A really shocking indictment of our police force

This comes from the New Statesman but for once I have to admit with that hoary old leftie periodical. In fact, I am rather surprised they did publish this, as the subject of the piece is more likely to crop up in the Spectator or, especially, Standpoint: the outrageous truth that most of our police force ignore such matters as forced marriage and "honour" based violence, despite taking the first step towards making it a bureaucratically acknowledged crime, creating an acronym, HBV.

The article, The majority of of police forces' failure to tackle honour-based violence is punishing victims, as clumsy a title as I have ever seen, was sent to me by Detective Sergeant Pal Singh, a good friend of mine, who is mentioned and quoted in the text.

Detective Sergeant Pal Singh has worked on some of the most high-profile “honour” killings in Britain to date, gaining a Metropolitan Police Service award for “Outstanding Individual Contribution to Victim Care” during HBV investigations. He is one of only a handful of people that I believe are truly able to understand the challenges we face and provide the real, practical solutions needed to tackle “honour” crime in all its forms. After spending many years bearing witness to the fatal consequences of inappropriate police responses to HBV, Singh has some important ideas on how to tackle the issue, which have yet to be acted upon.

He suggests that, to begin with, a specialist HBV unit covering the whole of London should be set up as a priority, which makes sense given that most recorded incidents take place there. Other high-risk areas include the West Midlands, West Yorkshire, Lancashire and Manchester. Underreporting of “honour” crime is not based on speculation, it is a reality deduced through analysis of poor and inappropriate recording of crime data.

We have heard of too many cases of women denied justice when they go to the police, being sent back to meet more violence and even murder; we know it is happening but we refuse to deal with it because we refuse to acknowledge that certain ideas are superior to others and refuse to accept the basic fact that the law of the land should be the same for all. That means the most important entity is the individual not some community, based on religion or so-called culture.

Read the whole article. It is worth it.

And speaking of Pal Singh, here is one case in which he and his colleagues managed to achieve the result they wanted: the saved the woman from an abusive husband and family as well as putting him in gaol, though possibly the sentence was not quite long enough. That, as we know, is not the province of the police so, possibly, other institutions need to start thinking about the problem as well.

Good to know that crime has been solved by a number of UK police forces

How else can one explain this story?

Several British police forces have questioned newsagents in an attempt to monitor sales of a special edition of Charlie Hebdo magazine following the Paris attacks, the Guardian has learned.

Officers in Wiltshire, Wales and Cheshire have approached retailers of the magazine, it has emerged, as concerns grew about why police were attempting to trace UK-based readers of the French satirical magazine.

There is, one must assume, no crime of any description in Wiltshire, Wales or Cheshire and the police forces are so bored that they are going around asking impertinent and ridiculous questions about who has bought and even read the special issue of a French satirical magazine.

There is, of course, another explanation and that is that the police forces of the two counties and of Wales consider that behaviour to be criminal and something that needs to be investigated and, possibly, punished.

The police forces explained it all rather differently, producing that old bromide about the need to keep community tensions down. Or something. Not, surely not, a need to control what people read.

A Dyfed-Powys police spokeswoman declined to say why officers sought the names of Charlie Hebdo readers but said: “Following the recent terrorism incidents, Dyfed Powys police have been undertaking an assessment of community tensions across the force area.

“Visits were made to newsagents who were maybe distributing the Charlie Hebdo magazine to encourage the newsagent owners to be vigilant. We can confirm the visits were only made to enhance public safety and to provide community reassurance.”

In Warrington, Cheshire, a police officer telephoned a newsagent that had ordered one issue of the magazine for a customer, who asked to remain anonymous. She said: “My husband ordered a copy of the special edition of Charlie Hebdo from our local newsagent in North Cheshire.

“Several days later the latter had a phone call from the police, saying they’d been told that he had been selling and advertising Charlie Hebdo in his shop. He replied that this was untrue: he had supplied in total one copy, concealed, to a customer who was a French lecturer. I find the police action quite disturbing.”

DCI Paul Taylor, of Cheshire constabulary, said he was not aware of any officer contacting newsagents by telephone but added: “We were aware of the potential for heightened tensions following the attacks in Paris. Therefore where it was felt appropriate officers visited newsagents to provide reassurance advice around the time of its publication.”

