The Secret Life Of The Evil Poor (part deux)

The story really starts 35 years ago.  I was working Old Trafford and got a call to another beat.  It was a favour from Panda control  The complainant was apparently very tasty.  I found a couple with a young baby driven out of there wits.  The problem was an old woman next door (terraced housing).  There was nothing I could do at the time, other than establish the old dear was barking.  I said I’d be back to help and it was clear the young couple didn’t believe me.  They’d been let down by at least ten other cops, including one I was going out with.

I went back three times to collect evidence from other neighbours over the week. Rumours my interests were only in the guy’s wife abounded, as they do.  The evidence amounted to discipline charges against fellow officers – they had had plenty of scope to act and had not.  It was enough to satisfy me something had to be done.  Putting together 40 pages of documentation that would make a case and drop my colleagues in the proverbial wasn’t much of an option.  I tried social services and got the usual fob-off.

The easiest route was to lock the mad woman up for something solid.  I didn’t regard her as criminal, but she was doing stuff like hurling roof-slates at kids,playing blaring music and banging on doors, walls and ranting.  I took a few statements that left the other officers out and went to tell her a few things, knowing she would get irate.  It worked and she hit me – totally ‘unprovoked’.  She I nicked her for police assault.  This was around tea-time on a day I’d started at 6 a.m.  She was squabbling along with her husband and clearly giving me a hard time.  Another young couple stopped and asked if they could help.  They parked their car (they were just passing) and stayed with me until the van came – for moral support.  My mate the van driver rewarded them by running into the back of their car – just a light lens broken.  The charge office sergeant wasn’t happy with a police assault charge, but we did a breach of the peace thing and I had thus to go to court the following morning. Another job kept me up all night.

The court appearance saw the old dear get the social services’ help she needed and I have to say after this all parties, including her and her husband got the peace they needed.  People involved were decent enough to thank me, including the now none mad old dear.

‘My case’ starts in this series of incidents because the response of GMP more than 30 years later was as piss poor as in the old case until I arrived on the scene.  Much worse when one considers the perpetrators were vile, thieving, child-abusing drunken recidivist scum.  The very idea that police and other authorities have learned lessons is bunkum – they were worse more than 30 years on, with all kinds of new legislation and alleged partnotship notworking.

Like other cops I went to many domestics and neighbour disputes and often did not much because not much needed or could be done.  Some complainants were just ‘complainers’, and I saw women egging their partners on to hit them so I’d arrest them and they could then demonstrate their love by refusing to give evidence.  Squalid crap mostly, though the clear problem was our lack of power to do anything in clearly dangerous or severe nuisance situations.  A lot of cops share my view that we were trained in nothing that mattered other than by more experienced cops and a sense of morality.  One night, with twenty rioting yobs advancing on us my mate asking if I was any good at fighting.  He wasn’t, he said after I’d mentioning playing rugby..  One other officer had run away and my mate Ken was bruising away in the distance.  We charged through the mob to join him. The three of us and two more from Traffic arrested 15 or so, back-to-back at one point.

That night we were supposed to do observations on a house a woman with an injunction against her husband was living in.  None of the section were on patrol,everyone dealing with prisoners.  I did the charge sheets because I was the only one who could type at any speed.  The house was on my beat, so when a 999 call came in, I dropped everything and raced off to my Panda car.  My old mate Bill followed, as fine a human being one was likely to meet.  We got there in time and arrested the vile husband under the injunction.  I near thing, you might think – but think on – the injunction turned out to have no power of arrest and he was released later in the morning and nearly killed her in the afternoon.  Bill and I knew there was no power of arrest.  We acted illegally and knew.  So did the bastard.  We ‘Rag and Flocked’ him for drunk and disorderly (£10 fine).  One got used to the law being an ass.  Of course, it still is.  He was released without any power of arrest being added to the injunction.  One might wonder what barking use one is without one.

More than 30 years later it is reasonable to think no lessons get learned by our authorities gone mad when they still issue injunctions without powers of arrest, and they do.  You will also discover victims have no support from any ‘Victims’ Code’ until they are dead.  The woman with the injunction was supposed to be visited regularly on the afternoon her violent husband was released, but I know she wasn’t and that the relevant log was altered. Two off duty cops attended the house meaning to suggest one of them stayed the night there. Otherwise she’d be dead.

The evil couple I came to know much better than I wanted to were in a more or less constant state of domestic violence or feuds with other families.  This was the case over the twenty years before I was fated to meet them.  They still are.  They do the same things they did when they were teenagers in trouble, relying on the same lies and posturing to keep themselves ‘out of trouble’ – which means always in it.  The question, as we explore their lives in part three, is why no one is really interested and prepared to prevent the injustices done in the lives they blight or admit the problem as everyone is affected by it.  I met plenty similar in the 1970’s and believe more help was available all round then.  I won’t be considering the economics, but I’m sure the leaching of cash and wage decimation is a key background cause.

Wandering through our town centre with an old mate over from the States, we laughed between ourselves watching some of our white urban poor.  We might have been crying, but we ain’t men that cry.  Many of the problems are obvious, so obvious you can see them on a trip from one pub to another.  We needed none of the sociology we teach (mine is ‘post-industrial’).  The old white working class isn’t working and no one gives a damn. We were once of it and able to leave.  The supply of tickets is long used up.  Part of the problem is that we left.

 

Advertisement

Blame the evil poor – but what creates them?

