Politics and Policing Where Do They Divide?

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In the wake of the riots we are bombarded with competing claims about who controlled them. The police are sure that the successful tactics were evolved by them while the politicians say that it all got sorted when they returned from holiday. I think that the riots stopped because the weather turned bad, but there is a serious issue about who should do what in keeping us safe from crime.

 

The government have said that they will scrap the costly and useless police authorities and replace them with elected commissioners. Well OK, but what exactly is a commissioner? The chief of the Met Police is called the Commissioner whereas the people who run all other UK police forces are called Chief Constables. If the Metropolitan Police Authority is to be replaced by an elected commissioner they are going to have to sort out the titles.

 

The real issue, of course, is what part of policing should be decided by politicians and what is decided by the police chief. The standard answer is that policy is for politicians and operational matters are the responsibility of the uniformed cops. But where exactly is the line drawn between these? Many libertarians support the idea of directly elected police control in some form because they want policing priorities to be responsive to citizen concerns and they also wish t oget policing to be closer to specific community conditions. These are legitimate aspirations, but I would suggest that focussing on election of a figurehead does not address the right issue.

 

Britain is unlike most other countries in its insistence on having a single police service in which personnel deal with everything from dropping litter to multiple murder, parking infringement to complex fraud. This is all done through 43 different police forces, roughly relating to counties, that are far too big to provide genuine local accountability and much too small to address large scale, organised crime.

 

The apprehension of criminals and even the prevention of crime is a technical process which most people would agree requires skills, experience, training and a high degree of efficiency. Quite obviously these are things which require stability and are not compatible with the turnover resulting from elections or the absence of appropriate background that election candidates are likely to have. Whatever title you give them, the operational head of any level of policing cannot and must not be determined by popular election.

 

At present, Police Authorities do not perform any worthwhile role. They are meant to be the means by which Chief Constables, or the Met Commissioner, are accountable for the performance of themselves and their force. The reality is that the Authority is composed primarily of Councillors selected by the local authority who have no knowledge of policing and no idea how to hold the professionals to account. Serving on the Police Authority is just another little source of responsibility allowance and a diverting couple of hours from time to time.

 

An elected person with specific responsibility for setting policy frameworks for police and holding the Chief constables to account would have more focus and authority and might gain sufficient insight to be able to probe the effectiveness of the force if s/he held office for long enough. The problem is that this doesn’t deal with the problem of getting policing organised on an appropriate scale to deal with the whole range of crime and public safety that is required. Also, in those places which have an executive mayor, particularly London, the elected Police Commissioner is going to be a competing figure to the mayor and a dilution of the executive mayor role.

 

A few years ago it was unquestioned that only the state could run prisons and handle prisoners. Now we have many privately owned and run gaols and prisoner transport is largely contracted out. Tiny steps have been taken to improve policing by de-criminalising some traffic management roles and introducing Police Community Support staff to deal with anti-social behaviour and petty crime. Even these micro moves have been met with implacable hostility from the Police Federation which, although they are prohibited from organising industrial action, is one of the most intransigent and powerful trade unions in the country. Apart from the rank and file union, the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) is a formidable barrier to reform. ACPO is the senior officers trade union, but at the same time it gets large amount of taxpayers money so it is one of those strange hybrid organisations by which the state extends its tendrils where they shouldn’t be. Financial pressures brought about change in the prison system and that will go further. The present economic constraints should be an aid to breaking the massive institutional barriers to police reform.

 

The way forward is to go ahead with abolition of Police Authorities. In those areas with an executive mayor policing should become part of his/her responsibility. In the rest of the country an elected police commissioner would be OK.

 

The real job though is to get the right sort of policing. Major crime and the contingency arrangements for large scale incidents must be coordinated nationally and internationally. All motoring offences, which does not include such things as manslaughter by use of a vehicle, should be de-criminalised. The task of enforcing the civil motoring laws needs to be contracted out to private providers. Local crime and crime prevention needs to be separated into its specialisms of theft and burglary, rape and sexual offences, fraud, etc. and delivered in the manner chosen by the communities they serve.

