Real Coppering by Real Coppers?

The Celtic Sage is not the only one dismayed at the forces of Law and Order having lost their direction and is seemingly not the only one railing against closed police stations, call centre prioritisation and policing driven by political correctness and central targets. The middle classes have lost confidence in the police, a stark report has warned. They fear they have been alienated by a service which routinely targets ordinary people rather than serious criminals, simply to fill Government crime quotas. The attitude of some officers has also led to spiralling complaints about neglect of duty and rudeness. The report from the Civitas think-tank says incidents which would once have been ignored are now treated as crimes - including a case of children chalking a pavement.

Its author, journalist Harriet Sergeant, says she was also told of a student being arrested, held for five hours and cautioned for keeping a London Underground lift door open with his foot. The report warns that a generation of young people - the police's favourite soft targets - are being criminalised, putting their future prospects at risk. Some offences being prosecuted are now so minor that senior officers have even begun talks with the U.S. authorities to prevent such a "criminal record" stopping decent citizens obtaining a visa to cross the Atlantic.

One member of the public gave a telling comment;

"I live in an area of central London which the police have effectively abandoned, and despite being a high crime area, we have no CCTV on any of our streets and no community police. When I was the victim of crime, the police told me to move house. As if life is that simple. When I have attempted to report crimes they have told me to phone the council or passed the buck in some other way. However, I have a criminal record due to some extremely petty law enforcement which they were very happy to jump on and resulted in a punishment that far exceeded the crime and has limited my whole life from a work and travel perspective."


Harriet Sergeant

Meanwhile responses to crimes such as burglary are slow and statements given by victims of serious crime are often left lying idle for months, the report warns. An apparent emphasis on motoring crimes is another negative factor. Miss Sergeant warns: “The loss of public confidence is a serious matter. The police cannot police without the backing of society. Without trust and consensus it is very difficult and costly to maintain law and order.”

Her report says: “Complaints against the police have risen, with much of the increase coming from law-abiding, middle-class, middle-aged and retired people who no longer feel the police are on their side.” In 2006-7, there were 29,637 complaints - the most since records began 17 years ago.

Miss Sergeant said this was due in part to the law-abiding middle-classes becoming upset by the “rudeness and behaviour” of officers. The report details how officers are expected to reach a certain number of “sanction detections” a month by charging, cautioning or fining an “offender”. Arresting or fining someone for a trifling offence - such as a child stealing a Mars bar - is a good way of hitting the target and pleasing the Home Office. Amazingly, the chocolate theft ranks as highly as catching a killer. They also have to get their quota of “politically correct” crimes such as harassment, racial and domestic violent often pressurising unwilling complainants. Amazingly the Police Service have to report to the Home Office each month on an arcane set of 86 KPI's (Key Performance Indicators). Somebody should tell the jawless wonders in the Home Office that the key part of KPI is "Key"!

Miss Sergeant says performance-related bonuses of between £10,000 and £15,000 a year for police commanders depend partly on reaching such targets. This leads them to put pressure on frontline officers to make arrests for the most minor misdemeanours. Officers said at the end of a month, when there was pressure to hit the target for that period, they would pursue young men as the most likely “offenders”. Offences could include scrawling a name on a bus stop in felt-tip or playing ball games in the street. One officer was so concerned he told his teenage son to be careful at the end of each month.


The pamphlet, parts of which were serialised by the Daily Mail earlier this year, says the police themselves are angry at the way they have to “make fools of themselves”. There were high levels of 'bitterness and frustration' and the targets were 'bitterly resented'. One officer told how he was pressed to charge children playing with a tree with “harassment”. The same offence was used against a drunken student dancing in flowerbeds, who aimed a kick at a flower.

At the cost of £550 per household and rising there are two factors irritating the mugged masses:

1. Coppers chasing targets and looking to fill quotas. This allied with trying to make an impact by running “high visibility” operations which are hugely wasteful of resource but are designed to grab attention and create the appearance of "activity". Result no coppers on the streets, no neighbourhood policing, closed police stations and relying on automated penalising with speed cameras and the like.

2. The Justice Gap. Even when brought to book the retards laugh at the system. They get “community orders” which are laughable and breaches are not followed up, the Probation Service is overworked and can’t follow up as several recent murders and serious crimes have demonstrated, the Prosecution Service (which prioritises on targeting Naomi Campbell!) has 30% of cases failing because of bad paperwork or missing deadlines, fines are not collected from the great unwashed and if they get to Prison they get automatic remission and let out early and the main educational benefit is learn the trade from old lags! Result; there is now very little relationship between Crime and Punishment.