Squirrel Nutkin is on TV claiming to know only a minority of Salford citizens were involved in the riots ‘because she lives there’.  No you don’t Squirrel and weren’t there £13K’s worth of doubts once about where you lived?  Squirrel wants to stamp down hard on the riots – and so we should, but already aren’t doing – but no you don’t Squirrel, you just want to be seen saying the right thing we all feel anyway.  Toss off …

I’ve finally found someone saying something I agree with that isn’t what boils down to ‘crime is wrong’.

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/camila-batmanghelidjh-caring-costs-ndash-but-so-do-riots-2333991.html

“My own view is that the police in this country do an impressive job and unjustly carry the consequences of a much wider social dysfunction …   Working at street level in London, over a number of years, many of us have been concerned about large groups of young adults creating their own parallel antisocial communities with different rules. The individual is responsible for their own survival because the established community is perceived to provide nothing. Acquisition of goods through violence is justified in neighbourhoods where the notion of dog eat dog pervades and the top dog survives the best. The drug economy facilitates a parallel subculture with the drug dealer producing more fiscally efficient solutions than the social care agencies who are too under-resourced to compete.

The insidious flourishing of anti-establishment attitudes is paradoxically helped by the establishment. It grows when a child is dragged by their mother to social services screaming for help and security guards remove both; or in the shiny academies which, quietly, rid themselves of the most disturbed kids. Walk into the mental hospitals and there is nothing for the patients to do except peel the wallpaper. Go to the youth centre and you will find the staff have locked themselves up in the office because disturbed young men are dominating the space with their violent dogs. Walk on the estate stairwells with your baby in a buggy manoeuvring past the condoms, the needles, into the lift where the best outcome is that you will survive the urine stench and the worst is that you will be raped. The border police arrive at the neighbour’s door to grab an “over-stayer” and his kids are screaming. British children with no legal papers have mothers surviving through prostitution and still there’s not enough food on the table.

It’s not one occasional attack on dignity, it’s a repeated humiliation, being continuously dispossessed in a society rich with possession. Young, intelligent citizens of the ghetto seek an explanation for why they are at the receiving end of bleak Britain, condemned to a darkness where their humanity is not even valued enough to be helped. Savagery is a possibility within us all. Some of us have been lucky enough not to have to call upon it for survival; others, exhausted from failure, can justify resorting to it. Our leaders still speak about how protecting the community is vital. The trouble is, the deal has gone sour. The community has selected who is worthy of help and who is not.”

Camila Batmanghelidjh is usually good value.  She finishes with an example of a rescued kid who did not ‘do the riots’ – who was like a mad, barking dog when her charity got him some help.  This isn’t Zoe Williams poncing with Baudrillard, a French dork she doesn’t understand who might have driven his Ferrari somewhere near distant farting distance of the riots and pronounced them as to do with consumerism.

I’ve seen these kids close up.  They get so little they grasp at anything on offer when they are young.  Food from our kitchen, sweets on bonfire night, whatever taken in a manner our own kids just couldn’t do – almost savage with a hunger for something.  Piss poor housing workers, social workers unable to see abuse and frankly never there when it matters to witness.  I later found their bosses encouraged them to lie and that much of their alleged ‘professional’ discussion was vile gossip.  One such kid, left in his druggie parents’ hands with no supervision is now described as ‘brain dead’ by other kids.  ‘What a happy child’ I remember one of the less wuckfit housing workers say of a kid exposed to drugs regularly and who was regularly up at one in the morning before suddenly going quiet as his parents passed out after a heroin smoke.  Others bring their children up remarkably well – the issue is not simple poverty – indeed the druggies who destroyed their children’s lives had an income of £20K plus with their due benefits, benefit cheating, dealing and thieving (that’s more than the average in the grim North and came with free housing).  I could walk round the estate near where I live and point to the houses our rioters will come from if my parochial town is hit.

What I’ve seen in research for my book is that very little good work is done by the non-police agencies, often despite decent street-level staff.  The collective noun for social workers remains what itr was when I was a Plod – an absence.  Housing workers, paid less, try harder.  A few cops are very good, again in the lower ranks doing the toughest jobs.  They are ‘led’ by jerks who bend the performance targets.  I could almost kill now on hearing about 3-star ratings!  The system is rotten and systemically so.  We need the resources out of its hands and to find some honest people like Camilla or the brilliant cop on the beat next to the one I live on.

These ‘rioters’ could not exist if the performance management figures were real.  Banksidebabble finished a recent post with ‘Screwtape’ – http://bankbabble.wordpress.com/

We once had an admiral shot because sailors mutinied and I would rather see across the board sackings of ACPOs, Directors of Housing, Social Services and various QUANGOs then have 10,000 of the looters locked away.  They have stolen more from us and helped create the mutiny.  Banksie is upbeat on a cure.  Listening to Melvin King I am not.  We need a new way out of the fiscal-financial econodung.  Most of us are used to it not mattering much and thinking politics doesn’t matter because the bastards are all the same.  The problem is that their corruption has spread into everything and we can’t think or act without its constraint.  It’s more than the petty crap Gadget ‘reveals’ on form filling, HR, H & S and supposed ‘leftie’ influences like political correctness, human rights and ‘koro’ (roughly, ‘ball shrinking’).  This is all the result of micro-management attitudes and probably persistent in-breeding in selection – we might call it ‘recruitment narcissism’ and it has been studied as such.  We are certainly gullible to psychopaths and narcissists – they are useful in crisis sometimes but destructive at all other times.  These are our leaders and we’ve got that all wrong.

