Gadget latest: Nothing To See Here, Folks

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? In the case of the police, the answer is the PSD (professional standards departments – though names vary from force to force).

These are the watchmen who watch the watchmen (though I understand there is an ongoing debate within the ranks of the thin blue line as to who watches the watchmen who watch the watchmen. From talking to a lot of police officers over recent years, it seems that, in many cases, they have some very interesting issues of their own. But that’s for another day.)

A number of people have contacted us – including members of the media – to ask whether Gadget has been busted by his* own side.

As I said yesterday, the answer is no.

It will disappoint certain people, who simply cannot stand the fact that Gadget had a voice listened to across the world, while their own was ignored even in their own street. To choose a subset entirely at random, monomaniacal lunatics from Huddersfield, say.

But the fact is, Gadget has quit entirely on his* own terms, at a time of his* own choosing. After seven years, enough is enough. Let someone else have a go.

So: to the concerned, I say: don’t worry about him* and if you haven’t read the book, here’s a free extract, and here’s a link (and, at the bottom, given today is booze day on the BBC, is another segment from the book).

To Melvin T Rumpelstiltskin, I say: keep on stamping those little feet!

*Or her

24 HOUR PARTY PEOPLE

WE HEAR a lot about ‘booze Britain’ these days, but it’s not the booze which is the problem, it’s the people.

Most of us like a drink now and then. As a younger man, particularly when I was in the Army, I had a few beers and rolled back home drunk more than once, but I never smashed all the car mirrors off in the streets on the way back, or attacked anyone with a baseball bat, or told the police to fuck off. I still enjoy a pint from time to time, but I don’t get absolutely slaughtered and I don’t go out and smack people in the face and puke all over the pavement. I don’t drink-drive and I don’t beat up my wife or kids or neighbours. I don’t smash shop windows, or urinate in doorways, or use foul language at the top of my voice.

I’m nothing special: there are millions of people who don’t do any of these things, and you’re probably among them.

The problem is, there are also quite a lot of Britons who don’t feel like they’ve had a decent night out until they’ve ticked several of the above boxes, and had a kebab/KFC.

Of course, their behaviour is often appalling when they’re sober, but it’s far worse when they’re drunk, as whatever inhibitions or social polish they might have had are swept away on a tide of Stella Artois and blue, vodka-based pop.

There are people who say that it was ever thus, and point to Hogarth’s Gin Lane and the back streets of our port cities where sailors would get tanked up and fighting drunk after months at sea. But this new phenomenon is happening on our High Streets, at least three or four nights a week.

The protagonists are often young, and they have a lot of disposable income: they can’t afford to buy houses anymore so they all live with their parents way beyond when they used to. With no responsibilities, and with discount drink far cheaper than it ever was, why not go out and get hammered every night?

Into this poisonous cocktail the Government recently threw another ingredient – 24 hour licensing.

Not many places are open 24 hours, it’s true, but lots are now open much later than they were. I don’t care what the figures say, this has caused us huge problems.

When the nightclubs used to shut at the same time, we could gear everything to that point. We would have a flurry of issues – the town centre fights, the robbing or bilking of taxi drivers, the drink-driving accidents, the people falling over and smacking their heads on the concrete etc – but at about 2.30am it would all start to die off.

Now it carries on all the way through to 6am. Ask any front line cop, and they’ll tell you: broad daylight on a Sunday morning, getting towards the end of the shift, and they are still going to fights in the High Street. What’s going on?

The Government calls it the ‘Night Time Economy’ (NTE). This Orwellian phrase refers to those bars, clubs and other such venues operating at night in town centres. It is a nightmare of vomit, urine, chips and police officers being punched in the face, but that doesn’t square with the official vision of longer licensing and the NTE – where everyone meets up in cafés to share polenta and vine-ripened tomatoes, sips their five units of alcohol and chats about the issues of the day.

Again, I may have missed it but I don’t think any minister has gone on telly and admitted that the NTE licensing experiment has been a disaster. They don’t like to admit they’re wrong about much, do they? Instead, the pressure is on the police to find ways to deal with NTE crime and anti-social behaviour.

Launching an advertising campaign recently, Jacqui Smith [the then Home Secretary] said, ‘I am not prepared to tolerate alcohol-fuelled crime and disorder on our streets and this new campaign will challenge people to think twice about the serious consequences of losing control. It reinforces Government action already underway to deal with excessive drinking, including tougher sanctions for licensees who sell to young people, new powers for the police to disperse disruptive drinkers and better education and information for everyone.’

The Government’s input, then, is an advert, some ‘better education and information’ and the wildly misguided hope that the lunatics we arrest each weekend will somehow start to ‘think twice about the serious consequences of losing control’.

As for actually sorting it out, that’s down to us. Luckily, they are legislating to give us ‘new powers’.

The problem with politicians these days is that very few of them have actually ever done anything in the real world. They go from university, to jobs as MPs’ research assistants, to themselves becoming MPs and then Ministers. Being law-abiding types themselves (save for the odd run-in with cannabis), they actually believe that a ton of extra verbage on the statute books is all it takes.

If only it were that simple.

The Government says irresponsible landlords who serve drunk people should be prosecuted, and that we should also identify the bar staff who served these idiots their booze. Which sounds great when you announce it at the despatch box in the House of Commons, or on Richard and Judy’s sofa, or in an exclusive interview with some newspaper political editor. It’s not so easy at midnight in our towns, when the streets are full of paralytically drunk yobs who are kicking off, smashing windows and fighting with us.

