ given to some Parliamentary duck-eggs that actually doing detective work is far too difficult, much as a lot of decent coppering.  I can’t say I’d have been happy busting my chops over phone hacking either.  What we need to know is how much time this enquiry really needed in the first place and we have been given nothing to work on.  The duck-eggs needed to get some of the leg-people in and have Ms Akers tell them how she would have done the original work if given to her.

The whole mess looks like it may disintegrate into a series of civil proceedings and pay-offs as in the link above.

The public interest is in a cleaner press empowered to investigate more strongly than before as a ‘fourth estate’, a more sensible legal system and so on.  In fact, it looks as though the whole shebang is now caught up in compensation claims, with plenty of time being given to shred and collude on stories in the Met and elsewhere.  Plus revenge on the Dirty Digger.  Brown now seems to be muddying the waters with a sob story about as genuine as his emotions.

And why does anyone think a judge-led enquiry will help after the farces on Iraq, no inquest on Dr. Kelly or 20 years in clearing two decent pilots flying helicopters known to be wonky?