What sort of country is it in which Squirrel Nutkin pops on TV slagging the evil poor?  They were around before the riots doing untold damage.  Call Me Dave is on now trying to take credit for something.  We won’t put up with it, apparently.  He’s discovered we have a problem with gangs.  We have pockets of sick people.  Really, Dave?  In every town, in every estate, in every street (some bullshit) – resource it all Dave?  The police have been asked if they have the resources they need and ‘they’ said they did!  Now he’s saying a dose of parenting,upbringing, morals, discipline in schools, no welfare for idleness – but not anything that costs anything is the cure.  Lying tosser worse than the vandals.  Hasn’t he got form for trashing a restaurant with Boris?  Things have sunk so low Ken Livingstone sounds like the voice of reason!

My thoughts and condolences to Tariq Jahan.

 

Bullying in the police

http://www.bullying999.co.uk/culture.htm

Anyone who wants to see what a mess academe can make in writing about basic issues could do worse than having a read of the paper produced at the above link.  It’s not without merit, yet seems to me to have a certain bullying tone of its own.

Some of the roughest, toughest, most profane people I’ve worked with never bullied anyone.  Some of the worst bullying I’ve seen was perpetrated by girls and women, and at work it often came in hideous, politically correct form.  Bullying is sophisticated and networked in ways the author of this paper shows no sign of understanding.

A start on understanding police culture would be to find out who gets the worst jobs and how that comes about.  Who is under stress and why.  How is ‘loyalty’ enforced and why is it so difficult for officers to speak out against unfair treatment and corrupt colleagues?  And a whole lot more before being convinced it’s down to hairy-arsed coppers’ drinking clubs and swearing! And in examining cases where cops bully victims.

Domestic Violence and Death

Domestic violence is a bigger problem than most who don’t suffer from it know.  The way it’s dealt with is a disgrace, but this is nothing new.  It’s very difficult for those of us who won’t use violence to understand at all.  We should operate a zero tolerance policy in respect of DV – but we have little clue of what this would mean.  We don’t even generally know what DV is, often limiting our view to that of a bloke knocking his wife about.

There are big questions as to whether police cold be doing a better job or whether we need to change the whole system.  And it’s hard to know whether we make anything better or worse through intervention.  Most of us like the idea of our homes and lives being private, so any intervention needs to be considered.

Hogday has posted recently on how dire getting involved in these matters as a cop was and no doubt remains.  I can only add to this in extreme.  A patient was lost on my watch.  Back then, I’d arrested the culprit beforehand, only to discover I had no power of arrest under the relevant injunction (swift change to police assault) and he committed the murder whilst on police bail.

When I first arrived at a domestic’s door, I had no clue they took place.  In my family they had been no more than raised voices and sulking.  I had no relevant training, even in self-defence (other than from the rugby field).  Initially, I thought I had brought about a ‘cure’, but I was back next shift.  Advice given by more experienced officers was broadly not to get involved – she’d only retract any statement after being given a ‘good servicing’ or threats we could do nothing about – this was pretty accurate advice, fitting maybe 85% of cases.  The victims were nearly all women, nearly all poor, thick and either drunk or victims of drunkenness.  The worst cases were generally father an son (step-children as a rule).

One could lump neighbour disputes in with domestics – again 85% were just a waste of time.  All one could do was try to restore the peace.  I don’t remember any referrals to other agencies – these were either non-existent or hapless like social services.  Occasionally, a decent social worker might be involved, and we might make a joint visit, but this was very rare.

As Gadget and contributors are prone to point out, there were many threats and death threats – so familiar you could more or less ignore them with impunity.  One night, a Xmas Eve and snowing, I arrived at a domestic’s door.  ‘What the fuck do you want short-arse’? was the response from a massive loon, body-sculptured from time in a marine gun crew.  He wasn’t going to let me in.  Too many kids to count and his wife could be seen inside the filthy place, all scared.  Dreams of a meal with my own wife faded.  It was already being kept warm as I was filling in after 2-10 for an absent night shifter, as were two more of my crew.  The bloke tried to push me, so hard he fell into the snow when he missed.  Inside, I found a complete mess and his wife in need of hospital.  I called an ambulance and for assistance.  Our shift was so thin the assistance cal went to Traffic and the panda control  guy said he’d come out.

The story could make a book.  I had to fight the ex-serviceman, to a point I could hardly hit him again because my knuckles were bleeding and bruised and I’d dislocated an ankle throwing him to the ground.  A female member of the ambulance crew finally rendered him unconscious with the wrong end of an oxygen bottle.  It turned out to be his brother’s house (real pleasure in nicking him for burglary the following week) and the wife and kids were thrown out into the snow.  Social services refused to attend until threats to call the Daily Mail – the kids ended-up at my house eating my dinner at one point, plus getting whatever else was in stock and Xmas presents for my nieces.

One hopes things have moved on.  I know all kinds of rules have been brought in, including special DV teams, taking photographs of injuries and so on.  I also know that much has stayed the same from personal experience of hapless policing of an evil poor family moved in next door, that was never resolved, now continuing a mile away.  We even have DV courts in some areas and I have organised and attended conferences on the same.  The experts talk a good job, but I saw it all fail next door, until she tried to fire-bomb a house round the corner.

The Xmas Eve job wasn’t the one that ended with a death.   He was charged with police assault, despite my injuries and those of his wife.  You may not think this fair, but he never re-offended and was contrite, humble and deeply shocked at his own behaviour the following day.  It was my decision and that of his wife.  Social services found them a house, a dire shit-hole they made into a palace.  I did a morning with a wheel-barrow there when I turned up to check they were doing more than playing happy families.  Thank the lord I didn’t have to fight him sober!  This guy looked much more of a threat than my former neighbours, yet they were far more dangerous despite looking much more petty.

