Yates (once of the Yard) is now a standard Bahrain thug cop

We learned today that Yates was so economical with the truth in front of Parliament over Ms Wallis’ job application that most of us would consider him to have lied.  He can also be seen on Channel 4 News lying that the resistance in Bahrain is about criminals in the villages attacking unarmed police.  For a place with “no crime” Bahrain has a vast police force in addition to a very large military (both massive for somewhere with a population of about one million, half of which is expat).

I have no reason to doubt the authenticity of this video in which the unarmed police sport assault rifles and (towards the end) another throws a petrol bomb.

I find it extremely disturbing that anyone like Yates could hold senior office in the Met.  After 8 years the IPCC is now merely addressing the problems of senior figures retiring before disciplinary action as something they can do nothing about..  It is more likely Yates was appointed for his ability to bullshit in cover-up than any reforming ability.  Is this a mere continuation of his role at the Met?  He is now condoning an oppressive regime, though we  would be unlikely to fully support the opposition, some of which is crude, sexist and backward-looking in its fervor – though also full of splendid people.  Some years back the Bahrain Government denied there were any prisons in the country, let alone torture.  There was a massive jail near Jaws and 10% of my students had suffered torture.  Yates is now a mouthpiece for the current lies.  I find it intolerable senior service with the Met has produced such a monster and wonder how many more there are.

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Police Racism Is Crap – Can’t the Met Catch On?

With 10 cases involving 20 officers referred or re-referred to the ludicrous IPCC can’t the Met catch on?  It’s OK for a black MP to slur all white people, but not one white person must  … blah, blah.  We know racism is crap and we know no one is really free from it if we read up on the subject.  We accept rape is wrong and yet the conviction rate is very low.  This is largely because most of the evidence is dubious, with all parties often drunk, stoned or both.  Solomon would have trouble!  The same, of course, is true of claims of racial abuse – often coming from people already discredited by being in police custody and it being so easy to make false claims without much comeback.  Black officers, I seem to remember, are as much as four times more likely to be subject to complaint procedures.

The problem here is that police complaints systems don’t work and are massively prejudiced in investigation and the law.  Cases that get to court follow familiar patterns of taking a very long time and of detailed histories of previous complaints against officers being ruled out as evidence whilst complainants (even if police officers) have their motives and credibility impugned.

Even if the IPCC was any use, referring such matters to them wouldn’t help.  This is a cultural matter requiring strong leadership beyond words in the supervision system and an openness that can’t be other than deterred by criminal investigation.  On the basis of the kind of “research” the IPCC has bought so far, it would poll the whole population on whether police are racist or not when what’s needed is research in the relevant population done by people who can establish trust.

Even the tape recording I’ve heard on television and at the Guardian is not evidence of racism and I’d acquit if that’s all to be found, despite being profoundly anti-racist.  I heard the same advice being given by a black nurse to black hooligans more than 30 years ago,though that was issued in more strident form.  Racism was chronic in the Met back then and they were in denial about it.  All sides in this need to let some independent researchers in so the matter can be brought properly out into the open. My guess is their are faults on all sides.

Half all young black lads are unemployed against a 25 – 30% average.  It’s common to hear this is because they are a lazy bunch and the rest, as it’s common to hear that Asians are bleeding welfare dry and so on.  Crap gossip like this comes about because we so rarely bother to make the truth on any subject easy to access.  Ethnic minorities are generally present in our prisons in disproportionate number.  Some say this is due to racist treatment, but it could as easily be disproportionate engagement in crime.

It is easy to stop your people using words like ‘nigger’ – just sack a few who do.  Works wonders, does a little of such medicine.  It won’t change any attitudes other than those about not being loose-lipped.  I’d like to see the Met engage some researchers prepared to get out in relevant areas with cameras and able to talk in confidence to police officers and the relevant population and make sense of relevant figures and some participant observation.  I suspect their are home truths the Met, our ‘ethnic’populations and the rest of us need to learn and that incompetence is at the heart of all this.  The current situation must be making all officers wary of dealing with BEMs and that can’t help.

The IPCC should get on with more important matters like the buried SOCA report on corruption.

 

Another Shooting By Police

Details on today’s incident are few.  Apparently some attempted car thief with a large bladed weapon was shot.  In years gone by we had to put ourselves at considerable risk and the likelihood of PTSD dealing with such creeps.  I’m not against them being gunned down instead.

