The original post can be found http://old-plod-of-plympton.blogspot.com/2010/09/christmas-for-criminals.html

The original post can be found http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TheThinBlueLine/~3/BsI78PuLn5c/christmas-for-criminals-impassioned.html

So the Pope  comes to the UK next week & ACPO are saying the visit will cost the UK police £1million to £1.5million. I think that’s probably quite cheap or a huge understimate. It must have cost much more than that when the last Pope visited, judging by the amount of police officers drafted in from all over the country who had to travel to Coventry & be accomodated for 2 days.

I’m not a Catholic but I have no problem with him visiting the UK & somebody has to foot the bill, but since he is not a guest of Strathclyde, Lothian & Borders, West Mids or the Met police I think the government ought to cough up the cash. It will probably come out of the force budgets & they’ll have to sack even more staff to cover the cost.

I won’t be seeing the Pope this time, I’ve already seen him, twice. Well, to be fair I’ve seen two Popes, once each.

Back in 2006, almost to the week, I posted my name-dropping Pope story, when I met the Pope in 1982. Then I managed to have an audience with his Eminence in St Peter’s Square at the Vatican earlier this year. Well, me & a few thousand other people. It was quite a special moment even for a heathen such as myself. I have another Pope-related story but I might save that until next week.

In the meantime, I was pleased to see that the England Cricket team beat Pakistan by an innings & 3 wickets next Sunday.

The original post can be found http://200weeks.police999.com/archives/3312

Right then here is an update as to how today (09/09/10) went.

We started the day at 0500 hours.  Officers from the local neighbourhood policing team were briefed in relation to 2 addresses where we had credible intelligence suggesting that we would find controlled substances.  About 0615 hours the first address was entered and cannabis cultivation was found – The lone male occupant was arrested and taken to the Police Station

The first door goes in - The occupant is arrested

A short time later officers hit the second address and although drug taking paraphernalia is discovered no arrest is made on this occasion.

We then receive information that a well-known local criminal is linked to a local house burglary – It doesn’t take long until he is also in custody.  I am delighted to say that he has been charged and remanded into custody.

It’s now nearing 0900 hours and I’m preparing for the second briefing.  This time upward of 50 attend the briefing from the Police and local partners including community volunteers

Police and Partners gather for the 9am brief

A verity of activities take place over the next few hours including volunteer ran community speed watch.

A Community Speedwatch Volunteer Deployed

A street briefing takes place across Willenhall precinct.  The aim of this is to consult with the local community and ensure that local priorities are set by the public.  Hundreds of people were consulted with in the street and on the doorstep. Here are a few photos.

The Street Briefing Briefing! - Everyone listens carefully

The Street Briefing Team at Willenhall Precinct

A local gent stop to give me feedback on my team - positive I must point out!

Partnerships Officer Pete Sturgeon get consulting on the door step

Coventry City Council dedicated their bus for street consultation

Plenty more activities went on and if it were not for the fact that most was captured on Video I would write on.  However they say a picture paints a thousand words.  So check this story in a couple of days and there will be a YouTube film, about 5 minutes, which will take you from the early enforcement action, the speed watch, street briefing and even local offender management.

Alastair

If you need to report a crime, call 999 in an emergency or 0345 113 5000 for non-emergencies. Alternatively, you can contact your neighbourhood policing team by visitingwww.west-midlands.police.uk/np/coventry/

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The original post can be found http://alastairorencas.wordpress.com/2010/09/09/drugs-burglars-speeding-consultation-all-in-a-days-work/

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The original post can be found http://allcoppedout.wordpress.com/2010/09/09/questions-on-changing-policing/

What is it with feet?

They’ve always played quite a big part in my life, literally, size 13s don’t go unnoticed & not to mention the troubles I’ve had in my life finding shoes & trainers. My daughter has followed in her father’s footsteps, unluckily for her she has size 10s & she’s not yet finished growing.

Feet seem to be playing a large part in some others’ lives recently, what with one washed up on the Lincolnshire coast a few weeks ago. Humberside Police are still trying to find the loser. As if one foot washed ashore isn’t enough, another one appeared this week, only 20 miles from the first but the really wierd thing is that Humberside Police are saying that the two feet don’t appear to be linked, presumably they’e not from the same loser which begs the question as to why are people in the Humberside area losing their feet?

I did a little digging and the loss of a foot or two doesn’t seem to be that uncommon. Only this week two legs, two arms & a torso were found inside shark caught by fishermen in the Bahamas.

This is nothing compared to Washington State in American where, on Friday, another foot was found washed up on the shore, making a total of nine feet in the last three years.

There seem to be some careless people about.

The original post can be found http://200weeks.police999.com/archives/3309

The original post can be found http://hogday-afternoon.blogspot.com/2010/09/blitz-on-britain.html

An update on one of my previous stories from August where police officers from Greater Manchester were forced to watch offenders ride off into the sunset on 3 stolen motorcycles because of  a policy not to pursue motorcyclists incase they fall off & hurt themselves; the thieves were not wearing helmets or safety equipment.