We don’t have the time or the personnel to start checking CCTV to find out where they just came out of. Even if we did, and we went to speak to the manager of the venue, what’s he going to say? He’s going to say, no, we didn’t serve them, they came in pissed so we kicked them back out. So we spend however many hours reviewing the tapes to find all the previous venues they went to, and the managers there say, no, we didn’t serve them either, they were pissed when they came in here, too.

OK, so we grill the bar staff instead. We push our way into a club we think a given bozo has come from. There are 300 people in there, the ‘music’ is at about 140 decibels, the five barmaids are all Polish and hardly speak a word of English. Shouting to be heard, we’re trying to ask them if they served a man in a striped shirt with tattooed forearms and a gold earring, in a club containing about 200 men in striped shirts with tattooed forearms and gold earrings. Back on the street, meanwhile, a whole different group of drunks is now kicking the living shit out of my officers.

This is the stuff of fantasy. It is ludicrous. It is dreamed up by people sitting in air conditioned rooms whose experience of modern drinking, I can only think, must be limited to nights out in country inns in the Cotswolds or metropolitan bars in London. In a trendy pub in Islington, there might be three dozen people sitting listening to jazz all night and if one of them later goes mad outside the 24 hour Tesco possibly you can pin something on the people who served him his last quart of pinot grigio. But these are not the places from which the trouble emanates.

The police can shut problem pubs, says the Government. Yep, we can. But it’s not quite as easy as it sounds when you say it to Andrew Marr and he’s nodding in agreement. I have shut a pub down. Once. But it was a really difficult thing to do, it took days of police time and it wasn’t easy to get it through at court. The licensees don’t just roll over, they put up a vigorous defence because it’s their livelihood you’re taking away. Plus, all it does is displace the problem. People don’t stop drinking and brawling just because their favourite bar has closed, after all.

I don’t know the full answer to the problem. I suspect no-one does. It probably involves all sorts of things, from improving attitudes to civility and behaviour from a very young age, to changing our drinking culture, to making booze harder and more expensive to buy (though this would penalise non-problem drinkers), to tougher enforcement of the basic laws against public drunkenness and violence.

This latter element of a wider solution is the one thing the police actually could do something about – after all, Ms Smith says that she has given us new powers to ‘disperse disruptive drinkers’. But this is another one straight from the la-la land school of public order: ‘Excuse me sir, can you put that bottle down and stop trying to blind that other man? We have new powers to disperse you, you see.’

Disperse them with who, Jacqui?

I know the Home Secretary says we have more police than ever, but how many of them are working Response? I know, too, that we have PCSOs now, and that they look a bit like police, but very few of them work beyond 9pm because it’s too dangerous (it’s not too dangerous for the public, note, but it is too dangerous for PCSOs, despite their stab vests and their radios). In the first few months of 24 hour licensing, we were given enormous amounts of centrally-funded extra money to put more bodies on the street – the overtime was great for the Sergeants and PCs. As a result, everywhere you turned there were police. Once that dried up, we were back to normal – and we really don’t have the numbers to do much more than control things to a just-about acceptable level.

So, what if we could do something to the figures, to make it look like things are better? If it’s not within our gift to stop the nations’ youth getting drunk and fighting, and it’s not, the only place left for us to go to, to get the reductions we need, is our bureaucrats.

If we arrest lots of people for relatively minor things, so we get lots of ‘detections’, we at least have some ammunition to use in our defence when people start squealing about NTE crime. Or if police statisticians start to look at definitions of crime, maybe we can shift things that would have been counted into areas that wouldn’t be?

For instance, someone is being aggressive and drunk in the street. We have two options. We can arrest him for being ‘drunk and disorderly’ or for one of the offences under the Public Order Act 1986 – sections 3, 4 and 5 of which are more commonly known as ‘Affray’, ‘Threatening Behaviour’ and ‘Disorderly Conduct’.

What’s the difference? The difference is that ‘drunk and disorderly’ is not a recordable crime. You are found in that state by a police officer, arrested and bound over to keep the peace at court the next day (or, more often, given a Penalty Notice for Disorder and sent on your way). It doesn’t show up on our figures. S5 POA is recordable, and does.

There is widespread anecdotal evidence of PCs being put under pressure to arrest for drunk and disorderly. Even if they arrest for S5 POA, it can later be changed to d&d – this is perfectly legitimate, no-one is doing anything technically wrong or illegal, but it does have the added benefit of making the NTE figures look a lot better than they actually are, doesn’t it?

I don’t even really blame senior officers if they are creating this pressure: the Government has said it wants to see reductions, so we have to provide them.

Whether it actually makes things better… well, who in authority really cares? As long as they aren’t getting stabbed in the kebab house, or having their car walked over at 3am, or being woken up by people fighting in their front garden – and they aren’t – then is there really a problem?

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You just cheat and lie to me all the time

The fall in crime in England and Wales ‘may be exaggerated’, says the BBC.

What? Crime figures being manipulated to meet targets set by the idiots in government?

Who knew?

PC David Copperfield in Wasting Police Time:

The country seems to be divided between those who think that things are getting worse, and those who think that things are getting better and that it’s all in our heads.

The latter includes most politicians, the liberal left, and ACPO. Many of these people earn quite impressive salaries and can afford to live in areas where crime is, for the time being, relatively low. This may explain their optimism.

The former includes: everyone else, many of whom live in areas where crime happens, and are people to whom crime happens.

The UK population has risen steadily over the last century or so, from 38 million in 1901 to around 60 million today (note, it hasn’t doubled).

In the same period, the total number of police officers employed by the State has risen from around 40,000 to close to 130,000 now (ie it has more than trebled).