The experts are fairly good at establishing what the problems are and some of the causes.  I did attend cases where the victim was the husband, but am surprised that 30% of those needing casualty treatment are male – though I believe this and it fits.  Some of the women ‘ask’ for what they get, though this hardly excuses the violence.  What does is a vile sub-culture in which violence is lauded, and little is done to penetrate this culture and its ‘non-values’.  There is no real excuse, though many of the victims and perpetrators are hooked in a system close to madness or mad.

Many of the people involved make threats they have no intention of carrying through, but what should be learned from this (and is) is not that such threats can be safely ignored.  The real victims are often the poor sods living next to a family out of control.  They see nothing happening after call after call to the cops and other agencies.  The real problem is what can be acted on as evidence and lack of the means and often enthusiasm to get it.  Times have changed, but most arrests during domestics in my time were for assault on police – because we could arrest and get convictions for that, rather than the sorry messes we ended up with trying as the law supposed was possible and wasn’t.  I even remember getting a mad old woman to assault me to get matters to court.

The real problem is two-fold.  First, police have inadequate powers to deal with breaches of the peace that keep repeating, and second that a whole flux of squalid false complaining, threats and other matters obscure the cases that lead to severe violence and murder.  Other matters, including police incompetence, make this worse.  Over-arching this is a fatal nexus in this country of denial and exploitation of the real issues by the relevant authorities, including politicians.  Their performance management may as well be theatre, for it is not concerned with doing a better job on the problems, but in making personal capital out of them (from lawyers taking actual coin to politicians votes).  Closure is often brought about by claims to be ‘learning lessons’, but we never get to know just how these have been learned, just of the ‘next Baby P’ or ‘death in Essex’.

A key technical problem in dealing with these matters is ‘stereotyping’ – a word we hear but rarely understand – not least in that we all do it and can’t be rid of it.  This is one of the reasons for the dire ‘diversity management’ that makes most who have to suffer it suspect whoever organised it of racial bias against ‘ordinary white folk’.  One could re-write Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin these days to discover the vile ‘nigger references’ in polite society merely transferred to other groups not considered quite human.  What many politicians, judges, lawyers and senior people can’t get is that they stereotype as surely as those put up to demonstrate the puerility of racism by Harriet.  Some of Gadget’s contributors may well think Harriet Harmon wrote the book (me stereotyping them if you get the drift).

You can’t stop people stereotyping – it’s a form of learning.  Cops learn what works and what doesn’t in their own culture just as surely as lawyers learn what pays them, or evil poor what works in their culture.  Academics stereotype themselves into postmodern essays as surely as Finn the Burglar slips your television under his arm.  My domestic calls were well into the hundreds before someone died, I had never taken anyone to court other than for assault on me, and I’d heard a couple of dozen death threats.

I can arrange for you to hear death threats if you are prepared to do a few weeks of rough drinking with me.  I won’t be able to hack the pace, but we’ll find what I mean.  First we have to find some Hillbillies in some number and a bad mood.  It’s advisable to ignore sex offers with jocularity.  Enough drink inside (you may have trouble holding yours there) and they’ll get ‘talking family’ – don’t expect cute pictures.  Soon one of them will be threatening to ‘do’ some boyfriend or shagger rival.  It may even get real in front of us until the landlord does his work.  It’s often one of these people who need protection.

In my old case, the victim was a ‘fragrant women’.  She had moved well away from the ex-husband – which most Hillbillies can’t.  There was an injunction (useless as he was just released when we nicked him).  We did take it seriously, sadly because she was so middle class.  She was killed on another shift.  He gave himself up, armed with a shotgun, at my house.  He’d threatened to ‘do’ me and at least found my address.  Instead he was on my front lawn, with the barrel in his mouth.  I was ex-NI by then and didn’t answer the door, I leaned out of a bedroom window.

What we need, rather than all the defensive stuff about how the hell we are supposed to sort the wheat from the chaff (which still needs to be said), is the ‘technology’ to do the job  as right as it can be done.  This would have to be a kind of public scrutiny we don’t have at all.  First of all, we have to stop blaming the system as though we aren’t part of it and actually form a worthwhile public.

We need to realise that what investigations there are into our CJS are not bringing results in terms of real change.  The underlying key is secrecy.  What we need to know is how current serious problems are being dealt with and the problems found in doing this, not reviews around dead people.  One can see problems in this, but I can see ways of doing it that maintain confidentiality as we need it.  If, incidentally, cops and other agencies were really concerned to learn the real lessons, then we’d find them discussing cases in which they’d failed with victims who haven’t died.  They don’t.  This hasn’t happened with my partner and I or any of the other 50-odd cases of victims who have been in touch with me.  Our case fortunately (for us) continues without us in it, a young boy and his two sisters ruined and a family fortunate not to have been burned to death.  No one in the other cases has had resolution without having to move.  These are just people peripheral to the actual DV, often associated with crime and anti-social behaviour of other kinds.

A mother-in-law joke shared with my local inspector (fortunately Gadget-like), that we’d have been better off if I’d killed my neighbours and done the time (ridiculously true) was taken as such.  Such is the defensive hostility of many of the agencies who should do the job towards victims who complain they don’t, they are more likely to treat such matters seriously than spot what needs to be done.  No one was at fault over the death 30 years ago, but I suspect the reasons in Essex will not be so different.  Reasonable law would have prevented the deaths, we just don’t have any.  I’m guessing on Essex, but other cases from 30 years ago, despite all the changes, would be indistinguishable from today’s.  This hardly suggests ‘lessons learned’ other than in bureaucratic excuse rhetoric.  We may as well hope, as I’m sure Hog doesn’t, for the arrival of Caribbean truncheons applied to all parties.  I’d have taken this if it had stopped the vile parties next door.