 

It is my view that the vast majority of policing and public safety would be best handled by private contractors, but there is no reason why mayors or commissioners should not keep it as a directly employed service or a mixture of public and private provision.

Tottenham in Flames

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Twenty six years after PC Keith Blakelock was murdered on the Broadwater Farm estate, riots have erupted in the same area after a man was shot dead by police.

Tonight there are buildings and vehicles burning and looting has taken place in the centre of Tottenham with reports of around three hundred people involved in disorder.

We do not yet know if the man who was apparently killed by a police bullet on Thursday was himself armed, but there are reliable reports that a police officer was struck by a bullet in that incident and he only escaped injury because it was his radio that was hit.

We are already being told that this is an area of ‘deprivation’ and a friend of the dead man’s family is reported as saying:

“They’re making their presence known because people are not happy,….this guy was not violent. Yes, he was involved in things but he was not an aggressive person.”

When she says ‘he was involved in things’ she means he was a criminal. There will be an enquiry to establish whether the police acted properly when they shot Mr Duggan. It may be no surprise that his friends and relatives do not have confidence in that, but it is very telling that some of them think it is OK that a person was involved in crime and that they are justified in taking to the streets before they know whether he shot at a policeman.

The people who are attacking police, destroying property and looting shops are not doing that because they are starving, oppressed or suffering from discrimination. They are doing it because they habitually hold their communities in fear and they think they can get away with intimidating anybody who tries to establish order and safety on the streets.

The sad truth is that a quarter of a century after Keith Blakelock’s murder, the police have made no progress in breaking the grip of violent crime infesting the estates of north London. It is impossible to stop the drug dealing, prostitution, unlicensed drinking and intimidation that is controlled by criminals. There are two main reasons for this.

The first is that people will always pay for sex when they want to and people will always get high. Trying to stop these things by making them illegal has no more effect than telling the tide not to come in and outlawing activity that cannot be stopped just passes that trade over to very nasty crooks instead of it being conducted with reasonable safety. The second problem in this specific area is the failure of the police and the local authorities to deal with black criminals. This is partly due to fear of the political consequences of doing it and largely because there are too few black people in policing and running the community.

We will be bombarded with requests for enquiries into poverty and deprivation in the area. Rather than producing masses of hot air and wasting time and money on post mortems of the riot, the real need is to immediately establish zero tolerance of the real crime which destroys residents tranquility and peace of mind.

Get in hard and fast on every mugging, burglary, assault and theft. Stop graffiti and littering. Ensure that habitual offenders are prevented from damaging this community any more. Do that well enough and people will stop being afraid to speak out about crime. They will become more interested in keeping their area nice and they will want to have careers in the police, fire service and other jobs that some are seeing as enemies at the moment.

Criminal gangs are not born out of poverty or deprivation, they come from fear and alienation. Fear must be driven from the streets so that decent citizens can safely build communities.

Related articles

• Tottenham in flames as protesters riot (guardian.co.uk)

The Inadequacy of Adversarial Justice

Recently I wrote a piece on the failings of the jury system as a way of delivering justice. However, juries are just the secret voting system which decides the winner of a battle between two champions and we also need to consider whether the adversarial court system is the best way of doing things.

 

It is worth noting that the reason we do things this way is a hangover from the medieval practice of trial by combat. This allowed disputants who were not in a position to physically fight their own cause (women for example) to appoint a champion to represent them. The barrister in a wig with a silver tongue is the equivalent of a knight on a horse with a lance.

 

In this piece I am only exploring possible improvements in the criminal justice system. In the UK we also have an adversarial system for civil matters where it is often even less appropriate than in the criminal courts.

 

Neutral third party mediation offers many advantages over the adversarial system in civil matters. It should be less formal and time consuming and my preference would be for it to be run by a private organisation rather that the government. The process involves a mediation that evaluates the circumstances and attempts to come to a fair outcome that benefits all parties that are involved. The outcome is not necessarily a one-sided judgement, so there is not a winner or a loser. Mediation is an excellent process for working through civil matters such as divorce, child custody disputes, neighbour dispute, debt and financial disputes, etc.