What about crime? Well, the number of indictable offences known to the police in 1900 was 2.4 for every 1,000 of the population. In 1997, the figure was 89.1. I’d put my house on the fact that it’s gone up since then.

I suppose some cynics might interpret these figures as to show that the police are actually causing crime. I wouldn’t go that far. But I do wonder this: where are all these new police officers and what are they doing?

Inspector Gadget in Perverting the Course of Justice:

I don’t trust official crime figures… I know the Home Secretary says we have more police than ever, but how many of them are working Response? I know, too, that we have PCSOs now, and that they look a bit like police, but very few of them work beyond 9pm because it’s too dangerous (it’s not too dangerous for the public, note, but it is too dangerous for PCSOs, despite their stab vests and their radios). In the first few months of 24 hour licensing, we were given enormous amounts of centrally-funded extra money to put more bodies on the street – the overtime was great for the Sergeants and PCs. As a result, everywhere you turned there were police. Once that dried up, we were back to normal – and we really don’t have the numbers to do much more than control things to a just-about acceptable level.

So, what if we could do something to the figures, to make it look like things are better? If it’s not within our gift to stop the nations’ youth getting drunk and fighting, and it’s not, the only place left for us to go to, to get the reductions we need, is our bureaucrats.

If we arrest lots of people for relatively minor things, so we get lots of ‘detections’, we at least have some ammunition to use in our defence when people start squealing about NTE ['night time economy'] crime. Or if police statisticians start to look at definitions of crime, maybe we can shift things that would have been counted into areas that wouldn’t be?

For instance, someone is being aggressive and drunk in the street. We have two options. We can arrest him for being ‘drunk and disorderly’ or for one of the offences under the Public Order Act 1986 – sections 3, 4 and 5 of which are more commonly known as ‘Affray’, ‘Threatening Behaviour’ and ‘Disorderly Conduct’.

What’s the difference? The difference is that ‘drunk and disorderly’ is not a recordable crime. You are found in that state by a police officer, arrested and bound over to keep the peace at court the next day (or, more often, given a Penalty Notice for Disorder and sent on your way). It doesn’t show up on our figures. S5 POA is recordable, and does.

There is widespread anecdotal evidence of PCs being put under pressure to arrest for drunk and disorderly. Even if they arrest for S5 POA, it can later be changed to d&d – this is perfectly legitimate, no-one is doing anything technically wrong or illegal, but it does have the added benefit of making the NTE figures look a lot better than they actually are, doesn’t it?

PC Bloggs in Diary of an On-Call Girl:

(M)y mobile rings. It is the Scrutineer Herself.

‘Hello, PC Bloggs? About this racist incident?’

‘Yes?’

‘We can’t just reclassify it.’

‘Why not?’

‘Well, how do you know it wasn’t racist?’

‘The victim doesn’t think it was.’

‘Well, how does she know it wasn’t?’

She’s got me there. I mean, just because Mrs Patel doesn’t think it was racist doesn’t mean it wasn’t, I suppose. But I recover like lightning. ‘Um… well, how do you know it was?’

There’s a momentary silence, and it sounds like an irritated one. Then she replies. ‘I will change it to a criminal damage, but unless you can provide verifiable evidence that it was not racist, the classification will have to stand.’

Will is now watching me with his head on one side, looking thoroughly amused. That’s the problem with more experienced officers: they treat all this Crime Managing stuff as a joke and just go along with what the Scrutineer wants.

I swivel my chair to face away from him and refuse to succumb. ‘Verifiable evidence that it was not racist? Like what?’

‘Perhaps if we knew the motives of the offender?’ She says this as though she is talking to a small child, or an idiot.

‘Perhaps if we knew who the offender was,’ I say, ‘I could arrest him or her and find out. Do you know who the offender was?’

‘Now, now, PC Bloggs, I know it seems pernickety, but we have to abide by ethical crime recording rules.’

‘But if it’s racist, I have to do a report to the Hate Crime Unit. I can’t do that because the victim doesn’t think it’s racist. So the report will just say that it isn’t racist, in which case why am I sending it to them?’

‘Well, I’m afraid that’s just the way it is.’

‘But…’ I am starting to doubt my sanity. ‘How did it become a racist incident in the first place? The victim doesn’t think it is, for goodness’ sake.’

‘If someone perceives it to be racist, then it is.’

‘It looks like the only person who perceives it to be racist is the Crime Centre.’

‘Well, that is ‘someone’.’

‘Look, this is just some kids chucking stuff at a door. It’s antisocial, it’s annoying and I’d love to arrest the little blighters if I knew who they were, but it isn’t racist.’

‘That’s your view.’

‘Fine… can we just file it then?’

‘Not without the report to the Hate Crime Unit. It won’t get through Crime Compliance.’

‘Fine, I’ll do the report.’ The call ends.

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Can I sue Tory MP Nick Herbert for libel?

In yesterday’s Observer, Nick Herbert, the former police minister, wrote at some length about what he said was the public’s loss of faith in the police. He said this had been caused by the fact that some detectives in Kent are being investigated for a scam involving TICs, and because of Hillsborough and ‘Plebgate’.

Leave aside the question of what on earth an MP of all people thinks he is doing lecturing people about a loss of faith; and the fact that the TIC scam is as old as the hills, and is partly in response to the government’s own insane target culture; and that Hillsborough happened in 1989 (90% of the cops in the country on that day having long since retired).

Andrew Mitchell resigned of his own volition after swearing at the police, and good riddance to the foul-mouthed yob. Arguably, the real scandal is that Mitchell was not arrested; if I were a youth who had been nicked for swearing at the police outside The Jolly Friar Chippy last night, I might be wondering why it is that pompous Tory MPs get a pass and I don’t.

