21st Century Policing

What is it with the police?

Ian Tomlinson, a homeless newspaper salesman, was pushed to the ground by a police officer and an inquest jury ruled he had been 'unlawfully killed' and that the police officer used 'excessive and unreasonable force' which led to his death.

The Gwent Police attack the car of a 73 year old with boots and batons, so severely that they cause £9800 worth of damage, for nothing more than a minor traffic infringement.
Read it HERE

They are viewed by a large part of the population as the enemy rather than the protector of the public.

They present, and seem to relish, in presenting a frightening appearance, clad more like para-militarists than bobbies.

Now Chorley police attack a blind 62 year old man with a Taser, a 50,000 volt electric stun gun, for carrying a white stick which they thought was a Samurai sword!
I don't know which is worse, the fact that they attacked an innocent man, or that they can't tell the difference between a white stick and a sword.
See if you can differentiate between them

(the sword is on the right).

I wonder how much longer 'policing by consent' can survive in such circumstances, and while this seems to be the vision of 21st Century policing.

Tough but Unintelligible

So hug-a-hoodie  'Call me Dave'  Cameron in a major law and order speech says he wants a tough but intelligent approach to law and order, whatever that means.
What seems certain is that he will not countenance the provision of more prison places but will continue Ken Clarke's mantra of 'Community Punishments'.
He sugars this particular pill by saying that in future all 'community punishments' will contain an element of.........punishment!
Well I never, don't they now then?
Obviously not!

He also seemed to suggest that outside groups would be involved in the provision of non-custodial sentences, with 'payment by results'.
Given that over half of those sentenced to 'community punishments' go on to re-offend within twelve months it would take a brave organisation to take on a task which history tells us is doomed to failure.

A definition of insanity is continuing to repeat the same failed course of action in the hope of a different outcome next time, a good definition of 'community punishments'!

Trafalgar Day

Today is Trafalgar Day, the celebration of the victory won by the Royal Navy, commanded by Vice-Admiral Horatio Nelson over the combined French and Spanish fleets at the Battle of Trafalgar, 21 October 1805

Legal Aid and Duty Solicitors, or the Law of Unintended Consequences.

Traffic court yesterday revealed an interesting aside to the Governments restrictions on legal aid, particularly the duty solicitor scheme which operates in all courts. For the uninitiated, duty solicitors provide free legal advice and representation to un-represented defendants in court, although their free help and advice only extends, in most cases, to those facing an allegation which upon conviction carries imprisonment.

Thus, those facing allegations of driving without insurance, or licence, speeding and other such offences, must either employ a solicitor of their own or represent themselves, which is what most choose to do.

A number of cases came before the court yesterday which illustrated the difficulty caused by un-represented defendants.

One was charged with 'no insurance', despite having an insurance certificate which clearly showed he was insured, to drive a third-parties car not belonging to him, and a police report from the Motor Insurer’s Bureau saying he was insured, but not to drive a third party's car!

This case had to be adjourned for further enquiries to be made as we could not be confidant enough of guilt to convict.

Another was a defendant accused of driving without a licence, despite producing a full clean licence to the court. In this case it was reported that the DVLA had rescinded (wrongly as it turned out) her licence, a quick check with the DVLA revealed that after being stopped by the police, and a DVLA check having been carried out, the DVLA, realising their mistake, had promptly re-instated her licence, at no time informing the luckless driver what they had done.

The CPS took the wise decision to offer no further evidence and the case was dismissed.

Another unfortunate driver, having been stopped by the police and given a 'producer', to produce his document within five days at a police station, was charged with having no insurance, no licence, no MOT and failing to produce his documents as required.

In court he not only produced documents showing he had a full clean driving licence, comprehensive insurance and an up-to-date MOT certificate, he also had a receipt from his local police station showing all these documents had been produced within the required timescale, and that they were all in order.

Again, an embarrassed CPS solicitor was forced to offer no evidence and invite us to dismiss the charges.

None of the above, and a raft of similar 'cock-ups' were the fault of the CPS, who can only work with the information given them, but each case took upwards of half an hour to resolve, given the difficulties a court always faces when dealing with un-represented defendants who know nothing of court procedures, and often little about road traffic law and regulations.