 

Mediation is more desirable than traditional litigation to resolve matters such as custody. The “win-lose” approach of the adversarial system often does not promote the best interests of the child. Private mediators require qualifications in psychology and social work for family or neighbour matters or financial qualifications for debt cases. They have an advantage over most judges because of their training in the specific field. Child custody involves a lifetime of cooperation. As people change over time they can return to the mediator to work through changes that benefit all parties. This can be done in a much quicker manner than in an adversarial court system.

 

Another advantage to private mediation is the substantial saving to the individuals involved because they do not necessarily need a lawyer to represent them. The taxpayer also benefits because participants must cover the costs of their own cases.

 

Returning to criminal law, shouldn’t it be self-evident that instead of a battle taking place between prosecution and defence over who can win twelve people to their side, the objective of a court should be to uncover the truth and protect society by ensuring that criminals are dealt with and innocent people do not suffer injustice. Apart from the problem of the outcome being dependent on the the most persuasive lawyer rather than the truth of what happened, the adversarial system also has ‘rules of combat’ which can only get in the way of exposing everything that needs to be known. We could probably agree that an accused person should be presumed to be innocent until they have been found to be guilty of a crime, but why should that include a right to silence? If a person has been wrongfully accused of a crime they ought to be eager to give every assistance in establishing their innocence. Silence from the accused only has the purpose of allowing the battle between the barristers can go on without the defence lawyer having his lance blunted. It has nothing to give to the discovery of truth.

 

Some might object that a defendant should not be forced to say that he was committing one crime in order to show that he could not have done the one of which he is accused. Why not? More justifiably it might be said that there may be alibi evidence that an accused person is entitled to keep private. Quite so and that is no problem. Although there should be no right to silence, there is also no requirement that all evidence is revealed in open court. If an investigating judge is provided with solid evidence that an accused could not possibly have committed a crime due to a strong alibi, that is all that the world needs to know. The key point is that all citizens have a responsibility to assist the pursuit of justice and an accused person is not excused from that duty.

 

As with the right of silence, the double jeopardy rule must be discarded. In recent years in the UK a second trial of an acquitted person has been allowed in a few circumstance of new evidence as it is increasingly recognised that dangerous criminals should not enjoy lifelong impunity because of a failed trial. The rule needs to go completely, along with the whole mindset that a trial can be tripped up on procedural challenges and a criminal acquitted unjustly.

 

So how would an alternative to the battleground court work? The alternative to adversarial trials is usually described as an inquisitorial method. Systems in use vary in their detail, but the basic principle is that crimes brought before the courts are first handled by an investigating judge or magistrate. It is the responsibility of this person to uncover as much evidence as possible about the crime and the possible responsibility for it. When sufficient evidence has been gathered to indicate that a person or persons have a case to answer, charges are laid and the case goes to hearing before a trial judge. The investigating judge will continue to gather evidence, if necessary, right up to trial. All parties are required to provide honest cooperation with the investigator at all stages and there is no right to withhold information. Giving false information or concealing evidence is a crime irrespective of whether it is done by a defendant, the police or lawyers.

 

When the case comes to trial, instead of examination and cross examination in a theatrical performance before a jury, prosecution and defence lawyers present their case to the judge in a verbal statement to add to the written submission already passed on by the investigating judge. The trial judge can ask questions of anybody involved in the case and if he or she wants to explore the quality of expert evidence or require additional expertise, they are able to do so.

 

One of the most important aspects is that even if a defendant has confessed or pleaded guilty, the trial must continue until the judge is satisfied that guilt is established or the accused is acquitted. This is an essential protection for people who are vulnerable to police pressure or who have mental difficulties that pre-dispose them to take responsibility for things they haven’t done.

 

I have referred throughout to the trial judge in the singular, but this is an oversimplification. One judge is satisfactory for cases where the possible custodial sentence is no greater than one year. Where there is a possibility of custody of between one and ten years there should be three presiding judges and for the most serious crimes a panel of five senior judges is appropriate.