Fair Coppers?

Jan Berry - Blindin' Diamond Geezer?


Jacqui Smith - Right Bad Egg?

Regular Blogistas will know I’m not the current Home Secretary’s biggest fan but even I was driven to sympathise with her on the churlish Section House behaviour she received from the Coppers Protection League otherwise known as the Police Federation. Here was the snide introduction by the outgoing Secretary of the Federation, Jan Berry, who represents those blameless souls, the Constables of the United Kingdom who stay awake at night thinking of nothing else other than our well being and safety:

“At my first conference, I introduced the opportunity to ask questions of the Home Secretary. Although some Home Secretaries have subsequently regretted it – the session has been an important and healthy exchange of views. Home Secretary - I admire your courage. You didn’t have to come here today and I know conference will treat your office with the respect it warrants. I am sure when your Private Secretary reminded you of today’s event you felt like reaching for the nearest stab proof vest - and perhaps slipping into old habits and lighting up to calm your nerves…”

Now this is from the lady who is leader of the Police Federation, the organisation that represents those blameless souls, the rank and file police officers. Perhaps Jan Berry could tell us why it is that, no matter what outrages are committed against members of the public be it dying in police custody whilst officers make monkey noises or some lesser outrage her members are rarely found guilty of anything or disciplined. I would genuinely like to know, I have made no pre judgements, but it certainly raises the possibility that there is one law for the constabulary, and one for everyone else.

It may well be so that the police are overwhelmed by paperwork, although a recent documentary featuring undercover filming of the Leicestershire police force showed junior officers (presumably members of Ms Berry's organisation) wasting their own time, and using paperwork as an excuse to stay in the station rather than going out dealing with incidents. This kind of thing certainly suggests that some police officers think they are a law unto themselves. What is more worrying is that they are confident that the culture of the organisation will protect them. None of this, I am afraid, inspires confidence in the public or politicians. Ms Berry may be too young to remember why the police are deluged by paperwork and general bureaucracy. It stems from the realisation which dawned some thirty to forty years ago that some police officers were routinely corrupt, abused their powers and made up statements and other evidence. Indeed many of these incidents which led to PACE (Police and Criminal Evidence Act) happened to involve Irish Terrorist defendants. The bent coppering which led to PACE had two effects, the innocent were imprisoned whilst the guilty were not and the “intelligence” leads which the police had were useless, making life more dangerous for all of us.

Community Copper

Should Ms Jan Berry or anyone else suggest ways in which these tendencies can be monitored and controlled without resort to massive paperwork and bureaucracy, then they should share their ideas as widely as possible. But it is within living memory that a Lord Justice of Appeal, Lord Denning, openly said it was better to send (Irish) defendants to jail than “open up the appalling vista” that the Police routinely fabricated evidence. Well the appalling vista was well and truly opened up and judging by conviction rates the Police are not coping too well with having to tell the truth.

Consider the appalling background to Crime and Policing in the UK set out by the pressure group “Police Reform” which Jacqui Smith and any Home Secretary would have to deal with;

“Crime is high by international and historical standards. The Government’s claims to have reduced crime are not borne out by reality. Substantially increased spending on the police has not been matched by corresponding reductions in crime, indicating that productivity has fallen and the public have received poor value for money. The fight against crime is a challenge for the whole criminal justice system and for society as a whole. But effective Policing has a vital role to play.”


A Patch - historic photo

“Crime today is almost ten times its level per 100,000 of the population than in 1950. People in England and Wales are the most likely to be victims of crime of any developed country, except only for Australia. The UK is the most burgled country in the European Union, with the highest levels of assault crime. The Government claims that crime measured by the British Crime Survey has fallen, yet the British Crime Survey massively underestimates crime. It covers only half of recorded crime and ignores murder, rape, fraud, crimes against under-16s, commercial crime including shoplifting, and crime where there is no direct victim such as drugs dealing. Estimates suggest the true figure of crime in England and Wales is roughly three times the level indicated by the British Crime Survey. Since 1997-98 total recorded crime has increased from 4.5 million to over 5.5 million crimes a year, an increase of approximately 22 per cent. The Government claims that changes in the way crime is recorded have caused this, but steep increases in crimes such as robbery and violence against the person cannot be explained by changes in the counting rules. Britain now spends more on law and order as a proportion of GDP than any other OECD country, nearly two-thirds of which goes to the police, costing each household in England and Wales £550 a year.”