24-year-old Bobby Carl Hodgkins was later arrested on suspicion of being involved in the theft of the motorcycles. He was bailed to appear back at the police station on September 10th.

In a classic case of what goes around comes around Hodgkins was killed this week when a Kawasaki 450 he was riding collided with a van in Wythenshawe. The bike had been stolen during a similar raid on  premises to the one he was on bail for on 26th August in Audenshaw. Hodgkins was not wearing a helmet, again, and died of head injuries, well there’s a thing.

The original post can be found http://200weeks.police999.com/archives/3305

And now for something completely different……… some context.

There is so much I want to say about the incident in Wiltshire, and looking at the over 400 comments on the last post, there is a lot everyone wants to say. This is my view, and I know it will upset the ‘tin foil hat’ ‘all coppers are un-reconstructed brutes’ brigade.

The public, most journalists and a significant number of our own desk-bound colleagues have absolutely no idea of the endless shit we take in custody areas these days. Why should they? It’s not their fault.

Take the Inspector Gadget ‘Could I Survive In Custody’ Test

Get two adult friends to stand either side of you, and another to the front. Make sure they are no more than 3 inches from your ears and face. Get them to start shouting as loud as they can, simultaneously for ten minutes. To make it real, they can spit in your face, endlessly repeat the same thing over and over again and scream, rant and rave. They don’t stop, no matter what you say. That’s the test. They simply will not stop.

Take this test in your hallway,  invite some neighbours around to repeatedly bang on your letter box, over and over and over and over, whilst shouting abuse and leaning on your front door bell. You’d have have to do the test somewhere between 8pm and 3am after you got up at 6am to come to work. Oh, and make sure at least two phones ring continuously throughout the whole test.

How long could you last? Dare you try it at home? I bet you don’t.

What that represents is the cumulative effect of working night after night in custody. How much does it take, in that context, to eventually snap and do something you shouldn’t? Probably not much.

The idea that all police officers can be trained in all circumstances not to react to the cumulative effects of abuse like this is simply not good enough. This kind of behaviour is learned by the underclass, and others, at an early age and is designed to get them the attention their damaged lives cannot provide by the usual means. And it works.

I have been a custody Sergeant and I know that a screaming, violent criminal who is about to cause serious damage to officers needs to be thrown unceremoniously into a cell, and I know that a silly, probably drunken non-compliant broken record of a pain in the arse woman needs to be taken in a transport wrist lock and placed in a cell. Even if it is ten times over.

Having said that, ‘there but for the grace of God’ and all that.

The person who eventually cops it may not be truly deserving of being thrown about; but the rest of society who continue to allow, by their silence on the matter, the criminal underclass to physically and mentally abuse just about everyone who comes into contact with them (teachers, police, NHS staff, housing officers, social workers etc) must take some responsibility for the cumulative effects that a failure to challenge this state of affairs has created.

Whether we like it or not, we now live in a society where people expect to be treated fairly. Police officers see day after day that members of the public who beat and abuse them walk out of Court with little or no punishment, yet (with the notable exception of PC Harwood where any ‘intent’ has yet to be proved) when a cop lashes out, he ‘goes down’ for the maximum sentence allowed, or near to it. Funny how all the excuses made by Magistrates and Judges for not imprisoning criminals suddenly go out of the window when it’s one of us in the dock.

Strange; I thought there were no prison places, I thought ‘prison doesn’t work’, I’m sure I heard something about ‘guidelines’. I thought prison was ‘no deterrent’. Blah, blah, blah. They can do it when they want to.

The endlessly patient and scrupulously fair PC Dixon of Dock Green simply did not have to put up with the terminal decline in behaviour and attitude we now see on a daily basis.

In the custody area at Ruraltown nick, I recently had a 17-year-old boy, nearly as big as I am, spit a piece of gum in my face, call me a ‘wanker’ and elbow me hard in the jaw. Why? Because I informed him that he couldn’t have his mobile phone in the cell. Dixon would probably have taken 9 inches of English oak to the boy’s head and thrown him out in the yard all night to think about his  behaviour. Back in the real world here in Ruralshire, he was back in his centrally heated cell eating one of 12 different hot dishes (including vegetarian, kosher, halal and vegan options) from our menu and demanding his third cup of tea with milk (not allowed to offer ‘white or black’ tea) before I could stick the additional charges on the system!

Needless to say, in Court the next day he received no additional penalty to the original public order offence he was arrested for. Some kind of fancy community order (he already has a record for breaching three others) and a curfew he will never keep.

Now please think again about the context in which former British Army veteran Sergeant Mark Andrews ‘lost it’ and wonder; is it all his fault? and how much more is there to come, as liberal Britain slowly swirls, in a clockwise direction, down the white porcelain.

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The original post can be found http://inspectorgadget.wordpress.com/2010/09/07/we-must-all-take-responsibility-for-police-brutality/

The original post can be found http://hogday-afternoon.blogspot.com/2010/09/good-case-for-defence.html