 

Unlike jury trials in which no reason is ever given for the verdict and there is no way of knowing what reasoning the jurors undertook in reaching their conclusion, the judgements in an inquisitorial system must always be supported by written reasons. If the reasoning is faulty that is a basis for appeal.

 

Related articles

• Abolish the Jury System (malpoet.wordpress.com)

Home Security

I have just had a letter from the police pushed through my front door telling me how to lock the door because recently some burglars have just walked into houses. This came at the same time as I heard on the radio that Greater Manchester police will lose a quarter of its staff over the next four years due to ‘savage’ budget cuts. That will be a big loss.

The letter also helpfully told me that it was not illegal to put spiked toppings, such as ‘Prikkastrip’ on my back fence so long as I displayed a small notice warning people of the danger of injury if they attempt to climb the fence. I am not sure whether the next thief approaching my house will be a person claiming to sell Prikkastrip  or one providing small notices. Without a Prikkastrip, anybody trying to climb my fences will be at risk of injury because they will collapse under the weight of a burglar. Should I rush out and put notices up explaining to people that it is dangerous to climb fences?

Perhaps I should even put up a truthful notice saying that if you try to climb over this fence there is a likelihood that the householder will rush out and nail your fucking hands to it.

I might be able to stomach a money wasting nanny state just a little bit if wasn’t just so totally stupid and patronising. Well, no I couldn’t. Privatise the police, scrap most of the stupid laws that have been passed over the last couple of decades, give citizens a proper right to self-defence and stop the state poking its warty nose into our private lives.

I am sure Prikkastrip are grateful for this taxpayer funded advertising. I wonder how much they are giving in kick backs to the prat that thought this one up?

A Caution

The only legitimate function of government is to provide citizens with personal safety and protection of their property. While the state interferes to an ever increasing extent in the personal lives of everybody and passes ever more restrictive laws on the businesses that provide income, and goods by which we live our lives, it is repeatedly failing to do the job for which it exists.

A recent BBC enquiry revealed that in the east of England alone the police issued nearly 30,000 cautions for burglary, sex crimes and assaults in 2005/6. A caution is only given where there is sufficient evidence for a prosecution and yet in this large number of serious offences the police are choosing not to prosecute even though the offender has accepted their guilt.

The Home Office website makes a strong point about cannabis having been re-classified as a class B drug (despite the scientific evidence making it very clear that this was not justified) and that personal use of cannabis could result in a prison sentence of up to five years and fourteen years if you sell it. Using cannabis has some risk for the person doing it, although not as much as for some legal and prescription drugs, but it is not something that does harm to other people. Burglary, sex crimes and assault are violent crimes that traumatise victims and cause peoples lives to be seriously limited by fear.

We have more police in this country than we have ever had in our history and we also have more laws than ever before. The Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police has said in today’s Sunday Times that the public are being let down by failures in the criminal justice system. Too many violent criminal and habitual re-offenders are not being dealt with effectively.

The public is worried by it and the police are well aware of it, but the government continues to fail to do its only proper job.

Our message must be clear. Stop telling us how to live our peaceful lives in our own way; stop spying on everything we do or say; stop taking most of our money away from us in taxes and then wasting it on failed bankers or stupid PC laws. Above all stop violent criminals from damaging our lives by properly enforcing the simple laws that have regulated our society for centuries and which you have now lost sight of.

Dangerous criminals must be taken off our streets and the rest of us must be left to live our lives.

Gordon Brown and Afghanistan

 

It is in matters where lives are daily being lost and placed at risk that we need the greatest political clarity about what we are doing and why.

 

The first thing I want to say is that the removal of the Taliban Government in 2001 was an entirely justified action. The Taliban were hosting Al Quaeda and facilitating their campaign of international terror which had culminated at that time in the murder of 3,000 people in the 9/11 attacks.

 

The criminal Taliban government with all of its disgusting oppression of women, ghastly executions and maimings had come about because of repeated international interference by world powers. There was particular responsibility by the USA and Pakistan and the previous involvement of Russia, but many nations also had a hand in it. None of this excuses or justifies the illegitimate Taliban government and its crimes.

