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.

 

Is Sue Akers Pointing To Widespread Police Corruption?

Sue Akers is certainly getting some work done.  I don’t believe in widespread police corruption, though I do now think our society is shot through with the stuff.  Akers’ claims are presumably backed by the initial evidence arising.  Evidence clearly available had any enquiry really been done in the past.  The big problem doing any enquiry is being able to get access to and investigate what’s been going on.  We would, of course, not known about the thieving parliamentarians if money had not been on the table to a whistleblower.  Even subsequent to the Telegraph and the intrepid Heather Brookes, material was still issued with material redactions.

Maybe what’s really at issue here is secrecy and the need for information to be much more freely available – with people responsible for its publication also being criminally responsible if they fail?  The Met is hardly covered in glory and we have hardly missed Yates and Stephenson – the former presumably making no impact on high salary in Bahrain either.  If we are to believe the story that this was not investigated because there were other much more pressing demands like terrorism, should we now conclude we are at more risk because Ms Akers and her team are diverted from such purpose with the Olympics pending?  From what I’ve seen she would be better fitted to the complex, multi-sourced enquiries involved in terrorism, than the buffoon men of the past.

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.