Questions on Changing Policing

1. Public consultation seems to fail.  Why is this not being addressed?

2. I want to see crime addressed much more directly by officers equipped to bring results at the time they are needed and in circumstances in which they are protected, physically and mentally from violence and other aggression.  At the same time, the public needs protection from incompetent and rogue officers in a manner that does not provide a means for the crooks to escape justice or leave victims subject to intimidation from either the crooks or the agencies supposed to help.

3. There is a massive problem with false complaints and inaccurate reporting of complaints by all agencies.  This is understood in part, but needs substantial investigation and change.

4. “Complaining against police” is a nightmare and needs to be civilianised properly to protect both officers and public from a fatal nexus of bullying senior managers and politicians and ‘stat juking’.  Complex behavioural issues are involved and ignored or dealt with through stereotyping and victim bullying.

5.  All issues seem to be dealt with by people who are not likely to be victims and live professional lives well away from the problems, yet supported by salaries dependant on the problems.  We are all paying into Legal Aid with almost no chance of receiving any benefit from the system (95% will not qualify) and at substantial risk of being abused by lawyers hired to protect scrote or police and other agencies.

6. What is “criminal” is both dismally defined and over-defined.  98% of “crime” is dealt with through Magistrates’ Courts.  This at least suggests many of the problems are “trivial” and could be dealt with in another way.  I see the same criminals (often pathetic people) “dealt with” yet dumped back where they continue to cause the same problems that are not trivial to victims.

7. What is the ‘profile’ of ‘criminals’ in 6?  Across the road, a private house is rented to a benefit druggie with three kids and a recidivist thieving donkey with perhaps 2000 convictions.  They have ‘weird’ night time visitors.  Round the corner, two social houses have similar occupants.  The faces change a bit (though not much) and there is a clear network of ‘evil poor’ families involved in crime and community killing (we should scrap the term “antisocial”).  Their kids are clearly the next generation and involved in bullying and idiot violence not being addressed on a  systematic basis.  Cops turn up and say it might be better not to make complaints because there will be retribution.  They say this as though we don’t know!  Even decent local kids know.  The criminals are allowed to exert influence on kids.

8. The ‘ways out’ have gone.  Much of this was factory work or ‘running away to sea of the armed forces’.  The very idea now, that a burgeoning private sector solution is possible is a  farce.  So is that of the much touted ‘education’  solution.  We do need a jobs solution, but no one in their right mind would take these people into a private business.  In any case, work is now much more efficient than before and we can produce most of what we really need with much less work – and have to to remain in business under current economic thinking.

9. Laws are made by clowns, so dismal they produce laws that would stop them from committing offences.  ASBOs were the classic, but only one example amongst many.  I shudder at the thought of being caught shoplifting, but the law stops ‘me’ not the donkey across the road, or even a few pretty decent people I’ve found selling smuggled and stolen goods (even drugs).  Think of Blair telling us of his great ASBO and frog-marching drunks to cash machines (he’s an obvious clown-plonker) and then  think of the same clown meeting Bush and taking us into war, pretending he was fit to assess ‘intelligence’.

10.  Cops and other agencies are not serving the public and we need to investigate this, find out why and establish a system that tracks offences and offenders so we can see who they are and what is really happening to them.  If, for instance, the donkey across the road is typical, we are maintaining benefit sponsored crime and its continuance, not stopping it.  We are making victims and unpaid, ill-equipped jailers out of that section of the public these people are dumped into.  Much liberal nonsense about rehabilitation is just that – problem dumping – perhaps similar to leaving old people in hospital beds because the right ‘devolved budget’ won’t take them into the care needed.

11.  We should stop lawyers, judges and over-paid cops and Town Hall worthies making big bucks for failing.  What is more criminal – the squalid, low IQ evil poor raiding shops and businesses, nicking your bike and making you feel you can’t leave your home, blasting music, aggressive foul-language and threats, drugging-up, prostituting their kids – or the overpaid nexus of agency bosses, lawyers, judges and politicians leaving them to repeat over and over every day?  We should stop them claiming to be successful when the problems obviously get worse.

12.  Mad, selfish clowns who state that eviction solutions might lead to people complaining about neighbours because they don’t like them (JUSTICE – a cross party set of selfish, behaviourally incompetent loons).  This kind of ‘thinking’ is typical of the selfish mediocrity of schools and universities produce.  It leaves an intimidatory, violent, noisy few damaging many lives far more seriously than a serious beating and can go on for years.

13.  Bureaucracy is the problem, but we need to see what bureaucracy is and who it benefits, not talk about ‘red-tape’.  Sadly, the bureaucrats are the ones “looking to change things” – what a joke – this is leaving the foxes in charge of the chicken shed.

14.  All the right questions are being evaded.  Idiot “suggestions” like “more Bobbies on the beat” are regurgitated over and over – very safe ground for no change.

15.  Cops and other agencies work largely in secret and are responsible only to a rank system that needs to change.  One possible solution is to package jobs for action with those officers involved responsible to victims’ groups for solution.  This should include not spending resources on the crooks without sanction from such groups.  We should stop people being sent into idiot schemes and prisons.  There should be work solutions under severe discipline, including that discipline that can be exerted by those in the schemes on those who breach the conditions.  ‘Screw up chummy and you screw all your ‘mates”.  Blaring music type stuff and local intimidation should lead straight to jail with no possibility of return to the community affected.  Cops know who these people are and  should have the tools to act, and know they will not be tolerated by communities they don’t help and be replaced.