I am concerned that the IPCC haven’t even (because of our dud legal system) told us the evidence on Duggan and this incident may take as long for what truth can be told to be out.  I believe the routine issue of one rifle per car is held back because of fears the complaints system is useless and officers don’t have the speedy back up that should be there for them.

Problem Families – Non-Solutions From Government and Gadget

Must get back to the book, but not in the mood following blue-in-the-face meeting with an idle solicitor.

The government is proposing to fix problem families with around £110 million a year to put one person in charge of dealings with said.  The estimate is 130,000 of them so this means about £800 a year on each.  That’s sod all – not much mroe than the cost of one of the 200 police visits they may get a year.

My suspicion is this measure will actually create bureaucrats who will juke performance management reports on what’s going on.  Louise Casey has been a failure for more than 10 years.

Gadget does the usual running down of the scum and is, of course, right.  The problem here is that moral urging over the years has made no difference at all and the problem, described in history books for centuries, is getting worse.

Cameron was even saying we first had to identify these families – given they have often been occupying houses in the same locale for generations, this seems absurd.  We already know who they are.

The problems are much deeper than any crass ‘putting someone in charge’ management scam can deal with.  The relevant authorities have been lying about ‘excellent partnership working’ since partnership working became a buzz phrase – underneath you find the very inspector issuing this bureaucratic grease saying working with the Council is like trying to plat snot.

I’ve lost nearly all sympathy with the scumbags – as I say, Gadget is right on what their problems are.  This isn’t the point.  I favour a cull.  The social problem is the damage they do to other people and this is immense.  There is another group who cause the rest of us as much pain and moer damage – the very rich and their financial services lickspittles.

The scumbags cause pain for the rest of us of such magnitude that we broadly do everything we can not to live near them (higher mortgage) or have our children go to school with theirs.  My grandson is at a school that can’t cope with its catchment from the Everglades and we are taking him out.  They are using measures like collective punishments.  There is bullying and most lessons are not worth much in learning terms because of disruption.

The scumbags, as any cop will tell you, know that the first line of defence is to get out a smear story on anyone complaining – what I’d like to hear more from cops is how they deal with this inevitable issue – silence when I do.  The same is true across agencies – they have almost no clue on how to gauge evidence and end up leaving the complainants in the lurch – an often violent lurch.  Complainants end up complaining about the service from the agencies and, surprise, surprise, get smeared to make them seem non-credible.

What’s needed is to identify the victims and provide support from that point.  Moral urging fails on the immoral – whether scumbags or banksters (you won’t believe what they are doing until the next collapse – coming soon).  And victims need to be contacted so that there treatment at the hands of cops, townhallsters, courts and others can be collated and used as a genuine performance measure.  Many cops would welcome this, knowing there are some knocks to take.

The current system is so crap you can’t even get noise stopped and includes such provision that this is OK if generated by certain ethnicities.  If you are ill and likely to be seriously made worse by intrusive noise the law says – well fuck you.  The agencies will lie and do complainants serious harm to protect their own incompetence and organisational performance – to the extent of conspiring to false prosecutions.  Politicians are worse and want to pretend their system and people are working.

Both Cameron and Gadget are a sell-out on this one.  What we need is someone with the balls to take the lid off and design something that works from the ground up.  Or give me and Gadget 00 licence and declare free-range on the shits.  Horrible as it is, a cull would do a lot to fix estates, housing, schools, NHS and many other problems.  Gadget might not join me in carrying a ‘banksters next’ placard.

What’s needed is not identification of the scum – I could organise most of that in a day (local cops know).  It’s the full extent of the problem and how it affects others that needs identification and sorting.  Fuck the scum – make them live partioned lives on trailer parks with barbed wire round them and a strict curfew.  They are beyond cure.  Start building these colonies now after reading Gadget’s riot act and move them on first breach.

Their houses will need a lot spending on them to enable decent families to have a home, and we could organise this as a youth employment-skilling project.

The cost of these scumbags will exceed any figure we can put on it.  The cost of non-policing them for others is vast,  We don’t police the banksters either and they are out to cost us democracy.  My guess is they are engineering another collapse and using a combination of derivatives trading and bankruptcy law in a plot to steal bail-out money and, indeed, any other assets they can grab.  We aren’t policing this either.