 

Al Quaeda is a criminal organisation responsible for mass murder and terrorism. The claims of Bin Laden and his associates for religious justification are of no worth and provide no justification for their crimes. Mafia claims for the moral authority of their ‘family’ values or Somali pirates attempted justifications of ‘policing’ fishing waters in response to loss of livelihood to international fishing are in a similar league to the propaganda of Islamists. Al Quaeda is organised crime like the Mafia or piracy. It is entirely justified to bring these organised criminals to justice and to take measures to destroy their organisations. By the very nature of the threat, these actions have to be international.

 

Dealing with very dangerous crime originating in another country requires military action, but it is very different from a war. As soon as the language of a ‘war on terrorism’ was invoked by George W Bush the necessary action against Al Quaeda and its supporters was misdirected. In his speech today Gordon Brown has shown that he has not yet managed to disentangle the issues in his mind and his government will continue to fail to set clear objectives in Afghanistan which will result in the unnecessary loss of British and Afghan lives for no purpose.

 

The Karzai Government is deeply corrupt and its pretensions to democracy have been exposed as completely fraudulent. These are matters which should be of great concern to the Afghan people, but they are none of our business. It is not possible to impose functioning political systems or moral values with armies and weapons.

 

It is not our business to stop Afghan farmers growing poppies. I will not go into the stupidity of British drug laws, but heroin use in this country cannot be controlled by trying to reduce production in Afghanistan. The demand for drugs in Britain is a British issue which can only be addressed in Britain.

 

Afghanistan is a multi ethnic place divided by different language, tribal and religious affiliations. For well over a century it has not been effectively ruled by a single government from the centre and there is no likelihood that it will be in the foreseeable future. Whether this problem is resolved by allowing the country to separate into its regional groupings or to form some sort of federal or con-federal relationship is a matter for the Afghan people to work out without outside interference.

 

The immediate problem is obvious. Invading powers have destroyed the military, policing and infrastructure of the country. With immediate withdrawal of the western powers, Karzai’s corrupt state apparatus would probably fall quickly to insurgents. So what is the solution?

 

The coalition forces should immediately stop all non-military activity such as school and road building or the administration of elections. The Karzai government must be told to establish its legitimacy by creating an administration that has public support. That can only be done by negotiating with the people who hold power and influence throughout the country. Some of the people they will have to talk to will be armed and may have been fighting to remove foreign influence from the country. This is not the same as wishing to attack the USA or Britain or having delusions about setting up a worldwide Islamist caliphate.

 

The coalition military should be taken of the streets and withdrawn to defensible bases pending withdrawal. Training of Afghan police and army should be rapidly phased out. If the Afghan government want training for their state forces (and they most certainly need it) such training should be provided by commercial contractors. There are plenty of private companies in the United States, Britain, Russia and elsewhere which are mainly made up of ex military personnel and they would compete for this business.

 

The pursuit of criminals like Bin Laden, Mullah Omar and their associates must continue as must the destruction of terrorist training camps and elimination of the criminal infrastructure. This does not require mass troops on the ground. It can and should be done by increased intelligence work, special forces operations and precision attacks by missiles and pilotless drones on firmly identified terrorist targets.

 

Brown has dithered on most things as Prime Minister and Britain has been too eager to follow bad leads from America. Now is the time for clarity and decisiveness. Recognise that it is a mistake to try to export democracy or western attitudes to Afghanistan and pull out the ground troops rapidly. Re-state our determination to prevent terrorist murder on British streets by eliminating criminal organisations whether they are based in this country or elsewhere.

The Sixth Commandment

You Shall Not Murder

 

This obviously didn’t apply to war or execution. God was always encouraging the Israelites to go to war and massacre their enemies and when you get to the laws of Moses there is plenty about people being put to death.

 

It seems then that it is OK for the state, tribe or whatever authority structure to kill people for the reasons that it decides, but individuals are not allowed to.

 

Well that seems a pretty reasonable rule on the face of it although I am against capital punishment in all circumstances (all justice systems are fallible and killing people for things they have not done is morally repulsive) and the way that the god of Abraham approved war is no guide that anybody should follow. Let us also not forget that this god would not have been a fan of the Geneva Conventions. He was entirely happy with genocide and killing prisoners.