It is not just that we spend so much on policing but we get so little for it due to the restrictive “Spanish Practices” of the Police Federation, although the Spanish will complain that they have moved on.

Richard Barnbrook BNP London Leader supporting Fair Coppers - 23rd January 2008

As police stations have closed and foot patrol has given way to modern policing methods, the police have become increasingly alienated from the public. The way to rebuild public confidence and tackle crime is to have police officers on the streets. But the reintroduction of community policing has been inadequate. Record numbers of police have not been reflected in officers on the beat, and key Government programmes such as promised Police Community Support Officers and the national non-emergency number have been scaled back.

It's a stressful job, innit?

What Jan Berry’s members have represented is the maintenance of restrictive practices and an inability to embrace change; a change the public clearly demands. Here are some of the restrictive practices the Federation maintains.

1. Rostered rest days; Police have to be given the days they are not working 9 months in advance. If they are then required on any of those days they receive 2 days off in lieu PLUS overtime. Last year the 127,000 police officers in the UK earned half a billon pounds overtime, that’s an average of over £4,000 each. Compare this to the £250 a head they claim they have lost under the staged wage award which was the reason the barracked Jacqui Smith at their conference.

2. Operational Feeding; Judging by the beefy rows of well upholstered police officers facing the Home Secretary at the Conference this policy is conspicuously successful. If they are on an “Op” away from their station “Nick” for over 4 hours they have to be fed a “substantial hot meal”, over 7 hours two hot meals. Of course the time they spend getting to the trough to consume their swill and the time spent consuming their ethnically inclusive “full English” is “operational time” charged to overtime. So at moments of great danger to the Nation TV crews are treated to the inspiring site of the Metropolitan Commissioner walking between long tables of Police Federation members consuming their entitlement. No army rations for Britain’s finest!

A Shout - great for overtime

3. 30 year pension window. Like the armed forces the Police have a hugely generous, publicly funded (that is to say unfunded!), final salary pension. Unlike the armed forces the Police Pension is hard to justify. Of course many don’t hang around to collect it for particular laxity is shown to “medical retirement” where they can retire early on “medical grounds” get their entitlement plus a “gift” of an extra 10 years. I personally know of one 42 year old inspector who had done 20 years (20 + 10 = 30!), took medical retirement for whiplash (sitting in his stationary car in a car park) and is running a security company despite his “reduced” health.

4. Archaic Disciplinary Procedures: At any one time 1 in 15 Police Officers are subject to criminal or disciplinary investigation or proceedings. I’ll give you the number, that’s over 19,000 officers who can’t be deployed effectively because their use is restricted. The proceedings are long winded and arcane and would take a book to outline but suffice to say the police don’t make co-operative subjects and are advised by the Federation to say nothing, agree nothing and sign nothing and contact the Federation’s solicitors for this restrictive cartel will defend it’s members good or bad. Contrast their advice to their members with how they would want the public to co-operate with Police “enquiries.” Even then they can bring any disciplinary enquiry to a shuddering halt merely by resigning. This “right” has been exercised twice up to Chief constable level in the past months (http://daithaic.blogspot.com/search/label/andy%20Hayman )

A Nick - Only one in 8 of those left are 24/7

5. Spend, spend, spend! We can take it as a given that the police are not very good at protecting us for the £550 each household it costs all of us but they are not very good at using the money when they are given it. Police Committee’s are an exercise in non-accountability where they exist and most forces don’t have qualified accountants in charge of their finances, as different criteria must have been used for recruitment in the past. Take the delicious fraud of “Lord Williams” as he styled himself in the Scottish village and estate he bought. He had a Scottish connection alright for he was Assistant Finance Director of Scotland Yard and he purloined £12.6 m from a “secret account” which was maintained to develop (wait for it!) a remote surveillance drone for the police. Or then recently Scotland Yard cancelled 1,450 credit cards which were being abused; I’ll give you the number again that is one third of the total credit cards issued or to put it another way, 5.6% of Metropolitan Police Officers could not account properly for their expenses. Hello! Hello! Hello!