The gist of the bankster scheme involves bankruptcy rules on hypothecated debt which all banks to grab any assets ahead of other creditors (including us).  We may be seeing such a scam at JP Morgan now in the MF Global collapse.  It’s sort of this – that in a world in which all go bankrupt those first in line for what’s left end up winners.

My guess, if the truth was out, is that we wouldn’t want to live with either scumbags or banksters.  All this needs more than some designated bureaucrat to fix.  Gadget’s moralising won’t work on either end – and what would a Gedget do when the right thing isn’t protecting its mortgage-paying ability?  I suspect this morality is one and the same with the scrote and bankster.  Self at all costs – and it’s costing our democracy.

More Problems For (I)PCC On Duggan

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/nov/20/mark-duggan-shooting-watchdog-panel

Two people have resigned from the Community Reference Committee set up by the IPCC after the killing of Mark Duggan and the riots sparked off by the event.  The allegations in the post above are dismal if true.

Perhaps the most damning is the statement that the IPCC Commissioner involved told CRC members 3 police officers gave a statement that a sergeant had been seen to throw the gun Duggan was supposed to be carrying to the spot where it was later found and later told them no such statements existed.  It’s more or less impossible to think of any reasonable excuse for the sergeant’s actions or to explain the lack of an arrest of the sergeant.  Quite how you can mislead someone on such a matter is also inexplicable.

We now seem to know that a potential murder scene (almost one of a police officer too) was easily compromised by the taxi Duggan was traveling in being moved and the brought back – flouting everything I know about crime scenes and yet apparently ‘authorised’ by IPCC investigators who hadn’t even made it to the scene, and that Duggan was under some kind of surveillance and allowed to pick up a weapon and travel with it.  Though we can’t be sure.

About the only thing we do know for certain nearly 4 months on is that Duggan’s death and the piss poor handling of the investigation caused riots across our cities.

This is not, as the IPCC would have us believe, a complex enquiry.  The players and the scene have been known since the outset.  A detective sergeant and a couple of jacks plus a SOCO should have been enough.  Early individual statements from officers at the scene (not colluding) should have been a must (the IPCC is so toothless it can’t even do this).  If a cop had been shot by Duggan most of the non-forensics would have been done within hours, statements within 24 and a charge read out the morning after.  The Commissioner seems so hapless she didn’t know even essential features of the investigation weeks into it and made up some that were untrue.

You wouldn’t find me anywhere near community referencing, but you could get me out of the office or bed to talk to a crowd of people in the circumstances of August 4th.  I wouldn’t do the job at all under the obvious remit for pussies in effect.

What I’d suggest is the scraping of elected police chiefs and letting us elect some regional oversight people to direct complaints and improvement with a small number of hardened investigators who would nick any “sergeant seen throwing a gun into a crime scene periphery”.  Of course, some will think we are getting no more than the usual community referencing porkies, but those of us who do think like this from time to time don’t go a-rioting.  I would say though, that police and IPCC people had enough time to spin false tales to the press and this means there was time to put together a truthful story to tell the putative rioters and the wider public.  If the nonsense on an exchange of fire and the rest came from officers involved in the incident, there is more gloom ahead.

IPCC Bungle On At Tortoise Speed

Whatever might the following mean?

“The Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) is to independently investigate the steps undertaken by Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) officers in relation to an investigation of an alleged assault, involving a firearm, in late July 2011.

As a result of the MPS investigation, an individual has been charged with offences relating to the firearm and alleged assault.

The MPS voluntarily referred the matter to the IPCC after tests suggested the non-police issue firearm recovered from the scene of the fatal shooting of Mark Duggan on 4 August 2011 could have been the one used in the earlier alleged assault.

 IPCC Commissioner, Sarah Green, said:

“Our investigation will consider whether all investigative lines were promptly identified and acted upon by officers from the Metropolitan Police Service and to what extent, if any, the conduct of this investigation may have impacted on the supply of the firearm found at the scene of the shooting of Mark Duggan.

“We have informed Mr Duggan’s family of the situation today and IPCC family liaison managers continue to be on hand to support Mr Duggan’s family while investigations continue.

“As an individual has now been charged with offences in relation to that police investigation, we cannot provide any further information at this time.”