 

Even when it comes to individual murder it seems that god himself was exempt from his rules. He was happy enough to kill poor Mrs Lot for the terrible crime of looking back. In the case of his chosen he also seems to have different standards.

 

When Moses killed the Egyptian overseer because of his cruelty there is no censure of him. Apparently the ten commandments did not apply to Moses himself. He cannot be allowed the excuse of self defence, because he was not personally under attack. The fact is that he took the law into his own hands. He killed an official of the Pharoah who was acting in accordance with the norms of his government. As is the case throughout the old testament, the life of an Egyptian did not have the value (in the eyes of god and Moses) of a Jewish life.

 

We should not be surprised that the old testament is racist, that merely reflects the times in which it was written, but it does mean that we cannot take biblical commandments as having any relevance to modern life.

 

I certainly think that you should not murder and that applies to everybody at all times. Not just to those who are alleged to be approved by god. We need universal standards not hypocritical and partial ones.

Amnesty

 

The government has claimed

success in its most recent boot amnesty.

Boot mountains have been formed

in police station yards

throughout the country.

 

Original plans to issue the surrendered boots

to construction workers have been abandoned

due to a shortage of workers since the fourth credit crunch

and concern that the boots may be smuggled

out of the building sites and sold to gang members.

 

An alternative proposal

to ship the boots to shoeless

people in the third world

was stopped after the

Stop The War coalition

objected to weapons being exported.

 

Policing of the prohibition

on males between the ages of

thirteen and three quarters and

forty two being seen in public

with a clenched fist has resulted

in a claim by The Police Federation

for a trebling of the number

of police officers.

 

The requirement that young men

may only wear slippers in

public places has resulted in

a sharp increase in

spanking attacks in night clubs.

 

An appeal against the two kicks and your out

sentencing policy will go to

the European Court next week.

It is expected that the government will lose

and plans are being made for the life sentence

kickers to be released to waddle restraint.

 

They will be required to wear an

electronic butt plug that delivers a sharp

electric shock if the foot is raised above knee level.

Shit breaks of not more than fifteen minutes

will be permitted for up to three times a day.

 

A government spoke said:

“We are on target to achieve

the 64^th consecutive year

of falling crime levels.

Less than half the population

are now in prison

or subject to control orders.”

End All Immigration Controls Into The UK

A free market should exist in people as well as goods and services. The only people who should be excluded are those who have been deported following legal process.

Everybody else should be free to come and go as they please without requirement of work permits or visas. Biometric identification should be used on entry and exit.

 

Discontinue all state benefits for anybody who has not been a continuous UK resident for 5 years

The simple solution to so called benefit tourism.

Citizenship is a different matter. Only citizens should be entitled to state benefits of any kind other than the protection of the law. Citizenship should be open to application to anybody who has lived in the country continuously for five years without any form of criminal conviction, speaks good English and has a record of employment and tax payment.

Gilbert Deya Miracle Babies Fraud

 

Deya leads a Christian evangelical group called Gilbert Deya Ministries. Just another crank cult preying on the spiritually needy and bleeding them of their money and devotion except for the ‘miracle babies’.

 

In a cruel twist on all the other religious frauds running their own ego pumping organisations, Deya claims to be able to make infertile women pregnant through prayer. Deya is a Kenyan and all the women who are helped into pregnancy by him have to travel to Kenya where they are presented with their baby.

 

The problem, of course, is that the babies are not theirs. They are shown by DNA analysis to have no connection with the alleged mothers and Deya’s organisation is really stealing Kenyan babies in a cynical crime to convince his followers of his miraculous powers.

 

This is one of the worse examples of how far cult leaders will go to mislead and exploit their followers. The continued claims of miracles by mainstream religions (such as those in the Catholic church who are continuing to make saints on the basis of supposed miracles) allows the continuation of an environment in which the ludicrous, cruel and criminal actions of people like Deya can continue to attract gullible supporters.