In a later statement, a Cheshire police spokeswoman said: “Officers were asked to call into local newsagents in their area to provide visible reassurance around the time of publication and were not asked under any circumstances to make inquiries as to who was purchasing or preordering the Charlie Hebdo magazine. Each area endeavoured to visit as many newsagents as possible however we cannot provide an exact figure.”

Remember that the next time any of the police forces mentioned here complain about lack of resources.

Where does the money go?

Taking time out of the two big stories: Russia where they do not believe politicians and Britain's obsessive need to do so, I have returned to a question I have often asked myself and anyone who did not manage to move out of my vicinity fast enough: just where does the money go? Britain is a fairly rich country and the people in it are, on the whole, well off. Yet there is never any money for what matters.

Businesses are not expanding, not hiring, not investing; charities are short of funds; arts and think-tanks cannot raise enough and don't even ask about research institutions. When asked, we all blame the amount we hand over in taxes here and there yet our public services, whether it be education, transport, police or anything else you care to name, are among the worst in the Western world. So where does the money go?

Here are two stories to be pondered over.

One comes from the Daily Wail but is backed by others, such as the Independent and the Telegraph; even the Grauniad who was responsible for the story in the first place is getting a little tetchy. It seems that Glenn Mulcaire, who was actually arrested in connection with the phone hacking enquiry, could not have been party to the biggest scandal of all, the deletion of Milly Dowler's messages, action that had given the family false hope.

Surrey police is, according to the story in the Indy, desperately looking for yet another NoW journalist who might have been responsible. Or, perhaps not. As the Daily Wail says:

Scotland Yard yesterday said it has absolutely ‘no evidence’ that News of the World journalists deleted Milly Dowler’s voicemail messages.

The police force’s barrister made a dramatic intervention at the Leveson inquiry into press standards.

Neil Garnham QC said the ‘most likely explanation’ for the disappearance of the messages is that they automatically ‘dropped off’ the network after 72 hours.

It seems that the police may have wanted to tell the family this but were not allowed to do so by the family lawyer. Perhaps.

What does seem to be the case is that this huge enquiry, investigation and scandal may have been started on largely false pretences (most of the rest of the "evidence" remains unsupported tales by celebs looking for publicity) and has resulted in the closing down of a newspaper (no, I never read it but that is not the point), the loss of 400 or so jobs and a threat of strict control over the media. Not to mention what looks like a wrongful arrest. Behind it all looms the question that one cannot help asking: given the loud complaints about the police not paying enough attention to crime, not solving more than a tiny proportion, not being able to control looters in the street, why exactly do they spend so much time, money and energy on cases that involve celebrities? (Or travelling to Barcelona to enquire into vague rumours to do with the McCann story?)

Story number two, in the Evening Standard, comes from my neck of the woods, the Borough of Hammersmith of Fulham, whose council, as it happens, is one of the more efficient ones in the country, the White City estate and the Westfield shopping centre, which has been a huge commercial and social success.

Stephen Greenhalgh, who has led Hammersmith and Fulham council for five years and is close to Boris Johnson, wants to help channel Whitehall and local authority funds to the White City Estate in Shepherd's Bush.

He said: "White City has been a huge disappointment over a long period of time in terms of money that has been spent. For example, Westfield opened in the area with 8,000 new jobs and very few of them went locally.

"Nearly £70 million of taxpayers' funds - or £17,000 per household - is spent in this area every year. Despite this, unemployment is twice the borough average, the area has high levels of overcrowding, relatively low educational attainment and relatively high levels of crime." Commentators said the move could lead to similar projects being set up around London.

I recall that when Westfield opened they announced their commitment to local jobs. I also recall that when the snow came most of the shops had to close because the staff could not get in, which would indicate that by then the jobs were not local or that the local talent could not be bothered to walk down the road to the place.

Nevertheless, this is a pertinent question. Just exactly why have only a few of the Westfield jobs gone locally in a high unemployment area? And, even more to the point: what on earth does the £70 million a year go? If Stephen Greenhalgh can find that out he is a better man than most. I await his report with interest. He will report, will he not?