The MPS referred the matter to the IPCC on Monday 14 November 2011 and an assessment has been concluded resulting in the decision to undertake an independent investigation”

I thought the IPCC was investigating the Duggan shooting – obviously so badly that the Met have had to refer a relevant matter to them?  Surely one would expect this to simply be a matter uncovered by the IPCC investigators?  It happened before the Duggan killing – who didn’t tell them straight away.  It’s time for some sackings now, but who can say not cooperating with the IPCC is wrong after Blair denied them access at Stockwell?.

There are any number of possibilities on the non-police weapon, from Duggan carrying it about after it has been used in another criminal incident (dumb but done) to it having been planted at the scene of the Duggan killing.  What I detest and can see no reason for is the manner in which this kind of information is released.  Our notions of sub judice are long past sell by date and in need of review.  The IPCC or police can’t flout them as they stand, but the ground itself is dangerous.  Just as Duggan’s killing led to the march that led to the riots, this could too.  One hopes not.

It is now more than three months since the Duggan killing – one that almost killed a police officer from assumed friendly fire too.  One appreciates matters do not proceed at all like CSI (which is crass nonsense) – yet we do not seem to have any means to properly investigate in an appropriately open manner, reported in a way we can trust.  This is in part the British disease of secrecy and across the world a problem with enquiries into potential police wrongdoing and incompetence.

What’s at issue in matters like this is less the probable fantasy that Mark Duggan was gunned down and a ‘Saturday night special’ left to confuse any evidence trail, but the general problems we have with fair ways of getting truth out and for us to be able to trust in fair investigation.

We have had enquiries into Iraq and yet another one is yet to conclude.  This is years on and I have never understood why we went in to Iraq or Afghanistan and don’t meet anyone else who does either,  As someone who teaches economics in universities I don’t have a full understanding of what I think is looting by rich people, though I’d say I do know enough to say the economics presented by politicians and media is based on a quasi-religious farce that is a cover-story for the looting.

One might say that we should be able to rely on court reporting and the various inquiries and should just have patience.  This barely fits with history in any depth, other than that written by victors etc.  I suspect the real problem is we can demand nothing from democracy.  We now demand those arrested tell their story against not being believed in the future (oversimplification) – yet allow those in authority to delay and deylay until “enquiries” are complete – a point often ever deferred with enquiries in secret and conducted by people with interests and bias we are expected to take as ‘objective’.

There are better and faster ways.  We need to establish and build them into a working constitution.  That we can’t wake up and smell the coffee over matters from nearly four months elapsing with us no further enlightened on the death of one person and the near death of a police officer, are waiting until January over a Border Agency farce and have so little conception as a populace on how reasonable equality went so badly wrong in the hands of paid-for politicians and banksters – or have so much coverage of a soccer player calling someone black and so little about vulture funds stealing millions from poor people who live in the Congo (also black) through banks in Jersey – all strike me as to do with a justice system that is intentionally inaccessible, expensive and slow. I suspect the reasons for wanting to restrict what can be said to courtrooms and equivalents are a problem for democracy.

It seems we can’t trust the public, when acting as jurors, with information such as Tabak looking at the pornography of strangling women the night before he put his hands round Jo Yates’ neck – yet could expect them to exclude ‘Duggan the hood’ reporting on deliberation of his killing and the near killing of a police officer by another police officer.  My sense of it is we need something less archaic in place on what can and should be in public scrutiny.  There is no scientific evidence I know of to suggest judges’ instructions and the system of evidence in courtrooms makes anyone more objective – rather the opposite.  We still allow eyewitness evidence and credibility, knowing both are highly likely to be wrong.  Where is the independent assessment of IPCC reports?

The legitimisation crisis continues.  I have no idea whether the officer who shot Mark Duggan and nearly killed his fellow officer is culpable of anything.  I’m happy for courts to decide.  I’m not comfortable with, have all these been traced an investigation that has taken so long to decide where charges lie and seems to have missed relevant material or had this hidden from it.  Given the non-police issue weapon found being previously subject to likely police seizure from criminal activity or amnesty, have all these been traced?  Was this basic enquiry done at all given the way this chestnut seems to have been passed on? We could be told about this and should be.  The rest needs social and legal changes, including to the IPCC remit – but is essentially about the secrecy we have made habitual.

If Mark Duggan has survived and was subject to criminal charges, one line of enquiry essential to his defence would be the discovery of similar weapons handed-in to police that cannot be reliably traced to destruction, or worse, the actual weapon turning up in police hands and supposedly destroyed.  One would expect a paper trail.  Has this been done?  It would seem not on the basis of the IPCC having to be informed about this other matter.