6. I could go on, but one final point. The Police Federation has by agreement, officers working for it full time on the payroll of every force in the country paid for out of police budgets, over 100 police officers at last count. These Police Officers (such as Jan Berry) are, of course, unavailable for policing.Once again I'll give you the number, that's a direct subsidy from Public Funds of over £5 m for the Police Federation.

So I hope Jan Berry enjoyed her swan song and her cheap shots at Jacqui Smith but this should not give her false confidence that the Public are happy to keep paying premium rates for this increasingly slapstick and dated Police Pantomime.

Surveillance Britain

It seems the CCTV chickens have come home to roost in surveillance obsessed Britain as a senior police officer has rubbished the impact of CCTV on crime prevention, a not too minor criticism in a country which is estimated to spend in excess of £1.1 Billon annually on installing and running CCTV systems making the inhabitants of Britain the most observed people in the world, to little practical effect it seems.

Billions of pounds spent on Britain’s 4.2 million closed-circuit television cameras has not had a significant impact on crime, according to the senior police officer piloting a new database. Detective Chief Inspector Mick Neville said it was a “fiasco” that only 3 per cent of street robberies in London were solved using CCTV. Mr Neville, who heads the Visual Images, Identifications and Detections Office (Viido) unit, told the Security Document World Conference that the use of CCTV images as evidence in court has been very poor.

“Billions of pounds have been spent on kit, but no thought has gone into how the police are going to use the images and how they will be used in court,” he told the conference. “It’s been an utter fiasco: only 3 per cent of crimes were solved by CCTV. Why don’t people fear it? [They think] the cameras are not working.”

The aim of the Viido unit is to improve the way that CCTV footage is processed, turning it into a third forensic specialism alongside DNA analysis and fingerprinting. Britain has more CCTV cameras than any other country in Europe. But Mr Neville is reported in The Guardian as saying that more training was needed for officers who often avoided trawling through CCTV images “because it’s hard work”.


Viido had launched a series of initiatives including a new database of images that will be used to track and identify offenders using software developed for the advertising industry. This works by following distinctive brand logos on the clothing of unidentified suspects. By backtracking through images officers have often found earlier pictures of suspects where they have not been hiding their features. Mr Neville said that Viido would be publishing pictures of suspects in mugging, rape and robbery cases on the internet from next month and building a national CCTV database that will hold images of convicted criminals and unidentified suspects.

Richard Thomas, the information commissioner, said: “We would expect adequate safeguards to be put in place to ensure the images are used only for crime detection purposes, stored securely and that access to images is restricted to authorised individuals. We would have concerns if CCTV images of individuals going about their daily lives were retained.”

Fears that the UK would "sleep-walk into a surveillance society" have become a reality, the government's information commissioner has said. As always in Britain with Government projects delivery has been somewhat late but the “Big Brother” Society predicted by George Orwell in 1984 has certainly arrived now in 2008! Richard Thomas, who said he raised concerns two years ago, spoke after research found people's actions were increasingly being monitored. Researchers highlight "dataveillance", the use of credit card, mobile phone and loyalty card information, and CCTV. Monitoring of work rates, travel and telecommunications is also rising.

There are up to 4.2m CCTV cameras in Britain - about one for every 14 people. But surveillance ranges from US security agencies monitoring telecommunications traffic passing through Britain, to key stroke information used to gauge work rates and GPS information tracking company vehicles, the Report on the Surveillance Society says. It predicts that by 2016 shoppers could be scanned as they enter stores, schools could bring in cards allowing parents to monitor what their children eat, and jobs may be refused to applicants who are seen as a health risk.

Produced by a group of academics called the Surveillance Studies Network, the report was presented to the 28th International Data Protection and Privacy Commissioners' Conference in London, hosted by the Information Commissioner's Office. The office is an independent body established to promote access to official data and to protect personal details. The report's co-writer Dr David Murakami-Wood told BBC News that, compared to other industrialised Western states, the UK was "the most surveilled country". "We have more CCTV cameras and we have looser laws on privacy and data protection," he said. "We really do have a society which is premised both on state secrecy and the state not giving up its supposed right to keep information under control while, at the same time, wanting to know as much as it can about us."