But my main gripe is with this paragraph:

Anyone who doubts what was behind Mitchell’s downfall need only read the blog of Inspector Gadget. A serving police officer, the self-promoted Gadget (he is not an inspector) says: “The relationship between Conservatives and police officers is not just toxic, it is over.” Feelings about the reform of pay and conditions were so strong “there was bound to be trouble. Plebgate is trouble”.

So, just to recap: I say Inspector Gadget is a serving police inspector, or at least has been (s/he may or may not have been promoted).

Nick Herbert says s/he is not.

Does that mean Nick Herbert is saying that I am a liar?

Given that I publish non-fiction books, it is quite important to me that people believe what I say (outwith the usual disclaimers about names and details being changed to protect the guilty).

Can I sue Nick Herbert for libel? It’s an interesting question, with shades of Tony McNumpty.

Incidentally, I have met Herbert once: I found him to be on the slimy side of charming. It was (from memory) some time in early 2007, when PC David Copperfield was invited to give a talk to Policy Exchange, the Conservative think-tank.

I went along to hold his coat, the Daily Telegraph‘s Philip Johnston acted as MC, and the then opposition MP and shadow police minister Herbert was among the invited guests.

The audience was small but rapt: none of them had ever seen or heard a ground-level PC talking, openly and articulately, about the problems British policing faced (and faces). This was because no serving PC had ever done so. (This was a few months after Wasting Police Time had been published, and Copperfield had not yet outed himself; it took a lot of guts for him to attend, as he would certainly have lost his job if identified.)

Copperfield’s key messages were that, yes, the police sometimes are terrible – being human – but here’s why: too much police time was being taken up in pointless paperwork (he recounted how it could easily take six hours to deal with two teenagers for the theft of a pushbike; no-one was saying theft of a pushbike was not important, but six hours was a bit much); that serious recidivist criminals were not being jailed for the protection of their (usually poor, elderly and otherwise vulnerable) victims; that the target culture introduced by the Blair government was changing police priorities for the worse; that discretion was a thing of the past; and that policing much of modern Britain was a bit like dealing with drunk toddlers.

Herbert sat there and listened, gave an interview to some TV people who had attended, and then left.

Wind forward five years, and the paperwork has got worse, the targets are still there, people are still drunk and entitled, and the government can’t wait to let violent criminals out of jail. But then, thanks to the Plebs at the Gates, Dave and Sam have zero chance of being burgled for the kids’ Christmas presents.

Of course, if you want to read more by Inspector Gadget, you can always buy the book.

On that note, Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to all our reader!

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Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it…

…according to  George Santayana.

He also said, ‘Those who have read Inspector Gadget’s Perverting the Course of Justice, available from all good bookshops and as an eBook at Amazon and via iTunes, will recognise this story.’

For those who haven’t read it:

LET’S go back to basics for a moment.

Lots of people probably don’t quite understand the words ‘crime’ and ‘detection’, and the role they play in modern policing.

That’s not surprising, because what they mean in reality and what they mean in surreality – ie modern policing – are often two completely different things.

In real life, a crime means something which we would all agree is against the law – theft, assault, burglary – and has an actual victim who has really suffered some harm.

In policing, a ‘crime’ – because of the ‘victim-focused’ National Crime Recording Standard I mentioned earlier – can mean, in practice, almost anything which half sounds like it might possibly be a bit like a crime and which is reported to us. (Because who are we to tell Mr Hughes his ex’s nasty texts isn’t a crime?)

Here is one example of a non-crime taken seriously by us.

It’s late one afternoon in the middle of last December. The Christmas lights are ablaze on every house in Bigtown, and the concrete walkway outside the local Spar is covered in fresh white litter. Inside, there’s a queue of people waiting to pay for their groceries. Halfway down the line, a little girl and her mum are chatting about Santa Claus, and the presents he will be delivering in a fortnight.

In front of them is a typical Bigtown youth – Burberry scarf, Nike trainers, NY Yankees cap and a ton of bling.

Overhearing their conversation, he turns round, looks at the girl and says, ‘You don’t believe in Father Christmas, do ya? Your mum’s telling you lies… he ain’t real.’

The little girl bursts into tears and the angry mum storms out of the shop and rings us on her mobile.

I like to think that, if that happened to me, I’d tell my daughter that the nasty man was talking rubbish, and chalk it up to experience.

But modern life being what it is, mum doesn’t do this; instead, she phones us, like it’s a police matter.

OK, so we get a call from a lady wanting to report a Santa denier.

We just tell her we’re awfully sorry but it’s not really one for us, right?

Wrong. The call-taker logs it on the system as a harassment offence. We all know that if the woman had been calling to report a criminal damage that had happened the night before she’d have got someone out a week next Tuesday. But because certain triggers are hit – there’s a child involved, this area happens to be a crime hotspot and the man is still at the scene – a patrol is despatched immediately, to speak to the mum and little girl and, if possible, grab the ‘offender’ and even seize the CCTV to see if they can ID him.

To me, that’s just about as mad as it gets. Is it, even at the edges of abstract technicality, a crime? Harassment is about causing alarm or distress to another. As a senior officer asked in the SMT morning meeting, ‘How can it be harassment to tell someone Santa doesn’t exist? I mean, he doesn’t. Does he?’

He’s got a point. Short of producing Santa himself at an ID parade and proving he’s real, the case is going nowhere. But time and resources have been wasted in a fairly ludicrous way.

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Come Back On The Show And Tell Us About It

The terrible shooting of two bobbies in Manchester has led to the usual mixture of handwringing, lies, and radio phone-ins. The amazing thing is the ignorance exhibited by journalists about modern British policing. It’s not like it’s a secret.