16.  How much of all this starts in our schools, exclusions, no proper education designed for the non-academic, no jobs and the rest?  What can’t we blame our cops for?  Maybe we have to bring back corporal punishment (I personally hate this, but some kids are out of control and too many adults are remaining child-like on violence).

17.  The aim should be the eradication of community-killing and the production of a CJA able to focus on real crime, much corporate and embedded.  It will be hard work because we will have to accept that most of our society isn’t working and the underlying models have failed.  We almost need ‘martial law’ until we get a system working.  The current one is riddled with incompetence we won’t look in the eye.

18.  One aim should be to make policing a more attractive job for decent people to do – and we should look at removing ‘money-rank’ and ‘rank-abuse’ from the system.

19.  We need thought experiments to break open cop-prejudices of the kind the blogs are full of, without falling into political correctness and recognise there is truth in much of the complaints coppers make, including one of the frustrations.  Cops need to be able to stop rogues in their midst and we all need to be able to complain without being smeared.  There are new technology solutions to this – all being ignored while money is poured into vapid research and stat juking.

20.  At ’20’  the question is why there is no new technology, confidential yet open system for this debate to take place?

PC David Copperfield states  (p.96) ‘Police management is much more about the management of inactivity than is is about reducing crime, the real challenge being to do as little as possible, take as much of the credit for any successes as possible and blame the rest on society … We in the police have enthusiastically embraced the liberal vision of heroin-addicted burglars making good and repaying their debts by tidying up the gardens of their elderly victims … so we stay in the police station and fill in forms and complete our investigations while the junkies don’t turn up to do their weeding’.

He then turns the usual trick of such police writing to a case of in-bred evil poor neighbour disputing to show us how difficult it is dealing with these irrational scum.  Been there, have the T-shirt from 30 years ago.  This crap does go on, as David, Gadget and WPC Bloggs go on and on.  What doesn’t get much attention in these books or police blogs (there are exceptions – Hogday when he feels like – great rants on Complaining About The Police)) is what is happening to ordinary decent people try to do anything.  My experience as a cop and victim has been dire.

Otherwise good cops and the rump of idle fail almost entirely.  They right-off criminal complaints as ‘neighbour disputes’ of the kind the police books are full of.  The agencies involved become more ‘criminal’ than the criminals or loons, and it goes right up the system into PSDs and IPCC.  The HMIC is more ‘aware’ but treats the public as unworthy of its attention.  ‘Remits’ are a massive problem.  I’ve seen police officers (ones I knew as otherwise committed coppers) ignore crimes including assaults on themselves in these circumstances, even acting like cowards.  They will even enter into conspiracies to pervert the course of justice to cover up their failings.  The very ‘evil scum’ they all claim to abhor get protected to the point you’d believe they were police informants.  The problems for complainants are compounded by severe lack of investigation and the attitudes David almost exposes.  All the agencies put complainants in harm’s way.  The system has no idea who is telling the truth and can’t tell a truth-teller from the kind of mad evil scum who are the problem.  The very officers involved pride themselves on being able to ‘see’ who is telling the truth (research demonstrates nearly all of us are hopeless at this), but in fact rely on dire stereotyping of the kind in the books-blogs and don’t have the guts to take the kind of steps Hogday reports on ‘travellers’ (Caravan Utilising Nomadic Thieves).  One or two may try, but these are rare, suggesting widespread problems in the rank and file, not just with liberal worthies and SMTwonkers.  You discover, as a victim, that they try to make you the problem and that elected representatives are as out-to-lunch as they were in the expenses scandal, very much part of the problem.  The complaints systems across the board prevent genuine complaint as there is no independent evidence gathering and much secrecy.  You know you must sound like a nutter as soon as you complain.  Indeed, given the stresses involved, as you property is targeted, false claims you are a paedophile and other made and even local kids start throwing stones at your windows (the perpetrators are networked into this and you are not), noise from domestic violence, music and constant odd visitors  … you do go ‘mad’.  The bullying from agencies is criminal – actually so when cops claim to have been where they could not be (an old copper’s ruse is to claim to be ‘in the vicinity’ when not) and start their own rumour mill.

Plenty of recommendations have been made about how to investigate, but you cannot get these enforced.  I suspect much equipment in use is so bad and incompetently used all it does is point the finger at you for further attacks.  The question Copperfields and Gadgets don’t address is what they would do when the complainants are real, not mad and under massive stress.  And almost no one follows up on complaints of bad police work and the even worse work of Town Hall agencies.  HMIC did in a limited manner (one problem being the agencies control who is listed as a victim).

We could look at these problems from victims’ perspectives, developed through representation and independent investigation (moderated by the victims and their representatives) and we could look at the effects of criminal families in the same way.  The questions on policing arising from such would be very different than the posing done by those able to draw big salaries from evading the issues.  There are massive, unasked questions about who is bearing the costs of our failing police and Town Hall agencies.  Part of the answer is ‘the disabled’ (HMIC).

Look at the costs of fostering – putting a child into care costs between £15K and £50K.  What then are the costs of living next door to druggie-thieving-violent-noise addicts?  One possible solution would be to give a group of neighbours perhaps £100K to deal with such a family, on a sliding scale on proximity?  If we weren’t ill, we’d give a child a home – the creeps who used to live next to us felt as though they invaded our home.  There were 5 of them and all needed either care or to be in prison.  £100K would have been cheaper- so why were we expected to take the hit (we lost much more)?  Decisions throughout the CJS would have been different if this factor had been in the resourcing debate!