The report coincides with the publication by the human rights group Privacy International of figures that suggest Britain is the worst Western democracy at protecting individual privacy. The two worst countries in the 36-nation survey are Malaysia and China, and Britain is one of the bottom five with "endemic surveillance". Mr Thomas called for a debate about the risks if information gathered is wrong or falls into the wrong hands. The Department for Constitutional Affairs (DCA) said there needed to be a balance between sharing information responsibly and respecting the citizen's rights. A spokesman said: "Massive social and technological advances have occurred in the last few decades and will continue in the years to come. "We must rise to the challenges and seize the opportunities it provides for individual citizens and society as a whole."



Graham Gerrard from the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) said there were safeguards against the abuse of surveillance by officers. "The police use of surveillance is probably the most regulated of any group in society," he told the BBC. "Richard Thomas was particularly concerned about unseen, uncontrolled or excessive surveillance. Well, any of the police surveillance that is unseen is in fact controlled and has to be proportionate otherwise it would never get authorised”

Some of the myriad ways in which we can be watched are;

• 4.2m CCTV cameras
• 300 CCTV appearances a day
• Reg. plate recognition cameras
• Shop RFID tags
• Mobile phone triangulation
• Store loyalty cards
• Credit card transactions
• London Oyster cards
• Satellites
• Electoral roll
• NHS patient records
• Personal video recorders
• Phone-tapping
• Hidden cameras/bugs
• Worker call monitoring
• Worker clocking-in
• Mobile phone cameras
• Internet cookies
• Keystroke programmes

The great problem with surveillance is the contrast between the compulsive behaviour of those promoting and using it and the Public concern that sooner or later it will be abused and it is a poor substitute for on the ground policing by, whisper it, human police. Indeed as the CCTV craze has taken hold in Britain “real” police have largely disappeared from the streets of the UK. Instead you are more likely to see what are deprecatingly called “Plastic PCs”, Police Community Support Officers who don’t have the same training, pay or powers. Even when you do ring the Police your chances are now slim that you’ll actually meet a Police Officer. You will be put through to a centralised call centre where civilian staff will “prioritise” your call. Unless you become a “CAT A”, an emergency blue light response, as the control staff are incentivised to ditch as many calls as possible, your chances of saying "Hello Officer!" are slim. Mobile phone theft? I’ll take your details and give you a reference to claim from your insurance company. Car window broken? Unless you actually saw it happen you can’t assume it is a crime. And my favourite is that the Metropolitan Police don’t respond to burglaries unless the thief is still on the premises!

In fact only 3% of crimes are solved using CCTV and in many cases where it is available it is unusable or unfit for evidence because there are no national standards. Indeed often the Police simply do not have time to go through the amount of material available so it is simply not examined. So as a cynical public and police officers alike have pointed out CCTV may document crime but it rarely seems to prevent it. The public don’t want their mugging to be captured on high quality CCTV, they would much prefer if it didn’t happen in the first place!


The other issue is the widespread abuse of personal data and failure to comply with the Data Protection Act. Every CCTV camera trained on a public place should state in a prominent place on a notice specified in the Act why the images are being recorded, who is responsible and how they are to be contacted. It is little known that you can apply for this Data from the Data Controller of the company concerned as you can for any other data under the Data Protection act (DPA). But the law is widely flouted and the enforcement is totally ineffectual. Take one case of many I could give, the achingly hip St. Martin’s Lane Hotel in the Central London street of the same name, so hip it doesn’t even have a sign and the cheapest room is £230 a night. It describes itself thus;

“From its dazzling location at the hub of Covent Garden, West End theatres and Trafalgar Square, St Martins Lane is a dramatic and daring reinvention of the urban resort. Smart, witty and sophisticated, Philippe Starck’s design is a brilliant collision of influences - from the modern to the baroque - that suffuses the hotel with energy, vitality and magic.”

Well one influence it has little danger of colliding with is the DPA, for it has no less than 8 CCTV cameras trained on the busy public streets around the hotel but not a single notice as required under the DPA. Obviously too “Smart, witty and sophisticated” to comply with the law of the land.

Perhaps given the failure of CCTV to solve crime, the huge waste of resources in surveillance, the lack of control of the increasing much resented surveillance in our lives which is changing the very nature of society and the total failure to ensure effective data controls it is time to roll back “Big Brother” and get the police out of their strategy and liaison meetings and fighting something as boring as crime in real time instead of investing in more toys for the boys?

“It was one of those pictures which are so contrived that the eyes follow you about when you move. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the caption beneath it ran.”

George Orwell. 1984.