 

John Yates Didn’t Do Anything

The ‘I’ in IPCC looks increasingly inconsequential.  An investigation into a decent enough, but highly overpaid cop who had already resigned has turned up no turnips.  The real questions go uninvestigated and concern a criminal justice system not fit for purpose, with too many chiefs (providing inadequate supervision) and not enough Indians.

Problems with our institutions are taking place in the malevolent influence of debt and those who have cornered power through it,  In all this, our language has collapsed.  Debt used to be about the obligation to repay reasonable amounts borrowed against reasonable ability to repay – now I’d need to write an article to begin to explain.  There’s one here – http://www.levyinstitute.org/pubs/wp_592.pdf – but most can’t be bothered.  Good policing used to be about preventing crime and keeping the peace.  This too has gone the way of all verbosity,

What we need is Dirty Harry – but you can be sure we’d screw up and arm himwith a blunted pencil!  With democracy ripped off by some rich bastards we come up with IPCC investigations into trivia and what are really footling enquiries into the News of the Screws when we’ve been taken into wars we don’t want and don’t understand by utter chavs like Blair.

The awful reality is that nothing happened when Stevenson and Yates resigned and I suspect this is because they did remarkably nothing much because this is what life has come to be about – doing nothing much.  None of us contributed much to the mad, religious economics that lets a few rich trouser most of the spoils, and the “brilliant” CEOs and the rest all turn out not to have known anything about what’s been going on when some glimmer of truth crawls out from under the carpet,

There’s plenty of stuff that needs doing, but instead of being able to organise that we engage in mad rituals as surely as Easter Islanders building statues and destroying the wood needed for boat building.  I’m for sacking anyone ‘earning’ more than £80K a year and sending them on compulsory voluntary service overseas.  I suspect we wouldn’t miss them, just as the Met won’t miss Yates and Stephenson – not because they weren’t decent men but because they were and were just doing their bit.  The problem is that the gross injustice of the rich world has moved in on the solid values we expect and we have started to use all kinds of false justification for the vast salaries paid to the ‘gods’.

I think it’s time to get back to being ordinary – John Yates seemed a very ordinary man to me – and putting an end to celebrity through money.  Good leadership is valuable, but we’re pretending we can get it by paying for it – and this is a myth,  Someone at the IPCC should have stood up and stopped the investigation into the passing on of a cv in its tracks.  But why should we expect anyone to show some decency and determination when our ‘great leaders’ pray at the feet of the gods of the free-lunch economy in which debts larger than all we transact ‘produce’ what we ‘need’?  We’re in the hands of lunacy and need to be shocked out of it.  This is clear when we can’t stop kids being bullied at school but can investigate an instance of nothing that wouldn’t matter anyway.

Keystone Cop Discipline?

The ‘Enfield Serious Crime Squad’ (or whatever) recently caught demolishing a Mini with laughably ‘non-issue’ baseball bats has rather sadly been disbanded.  Current cops shows lack the edge of ‘The Sweeny’ and this lot promised yo add Keystone humour and farce to our lives.  A better punishment than the slapped wrists and demotion of the obviously heroic detective sergeant running the show would have seen them followed everywhere by a documentary team led by Ricky Gervais.  At least the suspect, if not the one they invented, was in this Mini – in my days they shot one up and killed people only to discover the one they were after wasn’t in the car at all.

There was a time when the Met’s version of shock and awe involved 50 Bobbies wading ashore to ‘invade’ Anguilla – I believe some were sensible enough to stay.  Compared with the Stockwell fiasco this was underkill by the Enfield Crew.  Once again supervision seems to have been entirely absent and the IPCC looking on burning money to no effect.  It’s time to be rid of that organisation.  The cops did a fair job investigating themselves – the problem being the discipline isn’t transparent.

What’s being missed in discipline cases is that the police officers and the forces generally lie and don’t seem able to come clean.  Some poor sod at the bottom may get the push, but generally the problems are being covered-up – including the pressures on officers and the cultures in which they are under-performing.

The key area in need of investigation are broad miscarriages of justice in the CJS in terms of victims’ and complainants’ perceptions and what carte blanche investigation could discover.  This needs to be national and properly independent.  It certainly doesn’t need to be about nailing cops to the wall, but it does need to be an open process.