On Radio 5 Live yesterday, Victoria Derbyshire appeared not to know either that the police often patrol alone, or that sentences for serious assaults on cops are woefully weak. There was also confusion from lots of people about bail (the Police and Criminal Evidence Act isn’t written in foreign) and over the question of whether the police put too many or too few resources into the hunt for the guy. Hard to win that one.

As for arming the police, I’ve spoken to many of them over the years since we published Wasting Police Time. It’s not scientific, but I’d say 95% of the front-line cops I’ve interviewed want to be armed. Life has changed since the mythical days of ‘Dixon of Dock Green’ (who, let’s not forget, was actually shot dead while on duty). The argument that it makes officers unapproachable is hard to sustain: millions of Britons happily take their holidays in countries where the Old Bill are all tooled-up.

Anyway, from Wasting More Police Time:

Single-crewing is stupid. It only makes sense if you think the point of the police is this thing about ‘reassurance’, which is, the public see lots of police about so they feel better… The fact is, it’s a tacit admission that we have decided that a certain level of actual crime happening to some people is a price worth paying for this spurious reassurance of the rest. It’s an admission, actually, that we can’t do much about real crime, we can only massage your ‘feelings’ about it. I don’t personally buy the reassurance argument, anyway. Two years ago, if we went to a proper call needing four cops, we’d go in two cars. Now you’ll have four cops in four cars and everyone sees four pandas rock up and immediately assumes world war three is kicking off on their doorstep.

And:

It has been introduced by people who will never have to live the policy they force on the rest of us, and it doesn’t work for very obvious reasons, reasons you only wouldn’t see if you were a senior policeman or woman who doesn’t understand that things have changed on the streets in the 15 years since you last walked them, if you ever did…

And:

In my force, assaults on police increased dramatically after single patrolling was introduced. Scrotes who would have come relatively quietly when there were two of us now will chance their arm, on the basis that they might get away and if they don’t the courts will not add anything on to the ticket for assaulting a police officer as it’s supposed to be ‘part of our job’.

And:

I get assaulted, both verbally and physically. I’ve been spat at and bitten and then spent weeks waiting in fear to find out whether I’ve contracted hepatitis or HIV/Aids or whatever the person I was arresting told me they had – during which time I can’t live a normal life with my wife. I’ve never had any of these assailants prosecuted to the full extent of the law, because it’s part and parcel of the job, apparently, and not in the public interest to deal with these people.

And:

(F)ar from giving stronger sentences for assaults on police, the reverse often happens. As a uniformed Inspector, and before that, as a Sergeant, and a Fed rep, I’ve been involved in a large number of cases of assaults on my officers. The general pattern is one of the CPS refusing charge except in the most egregious cases. In the cases where they do charge, they will accept pleas to lesser offences – so the defendant says he won’t plead to GBH but he’ll plead to ABH, or he won’t plead to ABH but he will plead to common assault. Instead of saying, frankly, bollocks to that, we’ve got the evidence, let’s have a trial, they roll over to keep their own stats up. And then, the courts do next to nothing to offenders. I’ve had a young WPC bitten and scarred – no jail for that. I’ve had officers hit with iron bars, chains and bottles, and the offender is given anger management and a small fine. I’ve had an officer stabbed with a syringe where the offender claimed that he had AIDS, which turned out not to be true but was horrible for the officer. No jail for that. It makes me very angry.

And so on and so forth. We’ve published four books dealing with this sort of thing now – not far short of half a million words. Gadget has been blogging about it for years, as has Bloggs, and Copperfield before them both, and lots of others. Victoria Derbyshire even had Copperfield and Bloggs on her show!

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Er… Um… Well… Er… The thing is…

The crucial thing to establish, when publishing books by anonymous coppers (or anonymous anything), is their bona fides. Are they actually coppers?

Inspector Winter looked like he was; turns out he wasn’t. Before we move swiftly on, nothing to see here etc, this from behind The Times‘ paywall:

Inspector Winter was the darling of the police social media scene [er, not quite. Ed.]. At the height of last summer’s riots, he tweeted and blogged about his experiences on the front line — comforting people who had been burnt out of their businesses in Tottenham, arresting suspected rioters in dawn raids and drinking tea with bedraggled fellow officers in rescue centres. His fan base of more than 3,000 Twitter followers included police and the media, and he was even commissioned by The Daily Telegraph to write a first-person piece that described the “chaos” of policing the riots… The only problem was that Inspector Winter was not a policeman. He was a serial conman…

…

He spent the next two-and-a-half years on the run, effectively hiding in plain sight by visiting police stations, mixing with officers and pretending to be one of them. He fooled at least three lovers into believing that he was variously an officer in the Metropolitan Police, an officer in Essex Police, a captain in the Army and an officer in the Royal Military Police…

Ward’s claims ranged from the believable to the implausible. In Ware, Hertfordshire, he posed as Ethan Winchcombe, a major in the Royal Military Police. He told local residents he had a false leg after an incident in Afghanistan, had served in Northern Ireland and owned a series of restaurants and a garden centre. He drank at the town’s Royal Legion club and even participated in the Remembrance Day parade last year wearing an RMP uniform.

John Hawthorne, owner of the Albion pub where Ward was a regular, told The Times: “He said he had his leg shot off in Afghanistan, and that the bullet ricocheted up through his nose. We realised that wasn’t true when we saw him jogging along the street.”

Ho hum. The weird thing is, if The Daily Telegraph want pieces about riots by genuine coppers, we’ve got them coming out of our ears, and the Telegraph know that.

