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.

 

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“More Met Racism”

The story is probably as complete as a newspaper can make it here – http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2012/apr/05/met-officers-restricted-alleged-racist

I don’t like racism wherever I find it.  The problem is that I find it everywhere.  So do scientific tests.  In the latter we find it in the sub-conscious, underneath what we can pretend in rhetoric.  This is true of criminality, sexism, pornography and whatever to ‘push away’ from polite society (a Freudian concept).  The Internet is a mirror for it all.

I saw “police racism” first hand and its language was colourful (let’s face it, PC is so bad it could even make this ‘pun’ a speech crime).  In the Met this included a threat to set a police dog on ‘the Spade in cell 5’, down to ‘what do you call a nigger with a machine gun?’ and assertions the ‘way to deal with blacks’ was to go in hard, ‘knock them about to show who’s who’ and so on.  In all my time, I never saw and behaviour by officers other than speech to indicate normal impartiality was dropped on race grounds.  There was plenty of other stereotyping and gaming.  It wasn’t a good idea to be young, scuzz-looking and driving a Ford Cortina in the late and early-hours when I was working for that matter (scuzz nicked an awful lot of Ford Cortinas back then).

I’m sure cops take far more abuse than they give out.  I tried not to nick people just on this count, tolerate their drunkenness and so on.  I’m not sure how we have come to operate broken windows policy on “speech” – especially what may be said in heated contexts.  We have little clue on what connects behaviour with speech in common action.  In terms of  real racism in action, it is surely worse that we allow capital flight from Africa (through London) that kills people and keeps them in squalor, than any sloppy racist language can do.  And ‘ethnic’ discrimination is colour-blind – as in the Balkan and Rwandan genocides.

I’m quite happy to see words like ‘wog’, ‘nigger’, ‘Paki’, ‘Gringo’, ‘Jihadist’, ‘Crusader’ and the rest regarded as inappropriate.  That the issues remain untouched is obvious, say, when after several months working with Arabs, they announce you aren’t a Crusader.  From Cyprus to the Balkans you can find friendly, even inter-married neighbours quickly at war on old ‘ethnic’lines and disgusting genocides.  OJ was guilty if you were white, not guilty of you were black.  Even those involved in the Rodney King beating were not convicted of any direct crime, but civil rights abuse (google the video).

I’m much more concerned at the lack of disabled people reading the news or having to throw their wheel-chairs off trains and crawl back into them, or disproportionate numbers of ‘foreign sounding’ men driving taxis rather than a cross-section of the local population than any problems in ‘politically correct speech’ amongst or towards police officers.  This doesn’t make the latter right, but it is an indication that our focus remains on ‘espoused theory’ rather than theory-in-action.  I deeply suspect that those pronouncing on ‘institutional racism’ are deep movers in the institution.

You can’t watch news on Sky now without (especially around tea-time) some grim advert on poverty and deprivation in Africa and children starving.  Yet behind the attempt to get you to give a few quid or dollars, capital flight through the well-dressed and well spoken City and its offshore network is growing.  This is the City of “Blue Arrow” convicted by a jury of us, let off by judges who aren’t.  A few Met cops mouthing the wrong stuff are small beer and should be treated as such – quickly rapped knuckles are in order, not protracted legal non-solutions.  Sticks and stones break bones – words can be hurtful but we should be able to give and take these in a tolerant attitude, and more importantly we need to discredit words in favour of analysis of overall actions.

That cops can still mouth this crap is sad.  Yet nothing like as sad as what banksters do.  That kid you see in the advert has malnutrition – but what is the cause of her not having enough to eat?  The words of a few cops or something much deeper and to do with the institutions of ‘money’ and our failure to focus on what really matters and what is really immoral and should be subject of a moral imposition of the broadly democratic human rights that matter?  Tariq Jahan was capable, under intense stress, of saying the right things, in last year’s riots, and yet could still break another man’s jaw for ‘looking at his wife’.  Police officers who spout racism should not, yet they do less damage in this than those who spout ‘learning lessons’ or are incompetent, and a lot less damage than most of those who might hear their outbursts.  This latest case is encouraging, as it seems other officers have felt able to come forward and complain.  Yet surely there are more important matters they should be able to bring to light and cannot – such as the cover-up on hacking, what really happened in the Nico Bento case, and why white collar crime hardly gets a look in.

What Can Raoul Moat Teach Us?

When the ‘manhunt’ finally came to an end, as Raoul Moat’s forefinger did the decent thing, he should have taught around 500 of our MPs and Peers a lesson in morality.  We could hardly expect to give them a bottle of whisky and a revolver and go and do the decent thing, could we.  Ambush Predator quoted some Phil Woolas’ diary entries the other day and from these we could only expect him to think the pistol was given because of our enduring love for his self-protection and that the whisky was a gift of our undying devotion.