What I’m seeing is probably decent cops ending up in discipline trouble and little happening on the incompetence, inadequate management and changes in the dud CJS system that doesn’t help with many of the problems.  Recent promises on 120,000 dud families by the Home Secretary may as well come from the nether end of Tony Blair and the same useless bureaucrat he used is still making the same false promises (Louise whoever).

The aim in police improvement is somewhat of a paradox – we need cops with more discretion and less clown bureaucracy who don’t do the gaming that is destroying all credibility – and for these cops not to abuse this legitimate authority.  I would say at the outset you can’t design a system on the lines of anti-corruption through bureaucracy – if you do the job itself can’t be done.

The IPCC is little use because it was not given the remit needed on discipline and has ended up as Bandaid -a typical British watchdog with no teeth.  This was predicted by Graham Smith.  I knew as soon as I saw the kind of investigations they were doing – despite some good people, they mostly waste time on dross.  Softcock – the former Chair was an obvious disaster.and was quickly defending hopeless systems like local resolution on the grounds everyone was unhappy with it.  The lack of balls was obvious at Stockwell where he should have gone into the scene straight away with his investigators or got locked up trying.  Plenty of information is going into the IPCC on widespread corruption and incompetence yet there is no sign of them doing anything with it.  The lack of statistics on complaints (not weasel numbers) is as appalling as the regular gaming figures forces issue on crime itself.  What we need to see is the anatomy of police action that causes complaint and what in that process makes people feel justice or otherwise is being done.  Instead, we have to rely on ‘Panorama’.

The probllems are clearly wider than policing.  The CJS remains a dated mess lawyers and a wad of other ‘professionals’  make money from.  Courts often get round to hearing cases over a year after offences are committed – and I’m not talking complex cases.  If the riots demonstrated anything, it was that we can cure this, And I’m sure most of us still trust cops ahead of banksters and politicians.  Proper work opportunities would cure a lot too.

The “answers” I hear are 100 years past sell by, yet politicians still puke them and the only view on television and most main stream media is undergraduate piss (useful only for drug testing).  How anyone can say, after 60 years of universal education and more training than you can shake a stick at, that more of this is any answer eludes me – and I’m an educationalist.  Just as many cops I meet despair of being able to sort out ‘problem families’ (IQs maybe at 380 for a family of five) or protect victims from them but won’t tell the truth on this openly, I know many academics who won’t let their own kids build up a £50K debt going to a second class ‘university’ who are ‘quiet’ too.  From a currently cursory look, police discipline hasn’t changed much over 60 years and the IPCC has the same problems as previous bodies.

My guess is the first problem is that we can’t see the wood from the trees.  Research shows that people in the UK and US believe society is much fairer than it is, wealth shared much more than it is – and worse that their ‘ideal’ is massively more equal than the current situation and more like 1970 – an era in which we believed we were making progress on this.

Part of the answer on policing is to make the job better.  Neville Evans was good enough to send me a copy of his book on this,  My solutions would be more radical than his, but I share his analysis on there not being enough care about for officers and that this is largely ignored.  It may seem strange, but I share with Joseph Wambaugh (who did 16 years) the feeling that civilian discipline would actually help with that.  In the meantime,Nigel’s book might bring some help and solace to those officers not pretending to be John Wayne.

Related articles

• Casey Brittle Case And Hapless Policing (allcoppedout.wordpress.com)
• Tottenham Probably Shows No Faith in IPCC (allcoppedout.wordpress.com)
• A Short Introduction To Literature On Police Corruption (allcoppedout.wordpress.com)
• Learning Lessons From The Mark Duggan Killing (allcoppedout.wordpress.com)
• Met Sacked Cop Case Leaves Unasked Questions (allcoppedout.wordpress.com)

What Do Senior Cops Do?

“During the course of these incidents and our investigation Nottinghamshire Police
has been subject to an intense period of change and scrutiny. We have been reassured
by the force that lessons will be learned on this occasion and I hope, for
the sake of those who need the police’s help, this truly is the case this time.”

The above is flannel from someone paid a lot of money to be an IPCC commissioner.  It’s schoolgirl stuff, typical of a game of doctors and nurses rather than the tough action of a world with real consequences.

The report it’s from contains no references to any Nottinghamshire senior officers.  One wonders what these officers get paid for.  The absence from the report is such that I would consider sacking them all.  In the absence of any report to the Home Secretary asking for more power to deal with such ‘invisible man’ corruption, the IPCC Commissioner should go to, instead iof making such vapid statements as above.