If there are 100,000 such families, then £10000000000 (£10 billion) would need to be spent on neighbour victims on compensation and control.  How much do such families already cost in benefits?  If they get £20K a year it’s  £2000000000 (£2 billion).  They could be paid this via the neighbour watch fund, leaving £8 billion to find.  I’m not costing here, just hinting at the extent of the problem.  So what might be available to a ‘neighbour watch’ on what we spend now?  Given we don’t pay such victims for loss of quality of life, property and health, why do we pay compensation to injured police officers and prisoners (etc)?  Clearly such payouts are a privilege, not a right.  A doctor may get £500K for a needle stick injury she may have had some personal neglect in sustaining.  Victims of these scum have no role in their losses or injuries.

We could, of course, think of more realistic compensation, like the costs of moving and upheaval (say £20K plus legal aid costs) and place the burden on the landlord (with possible recovery from police and other agencies).  This would at least give victims representation in any ‘resourcing debates’.  This might well lead to housing placement problems, but so what – when you give a set of these scum a home you take one or more off others.  Unless, of course, you get their policing and ours right and they cease to be a nuisance in the locality you drop them in.

21.  Would you live next door to evil poor?  If yes, then volunteer now as a public service you lovely liberal.  If not, then work out you are selfish scum because you drop them on others and resign.

22. Can we make it a criminal offence for selfish scum to moralise in public about the evil poor, unless they volunteer to have a party wall connection or give up a room to them?

23.  Police and Town Hall agencies should have to maintain an open database on criminal and community killing cases.  This would be to stop false recording, but how could we make it work?  None of these agencies can be trusted with ‘confidentiality’ – they abuse victims through it and this must stop.  But how do we protect the innocent – not forgetting we often condemn them to the malfunctions in secrecy of these agencies?

24.  How do we track an individual case in detail so that we can generate true and useful  reporting in place of “statistics” that serve vested interests and not good practice?

25. How do we encourage good officers to stop bad behaviour by their colleagues?  The IPCC is a disaster, but is a non-bureaucratic answer possible.  Anyone needing to get a feel for how difficult it all is could watch ‘Ghost Squad’ free a LoveFilm.com.  Underneath the gloss, sex and dramatic licence some of the issues are raised in complexity (esp. episode 3).  Cops are not investigated like this, but the issues are real, if lacking in the important one of where we could get the evidence given bad cops from the few very bad to the jobsworths have control over it?  I saw very little criminal corruption by the way, though some.  I’d crash the PSDs and IPCC in favour of an ‘open’ reporting system and trained officers to be drawn from a pool doing normal police work.  I’d crash all Gadget’s HRM and give sergeants and inspectors proper line management discipline back, ‘open’ to public scrutiny.  Somewhere in this we have to accept it is both ludicrous to charge officers at Stockwell and let the brass get away with the lunatic defence of their incompetence and the cover up.  17 members of the public do not not hear ‘stop armed police’, AND no one should have shouted this in such circumstances.  People should have been sacked for the cover-up and attempted damage limitation.  All sides have to give up something in this, so we can get something.

25. How can we stop worthy lawyers making fortunes from public enquiries that are useless and the lying of almost anyone caught up in an enquiry in our public services?  Scrap existing complaints systems and go for open new technology solutions?

26. How can we sensibly target our cops (and other CJS systems) on what is needed by the public, poor kids abused by clowns and so on?  Could we decriminalise drugs and yet put more effort into the problems?  How?

27. Could we decriminalise (yet put more and more effective effort) into a whole wad of petty crime?

28.  Can we criminalise the abuse of the phrase ‘learning lessons’ and actually get on with getting good practice working?  Ban the phrase ‘community solutions’?  At least 80% of the community problem is the networking of the evil poor in intimidation.

29.  Engineering has long benefited from disaster.  They get properly identified and investigated.  Sacking people who have been claiming success when there was mostly disaster would be a start.  ACPO could go, but if we take this seriously we need a new election and all the political parties to stand down until we have a new constitution!

30.  Are we so dumb we really believe its better to have 8 million on benefits (it’s more if you include tax credits), keep importing workers and so on than to organise productive work for all?  The invisible hand of economics is as ‘real’ as any god.

31.  With neighbourhood crime the issue is getting the issue sorted out by response police under a get it right first time system linking police powers and the rest of the system.  It cannot be acceptable to leave the same recidivists and their intimidation networks in place to cause so much trouble.  Disasters in this are commonplace and go on for years.  Proper and tough powers to stop noise, threats and persistent ‘coming to police attention’ need to be put in place and culprits removed from their homes after no more than two or three official warnings – we can lose our jobs for less.

32. Things may be so bad that we need to accept our cops are not the world’s best or anywhere near.  I’m not sure this is the case for the cops but do feel it is true of the rest of our CJS (they ain’t really good anywhere, but much better in most of Northern Europe).  The fact we don’t know much in public debate about other countries’ systems is concerning.  There may be a good model to use as a template here.  I like the Dutch one – but the changes need to be across our systems from schools, through social services and courts.

