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.

Advertisement

Who Would You Rather Lose?

So now public sector workers are fair game for pay freezes until they match their regions private sector levels.  Our armed services are losing good people to more attractive pay guarding ships from pirates.  Our cops, if they have any sense, will be applying to Canada, Australia or the EU if they speak anything other than English.  John Yates is no doubt on a good bung in Bahrain, where his ability to turn a blind eye will be useful.  I am also off to sell my skills abroad, though this won’t extend to ignoring torture.

Public servants in the UK can expect pay cuts to bring them in line with the Chinese-serf levels the private sector manages through its innovation, creativity and competition.  The rich, meantime want more and more or they will all go abroad leaving the country they ‘owe allegiance’ to to sink to its knees.  Who do you think we can afford to lose – skilled professionals in health care and the public sector and armed services, or a bunch of shits who think they are so special the deserve salaries that amount to more than a life’s earnings for most?  I rather gave my own view away there!

I think we should have a cull of those allowed vast wealth now – I’m rather against killing people off, but we could just strip them out of our system at around £80K a year equivalents and give them three months to settle elsewhere with their in demand skills.  Rooney would no doubt leave his ‘beloved’ Manchester United and City have to put out the youth team, but who cares – do we really think we  haven’t got replacement talent to run the necessary show?

Even in the “industries” (like children’s games played by men) where the best have to prove themselves on level playing fields on open display, there is no need for the absence of reasonable salary caps (this just removes the competition via money element).  When you can hire bent accountants to “prove” success it’s even worse.  I’d be happier to live amongst people who accept reasonable pay and wealth retention as part of an obligation to everyone else, than grasping Einsteins (which they ain’t) prepared to live off the backs of everyone else – where will they be if we go to war – next to you in the trenches or suddenly off on holiday to neutral territory?

I understand “modern economics” and have seen how little benefit those on big  pay bring, and how the wealth is manipulated through various offshore, transfer pricing dodges, land and mineral theft and the rest.  We can do better than this pornographic society and have the technology to rebuild from the bottom-up, embodying management knowledge into a machine utility needing regulation.

In Bahrain, a colleague was asked to prevent an IT system operating at a particular point so a favoured bureaucrat could make decisions. A bit like the days when police investigation systems produced format (more or less wordperfect) incompatible with prosecution systems – with the outputs needing re-typing.  We are doing this over and again in management and finance, largely to allow fraud and the high-paying jobs of the machine overseers whose skills are obsolete.  The last successful innovation in financial services was the ATM.  Give me decent cops, soldiers, nurses and doctors to form a community with, not money-grubbing creeps selling bags with the smell of cakes, or bananas produced at subsistence wages at a price inflated by offshore management dodges to ten times the price that would provide a fair wage for pickers, transport and retailing.

The truth about most work is that it is routinised and we need to share it under fair exchange and regulation.  We have failed to organise a fair global society, yet insist that management organisation is so good its worth 150 times the reasonable salary we can’t pay our  soldiers or public sector workers.  In science, stuck with a core research programme as dud as this we’d abandon it.

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.

IPCC Should Go In Police Cuts

The IPCC have pronounced on several of the Met’s now former officers and continue to ferret away on John Yates’ involvement in a job for one of the girls. This is all a waste of money.  There has obviously been a problem at the Met with officers getting involved in selling stories and frames.  This looks much worse when various officers seem rather too close to the media bosses involved further up the chain.  Officers involved in attempts to frame people to discredit them is really bad news.  One hopes there is a real investigation going on into this, done by cops who know what they are doing.  By the time the IPCC were doing their work, those who might have done something had had plenty of time to get rid of any evidence and get their stories right.  The whole of Westminster seems into ‘unhealthy’ relations with media.  No reason really to look at the Met over this.  A ‘clean you act up now’ message should have been enough.

The IPCC is a dismal failure and the reasons generally given for this point to a management failure in our country.  The same failures as in previous revisions of what to do about police corruption and bent cops were built into the IPCC – this reeks for the classic British management disease of repeating past mistakes in apparent change.  The others involve the closed nature of the organisation, restricted remit, lack of power, bureaucracy in extremis, bias towards internal accounts (i.e. police accounts), timidity and with no influence on the kind of change that could make a real difference.  After enough time to be making a real difference (8 years +) the IPCC’s website is not full of competent reports and successful prosecutions, but cluttered with failures like Stockwell and clown performance management.

Compare the costs of a Bill Bratton style “assault” on UK policing with those of the IPCC.  I don’t expect you have these to hand, but the first obvious downer for the IPCC is that it saves no money and is always an added cost.  You don’t need Bratton to ‘do Bratton’  – the management style essentially boots out the ‘LOMBARDS’ at the top, brings in a new top team, cuts our dross (BPR – whatever) and forces accountability (including testing for cheating through statistics) and sponsors action (broken windows is usually team action on genuine problems) rather than ‘cuffing’ on work.  Bratton’s work has happened alongside far more serious arrests and convictions of bent cops than anything the IPCC has screwed up here.  There may be more corruption in the USA, but if not you have to wonder what we are paying our lillywhites for.  The IPCC look ripe to cut because of their success in being unable to find any!

They won’t find any if they keep looking where there is none and where the evidence has already been “routinely” destroyed or left in the hands of the potentially culpable to change or disappear.  They could be cut to provide the running costs of setting up a Bratton type re-engineering of British policing.  We could replace them with 10 regional teams under elected chiefs with a broader remit and more power to do management discipline and proactive anti-corruption work.

In terms of measuring police performance, we could establish a better understanding of why so many of the non-criminal public who come into contact with police are dissatisfied and work through the data for reasons.  On the same theme, we also need reliable estimates on crime costs as well as numbers to enable a better gauge of whether crime is under control or just being diverted.

My guess on cost saving is that 15% could be targeted and that a major part of restructuring would be improving recruit quality and flattening supervision structures (less ranks, less in rank).  The ‘overhead’ on a piece of police action is dire (some of my old research bids were at 60% – I’ve worked recently where they are at 24%).  There are ways to beat this through more focused recruitment, part-timers and specialisation that doesn’t require the current uniform ‘plodding’.  I’m not surprised Bratton says he would love the job.  As a business re-engineering prize it looks as good as the Imperial Group back in the 80’s.

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?