Across the board we see senior figures taking gazumped salaries, bonuses and having no clue when things go wrong on their watch.  In this case I can’t even find mention of anyone above the rank of sergeant.  Police inspectors are paid more than university lecturers these days – what for?  We know the IPCC is a shambles that couldn’t investigate its way out of a paper bag and can’t see how pathetic and biased it is, but what on earth has it done here?  Sure the Plods have behaved just as any victim still living would expect – like a bunch on incompetents – but this went on and on and on with no supervision stepping in to sort it out.  There is no investigation into what matters, only some puny attempt to find scapegoats at the bottom.

These domestic violence come “neighbour dispute” cases are often more difficult than murder enquiries yet the most inexperienced cops are dispatched to deal with them.  I had not only no training to deal with them but operated in a cynical culture concerning them.  As far as I can find now, this situation pertains, though high-level rhetoric has changed, paralleling political correctness.  Untrained, inexperienced cops are being sent into situations with little power to resolve them and every encouragement to write them off so they can get to the next job.  A case of no real change in 30 years and perhaps even a worsening despite new rhetoric.

This case should have gone down the route of ‘Williams is a dangerous bastard Boss, I need help to sort it out’.  The IPCC never get to the question of why this didn’t happen. Underlying this is the widespread understanding in police ranks that victims like the woman concerned don’t matter.  The cops on the ground blundered – but frankly almost anyone would.  Some of them lied or were totally incompetent on vital evidence too – but don’t con yourself that you wouldn’t have – they were acting as expected.

So where were the senior officers who trashed the useless domestic violence policy and didn’t replace it for 18 months and where were those who should have picked up on this long-running case?  What does a senior cop do?  The only obvious answer is that they stay away from any flying shit that might stick to them and they cloak themselves in invisibility and take high salaries for little evident work or accountability.  In this case the accountability appears to be to another highly paid IPCC slacker whose rap on the knuckles is to “hope” they learn the lessons they didn’t learn, as promised,last time.  This is like the hope of the mother of a teenage recidivist.

We need to stop seeing matters like this a police problems needing external review through feeble bodies like the IPCC – this route of what is really self-regulation (for many reasons the “independent” is a con) is failing everywhere from banking to government.  The IPCC has merely found what a decent sergeant or inspector should have been on top of in routine supervision.  This is key – if the supervision didn’t find this case in time how many more are going bad under their watch?  This one only came to light because of a death – dead victims have more ‘rights’ than living ones.

Decent senior cops doing what they are paid for would be finding these cases before the deaths and where there aren’t such final consequences.  They should also be pressing for such matters to be out of police hands at an early stage for resolution.  Instead they let victims live in fear and blame it all on the evil poor like Gadget.  Gadget is right on much of what goes on, but hapless on solution.  This is for the worst of reasons and amounts to giving up to the current situation in which many have to live with the consequences of “policing failure” – a failure which is much more generally systemic and buries the real problem.  That the IPCC has replaced what should be routine supervision suggests our senior cops are obtaining a pecuniary advantage by deception just by turning up at work, and that IPCC management is puny.

We have seen recently that half of the complaints made against teachers are malicious or groundless.  I would have expected a higher figure and would in complaints against police. Standards in both organisations have been dropping for years and this is the case across our society.  Nurses chat idly as patients need care, doctors strike patients off for having the effrontery to complain.  I suspect a widespread collapse in responsible supervision.  As an academic I could once advise good students to get to an appropriate university.  Now this advice would probably be a discipline breach if it was to advise on a different university than the one I teach in, despite the advice being in the interests of the individual.  The relation to the public we serve has gone.

I believe senior cops are:

1.no longer cops

2. overpaid

3. self-serving mortgage serfs

4. bureaucrats charged to cover-up serious failings

5. take no responsibility that matters

6. need the cost-saving knife.

I would welcome an explanation of what they do.  I can find none in any IPCC report and plenty of evidence they preside over a system that fails us more than it helps.

 

Casey Brittle Case And Hapless Policing

The IPCC has produced a mildly critical report on the death of Casey Brittle at the hands of her dangerous ex-boyfriend.  The guy was clearly a total shit and not fit to be on our streets.  One wonders how many more like him there are and why our CJS can’t deal with them.  I am not aware of any case studies of successful police and legal action in dealing with this kind of scum.  One would expect such material to be collated and in use in training.