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Meet the Chandlers

And Kidnapped author Colin Freeman, here. They all seem remarkably unaffected by what must have been, especially in the case of Mr and Mrs Chandler, really terrible ordeals. Getting your internet reconnected on release, apparently, is worse than being held in a cave somewhere in the Horn of Africa. (Interestingly, given Colin’s hairline, the video was sponsored – when I watched it – by Regaine.)

By the way, Kidnapped was reviewed the other day in the Indie.

Gadget’s blog is being read by lots of people these days, including Bill Bratton. We’re sending the former LAPD and NYPD commissioner a copy of Perverting the Course of Justice.

Theodore Dalrymple’s Anything Goes will be out around the end of the month. It has additional content that is not in the US version, including a piece about the recent riots. Apologies to those who have been waiting for this book to appear! As you can see from the Amazon date, we’re slightly late with it.

Steve ‘So That’s Why They Call It Great Britain‘ Pope’s Run Across America is well under way. You can follow his blog and sponsor him here.

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UK Riots: I hate to say we told you so

Wasting Police Time opens with the pseudonymous PC David Copperfield reporting for duty in ‘Newtown’ and finding himself the only uniformed response officer on duty:

The other day I turned up on my own to the morning parade.

I don’t mean I had got the wrong room, or turned up late after everyone had gone.

I mean I was the only uniformed officer on duty that day, in a town of about 60,000 people.

Let me just spell that out again: the population of the town in which I work is about 60,000, and I was the ONLY UNIFORMED OFFICER ON DUTY AT THAT POINT.

True, there were other uniformed officers inside the police station; there were even a few officers on duty who were not wearing a uniform. But as for officers, in uniform, on duty and able to deploy to a call from a member of the public, there was only me.

The ‘thin blue line’ had become a very insignificant dot.

When PC Copperfield outed himself as PC Stuart Davidson and ‘Newtown’ as Burton on Trent, Staffordshire Police essentially said he was making this up, and that he had never paraded alone. The repulsive, reptilian then-Police Minister Tony ‘Second Home’ McNumpty went further and used parliamentary privilege to denounce Copperfield as a liar, his book being ‘more of a fiction than Dickens’. He later conceded, on the BBC’s Panorama special about Copperfield, that this was not the case and that the book was in fact an accurate portrayal of the woeful state of modern British policing.

We didn’t need the fatuous McNulty (who could himself call on armed police guards to protect him from the consequences of his government’s policies) to tell us this: we’d had literally hundreds of police officers ringing and emailing us to tell us that the book was spot on. There was also a recurring phrase in those conversations: ‘The wheels are going to come off.’

There are lots of cops, they said; the trouble is, most of them are sat on their backsides in police stations filling out forms and chasing government targets.

Of course, Copperfield, Gadget and Bloggs had also pointed this out, explaining what happens when a member of the already stretched thin blue line actually makes an arrest. In Perverting the Course of Justice, Gadget tells how – thanks to the mania for paperwork and box-ticking – arresting and dealing with ‘Mikey’ for smashing a window takes hours and hours and hours:

Here’s a list of the paperwork required from the patrol who were unlucky enough to arrive at the scene and arrest Mikey:

- A full, handwritten, pocket notebook entry detailing the incident, the grounds for his arrest and anything he said about the incident.

- A typed arrest statement containing exactly the same information, only in more detail.

- A typed form requesting the release of CCTV tapes. We don’t need the CCTV, but we still have to view it. If we don’t, Mikey’s lawyer will claim it contains evidence exonerating his client of the offence that four people and the CCTV operator saw him commit and to which he has confessed.

- A handwritten custody ’search and booking-in’ form.

- A property sheet, listing the contents of his pockets.

- A typed Persistent Offender form, containing the same information as the arrest statement but in a format which prevents ‘cut-and-paste’ (meaning everything has to be re-entered).

- A typed Young Offender form, containing the same information as above, but in yet another format.

- A typed or verbal ‘update’ for the computer log held by the Control Room, containing – guess what? – the same information as all of the above.

- A typed Crime Report, with the same information as in the notebook, arrest statement and Young Offender form, but with the details in different fields which, again, cannot be cut-and-pasted.

- At least two MG (Manual of Guidance) forms for the case file, summarising all of the above.

- Witness statements from at least two of the people who saw the whole thing occur.

- A PNC check of all his previous convictions.

- A witness statement from Beachtastic Breaks saying that Mikey didn’t have permission to smash their window.

- A print out with a map showing their address.

- An ‘intelligence report’ about the incident (the full details of which we can’t discuss here).

- A typed Domestic Violence form (because Nicci was mentioned by Mikey as a reason for his committing of the offence) with all of the same information again, and a complete risk assessment for her, even though she wasn’t there at the time. (This risk assessment will take hours and is likely to involve several appointments made with Nicci which will be broken by her when officers arrive at her home to find she’s gone out to the pub.)

- The paperwork for Mikey’s fingerprinting and DNA record. This will run into at least four pages.

- The Custody Record. This will be at least ten pages long (though admittedly this is completed by the custody team and not by the patrol).

- The brick will have been seized as evidence: there will be the forms and statements to be filled out for that.

- A typed ‘update’ on the ‘Night-time Economy Incident’ diary sheets.

- A three-page Community Impact Assessment briefing form for the Inspector (because Mikey is a ‘traveller’ and therefore his arrest has an ‘impact’ on the ‘community’). As the Inspector, this enables me then to fill out a longer version of the same thing, totalling six pages.

- A handwritten two-page form for the Licensing Officer discussing where Mikey might have purchased the alcohol he had drunk, again containing all the details of the offence.