Not Sir Hugh Orde

By and large, given his past record and the fact that he has been in charge of the lamentable ACPO, it is good to know that once again the prize of Commissioner of Metropolitan Police has evaded Sir Hugh Orde's grasp.

The winner is Bernard Hogan-Howe, former Chief Constable of Merseyside. At present I know of no ill about him but have no doubt some readers will send me some. I shall ferret round as well.

No there is no looting, I mean rioting here

It is a little surprising, given that this is West London, the hub of gang culture, that there are constant fights and arrests here (though there has not been a murder in my street for three years so, clearly, things are changing) and Westfield shopping centre is just down the road, that the lootings riots motivated by hatred of the establishment especially the oppressive police have not spread here. Perhaps, the Somali gangs are too busy murdering each other and running illegal shisha cafes and the other gangs are still so backward in their political education as to think that they would prefer to choose the highly expensive clothes they buy rather than grab the first thing that they can, even if that means paying.

From the above paragraph readers might surmise that I am not impressed by the highly politicized explanations given by some analysts most of whom, curiously enough, do not live in London and have no real understanding of the different areas and what happens in them. Parts of Tottenham experience serious trouble every week-end and often on week days as well. The gangs are very real, indeed, and have little to do with alienation experienced by people who have nobody to vote for. If these people or their "community leaders" think that the police are not on their side, they are, we all hope, absolutely right. It is not the job of the police to be on the side of violent gangs who terrorize local shopkeepers, mug passers by on the streets, sell drugs (well, OK, I do think the drug laws should be changed but the police works in the legal environment that is created by others) and, when all else fails, have violent fights with each other.

The real problem, as expressed by many of the inhabitants of Tottenham, Enfield and other places, is that the police is insufficiently on the side of the law-abiding inhabitants. There are many reasons for this and the infamous Macpherson Report had much to answer for. The police were no longer on the side of the law-abiding members of ethnic minorities but on the side of the criminals from those communities. A discussion of all the other problems would take at least one long posting and today I want to stick to what is happening now.

I would, however, like to describe a scene I witnessed near here some weeks ago. There are many small supermarkets on Uxbridge Road, Shepherds Bush Green, Goldhawk Road and all around them. Most of them have boxes with fruit and vegetables outside. A tall and strong-looking young black lad went past one of these shops, picked up an orange and started eating it. A young member of the Asian shopkeeping family (no, I have no idea whether they are Muslim or Hindu and it is of little significance) remonstrated and got a volley of abuse back, the chief of which was the young lad with the orange demanding that some respect be shown to him. He was being "dissed" when asked to pay for the fruit he was consuming. It was not clear to me whether he was asserting that he was going to pay in the fullness of time or not. One of the older shopkeepers came out, broke up the fight, shooed his young relative back into the store and let the lad go with his orange and whatever else he picked up on the way. He then told the young relative off. It was clear to me what was happening: the shopkeepers wanted no trouble with the disrespected lad and his friends and thought that the loss of some fruit was a price worth paying. Clearly they did not think of calling the police. Notoriously, the police do not even list shoplifting when compiling their crime statistics.

This small episode is being echoed in the complaints of the people of Tottenham right now. Far from complaining about police brutality, they would like to know why the police had not been prepared for the looting and arson anti-establishment rioting and were not out in force protecting people and their property.

As these riots have spread, certain things have become obvious. There are no geographic or any other kind of links. Simply in several areas of London where there are already gangs in place, some of the smarter organizers decide to target shopping areas and bring their mates together via cell phones, twitter and whatever other expensive communication network is available to them. These are not the "wretched of the earth". The police are thinly spread and are somewhat hampered by the knowledge that if they do use a certain amount of force, there will be uproar on every side of the political divide about "police brutality". The same people who are calling for tougher action now will be screaming in horror if there are pictures of police going in with batons or deciding to adopt the Continental method of water canons.

It is, of course, about time we worked out what the police are for and what do we want them to do. Possibly the events of this week-end will open up that discussion but I am not holding my breath. And while we are on the subject, is it not about time we started worrying just a bit about the very large underclass of all colours, races, religions and ethnic groupings that we have in this country?

ADDENDUM: I have found an interesting blog that is following events closely.