The IPCC report is tiresome and lacks any self-criticism, or criticism of the system-level. The cops put up for minor disciplinaries are all constables or sergeants – this despite the Nottinghamshire force having form for such failure and having no domestic violence policy in force for more than a year.  In defence of the IPCC, one can say there remit is woefully inadequate, but they’ve been around long enough to protest this and get it changed and have, instead, been led by inadequates drawing massive salaries who couldn’t say boo to a goose.

The report gives us no idea how rife (or otherwise) the problem is.  My own experience indicates the problems are extensive and policing of them hapless.  The issues are not merely policing ones – our CJS (indeed wider legal system) is not fit for purpose. Resources are committed to clown libel cases or interest only to the rich and the feeble-minded who gawp at such stuff through the ‘mejar’ (a far more appropriate term than media, suggesting narcissistic voyeurism).

The systemic failures are not correctly pinned on Response officers, dud as these often are in effect.  My guess (fairly reasonably informed) is that this case is the tip on an iceberg.  I believe the actual problem is that we don’t equip our cops with the tools to do the job and actually skill the incompetence they and other agencies demonstrate,  The IPCC make several references to forms not being submitted to a domestic violence unit working 9 to 5 (well almost).  Piss-poor bureaucratic solutions will only lead to clown form-filling that will only help in cover-up.

What’s needed is a system that drags these bastards in front of a court straight away, much as the night courts rustled up to deal with the recent rioters.  Police officers are being asked to deal with questions they can’t answer and which it would be wrong to give them personal power to deal with.  Sure there were officers who ‘dealt’ with these incidents on “area search no trace” form – but this is the ‘record’ of most Response policing (including mine 30years ago).  No solution that doesn’t recognise the mostly young, inexperienced and wet-behind-the-ears Response cops (some remaining this way for 20 years) aren’t Solomons will work.  They need somewhere to ‘bag-off’ these problems and this place should be ‘judicial’ and the bastards (and some innocent parties) need to be taken there, and directions given for proper investigation under which all parties are made aware of consequences, and resources allocated.

There are glaring faults in the policing in this case, yet we keep coming back to the same old story, most of which is cover-up with each case dealt with as though it is separate from the actual and much wider problem.  This problem is that our justice system is run by the rich for the rich and is too slow to have much deterrent effect amongst the repeat offending scum whose presence dominates the CJS and policing.

Much policing actually works on the basis of keeping people out of court because this costs so much money.  I think it’s time to reverse this and get more of these problems into a courtroom as they arise, with courts issuing injunctions with powers of arrest as soon as possible with the effect of a binding over and directed police and other agency investigation.  This would bring about ‘partnership working’ far more directly than current pontification about it.

We should be looking to improve police work, but as with 50% of our kids who can’t benefit from education designed for the intelligent, we can’t keep on pretending we can make cops just out of training school into Solomons capable of solutions none of us could manage and they are expected to deal with because white collar people and all kinds of stuffed shirts want their weekends free for ‘golf’ or fear they would turn to dust if forced to venture into the 24/7/365.

In terms of resources, I think we could design out the CPS, the need for the judicial element to consist of expensive lawyers, use this element instead of elected police commissioners and remove many senior police ranks, the IPCC and look to further savings by a less adversarial CJS and reliance on dated concepts in evidence such as ‘credibility’ and in some cases ‘proof’ through a more discursive yet binding approach.

One thing clear in the IPCC report is the absence of senior officers (amazing given the lack of a domestic violence policy for 18 months) giving advice or being available to give any.  Several should be sacked and the disciplinary record of the poor sods trying to actually do the job, however badly, expunged.

I believe our cops are much worse than our general public image of them – they are much more unpopular amongst people with recent experience of problems needing police support.  That a statement like this is so often received as criticism of all officers is also a statement of the paranoid-schizoid position cops take too easily.  Police always make out their job is very difficult, but rather than using this as an excuse, we should be looking for the reasons why the job is so difficult and solutions to it.

Even in proposing immediate referral of many street issues to an investigative court, I’m aware that the worst court in Britain is the Family Court and this is stacked out with professional advice.  This court is so bad it keeps its proceedings secret.  We need something quick with follow-through, using mediation with enforceable arbitration.