There will also be a ‘control sample’ of the glass from the window for CSI, and associated paperwork, so that the defence can’t claim later that he did smash a window, just not that window

They then take it to the Sergeant, who looks at it and then fills out his paperwork, another huge tranche of forms and writing.

You may think that this is insane for such a simple job. You would be correct.

We collect all of this because we live in fear of Mikey getting to court and saying, ‘I didn’t do any of this. I just said I did because the police bullied me. Now prove it.’

It’s about worst-case scenario policing: every job we go to, we have to assume that it is going to go really bent at trial.

This isn’t a triple murder, it’s a smashed window. A smashed window, moreover, which Mikey has already admitted breaking.

Imagine what happens if it’s slightly more complicated than the incident described.

What if Mikey doesn’t admit the offence?

Or if there are two offenders, and each blames the other?

What if drugs or a weapon are found in his pockets when he’s searched – as they usually are? Mikey will be arrested for those offences, too.

We haven’t even talked about nicking him for resisting arrest, or assaulting the police, or about the lengthy booking-in process (we’ll get there in a minute).

If any or all of these factors come in to play, the whole process doubles or trebles in size and complexity.

If any of these forms contains a single mistake – even a genuinely unimportant error, like a digit wrong in a postcode, which could easily be corrected by the admin clerk who discovers it – it will be sent back to the arresting officers for correction.

We need paperwork. We need to know that the police are not fitting people up, or maltreating them in custody. We need to keep a close eye on domestic violence offenders. I don’t know a single police officer who believes otherwise. But do we really need all of this? Of these forms, half are duplicating information for the Crown Prosecution Service and the remainder are ‘data mining’ exercises to satisfy various national or local initiatives and ensure we’re hitting centrally-imposed targets.

As with reviews of our books about education (Frank Chalk just ‘hates kids’) and doctoring (Theodore Dalrymple just ‘hates his patients’), lots of people were quick to shoot the messengers as right wing apologists for ‘the man’ – ignoring the fact that the victims of crap schooling, unrestricted criminality and random violence are the poor, not the rich.

Well, now there are a lot of windows being smashed by ‘Mikey’ up and down the country, and the wheels really have come off. I’m sorry to say it, but we saw it coming.

++

Winston ‘Generation F‘ Smith may be on BBC 5 Live at 1pm today. They want to hear from him first hand what it’s like to work with the kind of people who are currently rioting. (Winston works with the Youth Offending team in Manchester.) Here’s a clue.

++

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The Police, and the Press

Amid all the ongoing brouhaha about phone hacking and journalists paying cops paying journalists, I think a lot of people are forgetting that most cops are good people doing a job that veers from mundane to terrifying to tragic, often in one day, and that most journalists, serious ones anyway, are doing a difficult and demanding job as well as they can.

Chris Hughes and Colin Freeman are two reporters who have put their own lives at risk to report on Iraq, Afghanistan and Somalia, and Inspector Gadget (author, lest we forget, of Perverting the Course of Justice – now also available as an iBook) has an excellent thread going on his blog at the moment. It’s about suicide, and there are some interesting and very moving comments from (one assumes) police officers who have attended these events:

Those jobs are the ones that stay with you the longest. I dealt with one that was done by fire not hanging. I can’t imagine what they went through for the seconds before the pain stopped registering. We had to use the car extinguisher on them as the fire was so intense…
I went through the trauma councelling and everything and it helped, but will never remove it from my mind.
Its come back to me in high definition a few times since and is triggered by the most bizarre things…one day we might discover how the human brain works and be able to intercept the triggers more effectively. Until then, I guess we just carry on coping…

(‘Minimum Cover‘)

Good post Guv. Takes me back to one went too with a probbie. Hanging. Suicide thought had terminal illness. Result letter in mat confirmed he was wrong and kettle with a funny faux whistle was on in background. My parents had same kettle. Had to buy them a new one.

(‘MetPlod’)

I used to think suiciders were selfish. I remember one old custody clerk telling me it was the cowards way out.
The old custody clerk gassed himself in a car 8 years later – stress over a woman..
I saw that corridor once – but I turned around before I stepped into it. I saw that door in the distance though – a bottle of scotch and a walk in the hills.

Seriously – genuine suicide cases are in a dark dark place where they see only one way out

(‘GPC’)

I had a mother who hanged herself from the bannister while her 18 year old son and his girlfriend slept. She did it knowing that he would wake to find her. I had a doctor who took an overdose and went to lie under a kids slide on an adventure playground, knowing that it would be likely that kids would find her. Guess who found her.

(‘Mad Mick’)

My worst was a Dad who hung himself from the Sky dish in front of the patio doors. In his best suit.

Kids came down for breakfast in the morning and opened the curtains to see Daddy swinging in front of their eyes.

Guy had a table set outside with a photo of the missus and kids, a bottle of JD and the note all neatly arranged.

Me and my poor street duties bod had to wait with him for 2 hours before we could cut him down due to the slow CID response.

Speaking to the wife was awful. Never got to the bottom of it. Suspected it was down to debt.

(‘AngryMet’)

Been to several hangings. One I attended with a good friend. Months later he copied that chap’s method when he took his own life. I think about that a lot.

(‘Mind the Oranges’)

I’ve had jumpers that have lived long enough for their families to say goodbye, and people under trains who have lived- including one guy who lost his legs but made an otherwise good recovery. When questioned after he didn’t feel low, and could not remember why he’d done it. The trick cyclists put it down to temporary insanity- like standing on the edge of a cliff and wondering what it’s like to jump- only the feeling was so strong he acted on it.

