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.

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Harwood To Face Trial – Pilkingtons Let Down

Too little too late.  Harwood can barely get a fair trial now and what should be ‘on trial’ is how Ian Tomlinson’s family were treated so badly and why those in our justice system tend so readily to cover-up.  The same is really true in the Pilkington case.  It should not have taken this kind of enquiry to open up the problems and lead to the ‘new practices’.

When the IPCC investigators are ‘let loose’ they are pretty good, something I knew long ago.  The problem is getting them or other reliable investigators on the case – with the further problem is is necessary because ‘local resolution’ is a total con.

The prosecution of Harwood is only necessary, in my view, because the complaints system failed so badly and so quickly became a cover-up through misinformation and use of available bent practice.  He is now likely to be the fall guy for this.  The  DPP’s statement today is thin cover for his own incompetence.  In inquest produced no new evidence, merely the evidence that would have been collected had their been any willingness to do so.

My own preference is for a police force that prevents the culture that allows behaviour like this and quickly moves to remove those who fail decent standards through open review.

Both these cases involve deaths and are likely to be the tip of an iceberg – other cases suffer from the brush-off approach of the complaints system and lack of status of those victimised.  Consider the support of law for Giggs in trying to hide embarrassment, compared with the lack of support for those living near ‘problem families’, or Ian Tomlinson who just wanted to get home.

For each of such cases that fit media criteria, there are many more.  They should be publicly collated and the fact this is not happening only reinforces poor actual quality and waste.  My own solution would be to bring a cheap version of judicial review to bear.  Many of these problems would not exist at all if police performance statistics (as opposed to any procedures useful to practice) were taken out of the hands of senior officers and political manipulators.

Time To End Representation?

Power tends to corrupt and absolute power tends to corrupt absolutely.  There’s a brilliant joke on this theme in Peter Cook’s film The Rise and Rise of Michael Rimmer (a couple of quid for the DVD – it’s genius from about 1968).  Rimmer gets to the top by ruthless tricks.  He then has us all make decisions on everything, leading to sacks of work being delivered to us all by post everyday,  Appalled at the work we are all burdened with, he becomes President in order to take all this work off us.

These days we have the technology to make representation unnecessary.  All current ‘democracies’ are representative.  We thus cede administrative power to a very few and to election processes involving a few parties.  This may have been the best we could manage in history and did not prevent Hitler coming to power in what was the most cultured and scientific nation then on Earth.  It did not stop the British or American Empires either.  These may be seen as ‘holding positions’ for freedom if there is future history, though may be seen as considerably more vile than those of us bred to their propaganda currently believe.

Those in power have always been reluctant to accept that power can really be given to the people.  It’s clear we could now organise reliable referendums that involved us very directly in decision-making.  Questions around this are the ones we should be considering in our politics, not piss like AV.

Of course, power to the people on this scale can be ridiculed.  25% of our populations, even where there is education, remain functionally innumerate and illiterate.  Critical reasoning capability is in very short supply – I doubt more than 5% can really do this (in terms, say, of the current ‘A’ level) – and I doubt we can ‘educate’ people up to it in academic terms.  The resources Plato outlined for his Guardians were immense.  Trying to equip everyone for the kind of citizenship apparently needed for genuine self-rule seem daunting.

Politics everywhere is a form of dictatorship of a rendered-docile proletariat.  Rule is enforced through hierarchy of one form or another.  We still give up to an absolute much as Hobbes described.  I prefer what we do in the West to what goes on in Syria or Saudi, though this may well be ‘our doing’ too.  I don’t want to give up government to half-wits who watch soap operas.

Yet surely, we should have dialogue on what we could do with new technology and the obvious abuses of representative and judicial power.  Blair was Thatcher in drag and Cameron uses the ‘Blair touch’ as well as the war criminal himself.  We are always at war, employers can always use the threat of moving to cheap labour and tax, or move the labour in.  We are destroying the planet and … enough said.  Harwood hasn’t been arrested and the DPP, really making a decision on himself, will try to quietly not have a trial, hoping time will kill off any fuss.  We can do better than this.

That we can’t move instantly to voting on everything is obvious.  What is so sad is that we don’t understand the importance of thought experiments and what they can reveal.  We are rightly scared of countries with more or less no government where piracy and banditry prevail.  Yet we are not aware of what is really going on in our own system, or whether this is remotely the best we can manage.  In this ignorance we have moved from the potential of bildung to bulldung.  We do not know there is something very rotten in the State of Denmark.

“Public Argument” is failing all of us (Tomlinson)

One can put a case forward that Mr. Tomlinson would still be alive if there had been no G20 protests.  Beyond this one can argue that the organisers of the protests are responsible for the death if the protest was not justified.  Beyond this, one can argue that those who organise our democracy were responsible because their failings make such protests necessary to protect democracy.  There is no need to agree any of these arguments, just appreciate they can be made, no doubt at tedious length.  We have known this about argument at least since Pyrrho. One can get so pissed off with argument that all that is left to say is to point to the pisswitterers (Sophists, lawyers, pundits) and announce ‘I know nothing, but even this is to know more than them’ (Socrates).  This is only a ‘polite, humerus’ way to chant ‘fuck off you twats’.

Given a more or less white powder, test tube, thermometer and Bunsen burner, and asked to find out what temperature lead carbonate turns yellow, most of us would probably stick the powder and thermometer in the test  tube and heat it up, recording the temp.  I forget the result.  There are more people than you’d think who can’t do this experiment.  They’d be the only ones left if I’d substituted lead azide, which is so massively explosive we transport it in dextrinated solution (carefully).  It’s sort of white to buff as a powder.  Most of us can heat up white powders; almost none of us can spot the psychopath.  Not many of us can do chemistry in a safe manner.  I could write this little exercise up a bit more carefully to make its point – which is that most of us can’t do argument safely either and the results are as disastrous as heating up lead azide or even looking at it aggressively.  I forget, but the stuff is so preposterously explosive in raw form, that the energy to set it off equates to dropping it through six inches, or as Hogday might appreciate, breathing loudly in the distant vicinity of a currently non-hostile Arab mob or Millwall soccer fans.

Public argument is as distant from real, scientific argument as most of us are from being able to make and handle lead azide.  More than this, we keep non-equipped dullards out of lead azide handling, but not out of public argument. That this is blazingly obvious is blazingly obvious – the questions are about how we so easily forget this so regularly.

We send cops (and others), ill-equipped, under-trained (yet burdened by loads of useless training) and more into quasi-lead azide situations and blame them when things explode.

I still like to think, at the end of a 22 hour shift, covered in the blood of my best friend (he survived) and having just fitted my inspector’s head up the exhaust pipe of a Volvo, I would have treated Mr. Tomlinson better than Harwood and the cops who looked on.  And that even in one of my current diabetic states, I would not have been as jobsworth as the DPP  in his pathetic ‘decision-making’.  I ain’t Superman or Plato, just a working stiff.  What has ans is getting in the way or ordinary people doing their best?  That they didn’t for Mr. Tomlinson is obvious.  The energy required to do this amounts to a drip in the bucket of cover-up blather.