Had these defendants been able to call upon the Duty Solicitor it is likely that none would have taken more than a few minutes to resolve, and may not even have got into court. Instead, for those three cases alone, one and a half hours of court time, three magistrates, a court clerk, an usher and a Crown Prosecutor were engaged in fruitless activity while 'genuine' cases went by-the-by.

I can't begin to guess what the cost of all this was, but I'll bet my pension it far exceeds what twenty minutes of a duty solicitor's cost would be.

The law of unintended consequences strikes again.

Rooting Out Evil

There's a disturbing report in today's 'Mail Online'

read it here

regarding South Yorkshire Police, as if they haven't adequately blotted their copybook by a 23 year long cover-up of their deceit regarding the Hillsborough tragedy.

Documents released yesterday reveal that South Yorkshire Police turned a blind eye to allegations of the sexual abuse of white girls by gangs of Pakistani men for more than a decade.
It would seem that a string of warnings going back to 2000 were ignored by the authorities and in some cases police action was taken against the victims rather than the perpetrators, such as the 13-year-old girl, arrested for a public order offence after being found drunk at 3am in a derelict house with a ‘large group of adult males’ who had plied her with vodka and who the police allowed to just walk away.

In 2002, Home Office-funded research criticised officers for treating young victims as ‘deviant and promiscuous’ while ‘the men they were found with were never questioned or investigated’.

Research, reports and case files also reveal that Rotherham Council was desperate to cover up any racial link to the abuse of young girls. Revealing their fears, and their desperation to cover up the racial element of the abuse, a 2010 report from the Rotherham Safeguarding Children Board (?) said the crimes had ‘cultural characteristics ... which are locally sensitive in terms of diversity’, but warned of ‘sensitivities of ethnicity with potential to endanger the harmony of community relationships’.

As clear an indication of their political correctness and double-think as you could wish for.

This same Council even went so far down the road of denial that they offered a vulnerable white girl who was sexually abused by an Asian gang lessons in Urdu and Punjabi after her ordeal.

It's a disgrace, a profound miscarriage of justice and a gross disservice to the whole South Yorkshire community, be it Christian, Muslim, black, white or any other socio-racial grouping to sweep under the carpet something that has become all too apparent in Manchester, Bradford and elsewhere - that Asian men, unable to have extra-marital sex with girls of their own race, who's virtue is considered sacrosanct, seek out white girls, abuse them with drink or drugs, and use them for sexual gratification.
It isn't pleasant, it does no part of the Muslim community credit, but pretending, as Rotherham Council and South Yorkshire Police seem to do, that it just isn't happening, is not the way forward.

I quote Denis MacShane, MP for Rotherham, who said:
‘There’s a culture here of denial and cover-up and a refusal to accept the reality that we have men living in the Rotherham community who treat young girls as objects for their sexual pleasure. It’s time to tell the truth. We must root out this evil.’

Battle of Britain Day

"Never in the field of human conflict, was so much owed, by so many, to so few"

Winston S Churchill

Double Think on Freedom of Speech

Looking through one of my favourite blogs ‘The Diary of a Legal Eagle’ (and one wonders why lawyers are not precluded from blogging, as Magistrates are?) I came across an interesting bit of double-think.

In the 2012 case of Chambers v DPP (a case brought under s.127 of the Communications Act 2003), the Lord Chief Justice no less said in judgement for the plaintiff

"The 2003 Act did not create some newly minted interference with the first of President Roosevelt’s essential freedoms – freedom of speech and expression. Satirical, or iconoclastic, or rude comment, the expression of unpopular or unfashionable opinion about serious or trivial matters, banter or humour, even if distasteful to some or painful to those subjected to it should and no doubt will continue at their customary level, quite undiminished by this legislation."

A pity the Senior Presiding Judge, and the Chairman of Council of the Magistrates’ Association, didn’t have those words in mind when formulating their recent ban on Magistrates blogging.

As to the question I asked at the top of this post, it would seem that barristers, officers of the High Court, can publish blogs highly critical of certain decisions in the Magistrates’ Courts, going so far as to name the particular benches, a move quite likely to, in the SPJ’s words “damage public confidence in their own impartiality or in the judiciary in general”. 

They, the lawyers, can make such comments without risk of censure, is that because judges such as the Senior Presiding Judge are ex-barristers themselves, that all lawyers must stick together but Lay Magistrates are just ignorant little people to be controlled.

Surely not, for that would be an exhibition of extreme prejudice, and quite unthinkable.