(‘Muppet’)

I attended a concern for male, after he’d text his wife to tell her goodbye. He had gone to a local bridge, sent his final text and then stepped out into the 90ft of air between the bridge and floor.
He never read the text she’d sent him back, It was still unread on his mobile phone when i found it.
I probably wonder as often as she does, if he had read it would it have made a difference?

(‘F’)

Elderly lady leaves home one evening “Just off to Bingo- back about ten” But she wasn’t. Surfaced 5 days later, 6 miles away, in the river. Must have walked some distance from her bus to the water. How to ‘write up’ the Coroner’s report so he can steer the Inquest to “Open Verdict” and save the husband at least a little distress.?

(‘Mjolinir’)

I still think back to a particular suicide, a young man who gassed himself in his car. He’d driven to a remote spot, and left a note at home saying where he would be. Myself and a colleague found him. His car was taped up with miles of tape, and a hose pipe was fed inside. He sat inside inhaling the toxic fumes, no doubt staring at the pictures of his two lovely kids that he’d taped to the windscreen in front of him. He was in the process of writing them a letter, and you could see the pen line after the last word he wrote veer downwards to the bottom of the page, as the fumes took him to the place he wanted to go. The words were hard for me to read as in it he expressed his love for his children, who he would never see again.

The car smelt heavily of that sweet, toxic smoke from a car exhaust. I can still smell it and can still see the picture of his kids on his windscreen. That was 17 years ago, and I can’t shake that scene off.

(‘Ecky “Three Milestones” Thump’)

One of the messiest I have been to was in the Balkans a number of years ago where a young man had killed himself with a hand grenade (not a cry for help this one)

The interior of the shed where he had done the deed, to coin a phrase looked like a slaughter house….his 8 month pregnant partner had walked in on it after she came home and could not find him.

She went into labour there and then and it is only due to the skills of the local ambulance crew and a doctor neighbour that there were not two more victims to add to the sad story

(‘As ex as ex can be’)

Sadly, and like so many in here i have dealt with too many in my time. The one that stays with me was a lad who took his own life. Not a very old guy at all, but when we dealt with him, his wife took us to a room which was lined with clay elephants. Perfectly moulded, hundreds of ‘em, clay elephants in all shapes and sizes – the guy was so talented it was amazing. I stood in that totally quiet room and felt sorrow like i’ve never felt before. The feelings were so difficult to take in that i still can’t adequately explain it. He had a beautiful wife, and great family – and, on the outside, so much to live for. We talked about his talent, and his wife said i could take one if I wanted. It felt wrong and ghoulish at the time, but I so wish i had done it now. He is the one that comes back to me time after time, and at every suicide scene. We can never understand what drives people to that point, all I know is that kid could have done so much. What an utter, utter shame.

(‘Barnie’)

All of our titles are available as Kindle eBooks at Amazon (you can read them on any PC). Some – including Kidnapped and Perverting the Course of Justice – are now available as eBooks for iPad and iPhone at iBooks

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Ending Police Bureaucracy

Theresa May says she’s going to end police bureaucracy. Aaarrrggghh! We’ll get no more books out of that, then!

Luckily, commenters at Gadget’s blog (now at six million hits) have their doubts:

Nick Herbert is a dangerous individual with a clear agenda and Teresa May is the same.

…

May: “Police need to move away from ‘cover your back’ culture.”

Stop stabbing us in them, then.

“Wants to further enhance officers’ discretion”.

Christ, how many times have we heard that? How many times are such soundbites crushed by constant SMT micromanaging?

…

“Any police officer who knows of unnecessary police bureaucracy should write to me personally” – May

Dear Home Secretary,

Thank you for the invitation to raise this issue with you. In a similar fashion I wrote to David Cameron some time ago on following his triumphant statement: “Police targets: smashed”. At the time I was very puzzled by this because as a serving ‘Frontline’ police officer I can attest to the fact that now, more than ever, targets and bureaucracy are a weightier burden upon thinly stretched police more than ever before. With this in mind I wrote to Mr Cameron and asked him for clarification. Had been misinformed by civil servants, was he simply ignorant as to the reality, or of greater concern, was he simply telling the public that which he thought they wanted to hear? Unfortunately I never did get to the bottom of this matter as Mr Cameron obviously did not think my comments worthy of a reply. In fact I did not even receive an acknowledgment.

Similarly, I have now written to my local MP on three separate occasions asking for him to state his position on a Royal Commission on Policing and whether he supports the cuts to policing. He has not replied nor has he even acknowledged my letters.

Mrs May I suspect that were I to write to you, my letter would also go unanswered. You do not need any officer to tell you that bureaucracy is endemic in our organisation and strangles the small number of officers available to answer calls from the public. If I arrest someone for a minor offence, perhaps you can explain to the public why it will take me on average, and seldom less than, 4 or 5 hours to process this prisoner before I can get back out onto the street? Would the public be surprised to learn that if at the beginning of my shift if I make an arrest, then I will, more often than not, be off the street for the rest of my shift? I believe most people would be shocked. I certainly was when as a young probationer I discovered how much time was wasted in completing pointless paperwork for minor matters.

I will however not waste my time in sending you this email, as it will not be read by you, simply deleted by one of your staff. Instead I will post it on Inspector Gadget’s blog where I am assured it will be read..

Home Secretary, I firmly believe that neither you, nor anyone else in your Government, hold any interest in reducing police bureaucracy. Your interest in the police starts and finishes with finance. Neither I nor any one of my colleagues on here believes you would lift so much as a finger to do reduce bureaucracy and your words are nothing more than yet another empty soundbites we’ve all heard before.

Sincerely,

another angry Rozzer

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