33.  ‘Human Rights’ organisations and people in this country seem clueless and concerned only with middle-upper class issues and easily get confused about the ‘rights’ of people hurting others.  ‘Rights’ are not good as the basis for much intellectually (nonsense on stilts etc.), but we also forget we can also ground nothing in thought alone and end up in the ultimate selfishness of solipsism where even other people are just part of one’s own consciousness.  It is something like this drivel that prevents apparently competent people from understanding much other than their own perspective – selfish clowns with high IQs.  ‘Balance’ is needed, but again this fails as soon as you watch the BBC trying to be ‘balanced’ and realise they are nearly all arty middle class goons.  None of us can generate all the questions needed and certainly not the answers – but we don’t recognise this half-enough.  We need to recognise Action Man is a plastic doll, but also that the cop with blood on his hands, an unconscious husband and who has just smacked the wife in the mouth may have reasons for the violence (like being attacked with a poker by one and stabbed with a shard of glass by the other whilst trying to protect both) and those who have never been in such situations almost always lack the knowledge to understand – and them remember that cops do use violence wrongly and panic, squirting off rounds because someone else pulls a trigger (Moat?) and putting the adrenaline boot in.  In rugby, you get sent off for the latter and there should be some similar punishment for cops in panic situations.  Instead we end up in lies and cop collusion.

34.  Our CJS needs to ditch “credibility” in evidence giving.  All research demonstrates we are useless at this and need to learn what evidence is and how far it is reasonable to stretch it.  Bent forensics are now with us as well as very intolerant juries, judges and the straw-men lawyers.  We could do a lot better on evidence, but again most of us need to learn we are not good at spotting what it is.  Many case brought to court don’t need to be and there is still heavy bias against defendants and in favour of those who can muster slicksters.  The vast majority of those I’ve seen in Magistrates’ courts are little more than children.  The parental gap could be better closed than through this system.  I would favour pleas for non-criminal restitution and for all other than recidivist convictions to be spent quickly.  At the same time, recidivists should be spotted quickly and tagged until they stop.

35.  Police officers should realise that they are now substantially overpaid and consider what happened to British industry; then ask what it is that is so different about them.  This is true of much of our overpaid public sector and is a substantial reason we have so few factories and work for those we once managed to employ in droves.  We take too much, are too selfish and stuck up ourselves.  The bottom-end, low IQ (yet possibly high skill) economy has been screwed because it was open to foreign competition.  We can’t educate people out of it and need to provide jobs and wealth instead of importing labour and pretending we are ‘better’  – ‘we’ were just less exposed to the competition.  ZanuPFNulabour was wrong to expand the public sector as it did – government should look after minorities and it failed the poor whites totally.  Average cop pay where I live in the castrated North is three times average take home.  That’s thieving too, though hardly Shaggerooney style.  Islam has it that if we don’t sort a fair society there can be no crime.  Not everything is rubbish from any source.  You cops take too much, I took too much and we left a few millions with no work.  Now we blame the evil poor.  If this is all we are, we’re crap and have rendered a section of society sub-human as readily as any clown eugenicist from the 1930’s (we had them too if anyone is thinking Godwin’s Law).

36. How much policing demand is Friday/Saturday/Sunday and drinking-drugging-sports-event related and demands little other than limited skills of presence-physicality-commonsense?  Could this be met by a part-time force and could other areas such as youth gangs also be dealt with by part-timers?  Not specials – this is always brought up and always fails.  There might be much more than cost savings in this approach.  Could we have the resources matched to recidivist housing allocations?

37. Is a lot of policing really “skilled” – if not could we get a lot more done on unskilled wages and a ‘mass production equivalent’ approach through local people who will not be entering a ‘career’ with all the associated costs?

38. What would really “demotivate” our criminals?  If we had proper ‘peace and consideration laws’ and quickly available bodies to stop vile behaviour could we get rid of the criminal family intimidation, street bullies, domestic violence and so on?  Something genuinely local?  Cop books-blogs have it that Swamps, Reservations (Everglades in mine) provide shelter for pond-life crooks and networks to sell stolen goods – yet my experience is that 90% and more want it all stopped and I suspect a ‘containment policy’ that does just enough to do just that.  Parenting is a key factor, yet why is our education so dumb it isn’t taught and yet ‘education’ so vital the rich pay a lot extra to get the ‘real thing’?

39. Teenage pregnancy, sexual diseases, shoplifting, chronic domestic violence, bullying, drugs, booze and so on just keep on and on in the UK.  There is little difference now in attitudes towards violence than when I was a kid in lower sectors.  Kids are often rude, excluded from schools in which there is a lot of bad behaviour.  Public transport is dire when kids are on it.  We only pretend solutions, yet politicians tell us it is being dealt with over and over.  The failures are obvious.  Is all this some ‘cunning plan’ to make the rest of us strive to earn enough to get away from it all?

40.  Could we have a policing plan that demarcated ‘villages’ again and organised communities that actually know each other again with cops living in them – motivated to make them decent places to live, not shit-holes to escape from?

41. Do we have management all wrong?  I suspect this as a management tutor.  The textbooks are vapid and we know they are.  I don’t want scrote families protected by high paid lawyers who live elsewhere, or directors of social services or ACPO posers and do not believe they serve any useful purpose to the general public.  We were supposed to get ‘flat management structures’ – what has happened is the imposition of tall structures with unaccountable clowns behind a mahogany curtain, sending out PCSOs and unqualified staff.  We need to scrap ranks and ‘rank culture’.

42.  Scrap lawyers in favour of law centres staffed by people universities can qualify, and let supermarkets compete on the same basis and pay scales to allow competition.  Get your representative by rote (prosecution too – so the CPS goes).

43.  Local parliaments and scrap Westminster – this is the information age.  Local networked cops on a national basis too?

Related Articles

• Letters: Perspectives on the tax people (independent.co.uk)