Most social psychology has it that bullies and victims share much in common.  We need to know more and do more about the environment that forms them, notably schools, peers and ‘family’.  Bullies almost always do worse in school than those fated to go on as victims.  People like Moat and those around him needed help when they couldn’t get it, in order not to get into the traps of paranoid narcissism, needing to be screwed early by, and capable of being impressed by over-aged losers like Moat, and generally being made into an underclass.  None of us are free of blame in this, though I don’t say this to excuse those who become benefit-sponsored criminals.  That police are called to the many incidents they cause is a sure sign we don’t care.  They are just cheaper in keeping the lid on than the social, teaching and discipline services that are needed.  Cops may deal with these people with their fuckwit stereotyping, but that’s all the training we give them, so we must know they are going to fob-off the victims and wait until someone dies before they step in.

We have already created a whole range of other class-interests to cope with and take advantage of this situation.  Politicians may never have to keep promises,but they do have to make them.  Having things going wrong at the core of society allows many promises to be made.  Now all you need is a set of lying bureaucrats to produce ‘statistics’ that pretend something is being done.  These can be juggled about for decades.  On the one had burglaries can be got down by simple observation and intelligence sweeps, along with far tougher sentences for this crime than shop-lifting.  Shop-lifting goes up; we know crime really doesn’t go down and that criminals adjust.  This part of the argument disappears in the official claims, because cops have been told to get burglary down.  We never think, as they announce yet another successful burglary sweep and 300 arrests, that these sweeps are always successful, which rather suggests there are always people about doing burglary.  You might think they’d be a disappearing race with all the focus on their removal from our society; yet they seem in plentiful supply.

We might do a much better job at understanding not just the underclass, but all the classes we form.  My own guess is that we are not organised efficiently at all and are inside a matrix of genetic making we need to escape as surely as some fifteen year-old needing Moat needs to escape.  I suspect huge amounts of public expenditure is not created to deal with problems and provide opportunities, but is stolen by bureaucrats pretending to act on behalf of the underclass or in protecting us from it.

The way forward is to change the nature of our ‘interest group’ formation right through society, from crappy bullies like Moat to those media and political creeps who do us much more damage.  New technology should already be helping, but classically it is hindering.  Its use runs against management power interests, some thing found again and again in research.  Proper management information systems have equality of access, and as all our dumb MPs and the rest ever have in their favour is information kept close to their chests, they will do anything to prevent widespread access to real knowledge.

To mention that the average sub-Saharan IQ is under 75 and broadly that of what we once called educationally subnormal, is often seized on as racist.  Average IQ has been shown to equate in a very straight line with a set of miserable diseases afflicting populations.  Once one knows both these facts, it is impossible to think along the racist lines, except for perverse racists.  It may though be possible to hold that Africa may well have human populations in need a a lot of help because of disease factors and that its populations may need help in ways that would be otherwise patronising.  To have prissy, patronising PC nasties doing idiot diversity dances all over attempts to produce the truth is our modern problem.  Facts are often embarrassing.  We need to be able to embarrass ourselves.

I’d suggest that virtually none of us now do necessary work and that we are so dumb we haven’t even realised there is no need to these days.  Instead we have money circulating through a benefits’ system that would be better understood by recognising just how many are really in it and how it generates a class of worthies who make fortunes from it.  Just as an example, Moat got off 14 charges.  Who got the legal aid benefits?  How many cops would we need if there were no Moats and so on?  Such questions could lead us to a systems understanding quite different from thinking of Moat as a scumbag or hero, but as a focal point of public expenditure and benefit allocation.  Just how much cop, judge, social worker pay and lawyer loot has been focused through him?

There is a lot we might investigate in this way.  I noticed when I got a couple of million in research funding two decades ago and saw if frittered away.  It’s really hard to spend money on real problems or ideas and very easy to do more or less nothing and with the gold medal (I have two) as long as you feed the audit evaluator well (mostly with a barrage of figures and boxes of receipts).

Moat clearly had a mental breakdown.  He got more resources spent on him after the killings than we would have spent on a platoon of German paratroopers in WW2.  Nasty, killing rapists have attracted much less in recent past, whilst representing a much greater threat.  The expenditure cannot be justified in a society in which people with disabled kids often don’t eat because they can’t afford it.    Cops who think this was a priority should have to explain themselves to the relatives of other dead or those living under threat from scum they fob-off as neighbour disputes and anti-social behaviour, or the hundreds if women (and some men) raped by people a few trained baboons would have caught.  Instead of honesty, we have Inspector Gadget, often right, yet hiding both from his duty and conscience, on the basis that telling the truth will make him poor (that is not a higher rate benefit scrounger?) and the usual groundless superiority of his morality over that of the criminal underclass.  What we need is a new accounting in the open.