Rogue coppers and this sinister abuse of power

LadIES and gentlemen, it is with great regret that I must announce that this year’s Mind How you Go awards ceremony has been cancelled. For many years, this annual celebration of police stupidity, incompetence and overkill has been one of the highlights of the Christmas calendar.

But while there have been many outstanding entries in 2017, the judges felt that given recent events it would be — to use the buzzword de nos jours — ‘inappropriate’ to make light of some of the constabulary’s more absurd excesses for the purposes of entertainment.

The decision was taken late on Wednesday evening after a week in which the actions of a small number of officers, both serving and retired, has shaken faith in the police to its very foundations.

First, it was revealed that two young men only narrowly escaped being wrongly convicted of rape because evidence which would have proven their innocence had been withheld from their defence lawyers.

In swift succession, Theresa May’s deputy, damian Green, was forced to resign from the Government because confidential information gathered in the course of a criminal investigation a decade ago was deliberately made public in a blatant attempt to discredit him and ruin his career.

That one of these rogue ex-coppers was a former head of the anti-terrorist squad, once tipped to be Commissioner of the Met, only makes this outrageous abuse of power all the more shocking. as I wrote a few weeks ago: if the deputy Prime Minister isn’t safe, what chance have the rest of us got?

Not that I’m defending Green. Never met the man, to the best of my knowledge. He’s in a dirty business. He knew the rules, or at least thought he did. In this Twitter-fuelled age of Hysteria, the rules seem to change every five minutes.

I can’t be bothered to go into all the gory details, which have been well documented elsewhere. as sex scandals go, we’re not exactly talking Profumo here.

But Green was at least entitled to expect a stringent level of propriety and confidentiality from the police — even if they did find porn on his computer — not only as an elected politician, but as a citizen innocent of any crime.

I can’t improve on what this paper said so succinctly yesterday: ‘They should not have raided his Commons office in 2008 — and it was a damnable and vengeful abuse of their authority to make public the lawful but embarrassing material they found.’

Sadly, this is precisely the kind of sinister behaviour some of us have come to expect from the police, especially the more ambitious upper echelons.

Between 1997 and 2010, the police were politicised to the point that they effectively became the paramilitary wing of New labour.

Bob Quick, the ex-Scotland yard assistant commissioner at the centre of the damian Green affair, who led the 2008 operation, was one of those considered too close to the then labour Home Secretary ‘Jackboots’ Jacqui Smith.

Green’s alleged ‘ crime’ was to have leaked some official figures exposing labour’s shambolic immigration policy.

He was treated by Quick like a dangerous criminal, held for nine hours, fingerprinted and forced to give his DNA, accused of the catchall offence of conspiring to commit misconduct in public office.

The case against him was eventually dropped.

When the raid backfired, amid a storm of protest, it was to prove the start of Quick’s undoing.

He should have foreseen that the Tories would seek their revenge. In the fallout, Quick’s career crashed and burned and he appears to have been harbouring a grudge ever since.

Now he’s finally got even, but only by dragging down still further the reputation of the police.

Similarly, the failure of detectives to hand over exculpatory evidence which would have demonstrated beyond a reasonable doubt the innocence of those two young men falsely accused of rape is symptomatic of a much wider and more worrying malaise.

The police appear no longer to see themselves as citizens in uniform, as independent upholders of the law. Increasingly, they behave as mere tools of vested political interests.

The hapless detective constable who now finds himself removed from active duty for sitting on rape case evidence was undoubtedly — even if subconsciously — only acting under pressure from the Crown Prosecution Service, which is on a ideologically motivated crusade to secure more guilty rape verdicts.

Nowadays, the police are more concerned with social engineering and enforcing fashionable doctrine than actually solving and preventing everyday crime.

Chief constables behave like politicians, constantly complaining about the ‘cuts’ and withdrawing officers from the front line to prove their point.

I’ve been leafing through some of this year’s Mind How you Go entries. Viewed from one perspective, they’re isolated pieces of madness. But viewed from another, they’re part and parcel of everything which has gone wrong with policing in Britain over the past couple of decades.

Take, as a random example, devon and Cornwall, where it was revealed that often there are no officers available to answer 999 calls from the force’s 523,000 residents — because they are all attached to specialist units.

Patrolling the streets and responding to emergencies are given low priority. yet in the same week this news emerged, devon and Cornwall announced a crackdown on ‘ hate crime’, to which they were devoting considerable manpower and money. Police officers these days spend more time scouring the internet for ‘inappropriate’ comments than walking the beat.

Elsewhere, avon and Somerset disbanded its burglary squad, after managing to solve just 10 per cent of 70,522 break-ins reported and failing to recover £40 million worth of stolen property.

Burglary victims were no doubt relieved to learn that avon and Somerset subsequently announced a bold new initiative to crack down on ‘gender- based hate crime’, which it claims has increased by 41 per cent.

In the name of tackling hate crime, Sussex police sent an armed unit to arrest a man singing the Jimi Hendrix song Hey Joe — because it contains the line: ‘I’m going down to shoot my old lady.’ He was locked up for seven hours, accused of making death threats.

It was the most ridiculous arrest since a singer on the Isle of Wight was accused of race hate against the Chinese for performing Kung Fu Fighting.

In West Wales, police launched an investigation into four men who blacked up as members of the Jamaican bobsleigh team, from the film Cool Runnings, for a carnival parade in aberaeron.

In Cambridgeshire, they scrambled a helicopter after a soppy WPC took exception to a man doing an impersonation of Osama Bin laden at a karaoke party.

and, of course, the Old Bill — like the rest of the public sector — is in thrall to the demented ‘trans’ agenda.

dyfed Powys brought in identical uniforms for male and female officers in a bid to become more transgender-friendly.

Sussex police even appointed a ‘trans equality champion’, Sgt Peter allan, who involved himself in a row about what kind of signs Marks & Spencer is allowed to put on the doors of its customer toilets. He followed it up with a campaign aimed at forcing supermarkets to use ‘ gender-neutral’ labelling on feminine hygiene products.

Add to that the clowns who painted their fingernails, put on animal masks and wore stiletto heels in stunts designed to ‘raise awareness’ of an assortment of trendy causes.

What the hell has any of that got to do with the police? and that’s before we get to the millions wasted chasing the ghost of Grocer Heath and other dead Paedos in High Places. Suddenly, it’s not quite so funny any more.

One of the reasons there’s no Mind How you Go awards this year is that I’d rather honour the tens of thousands of decent coppers doing their best to keep us safe, not just over the holiday period but every single day of the week.

In particular, we should remember PC Keith Palmer, the unarmed police officer who was stabbed to death fending off a crazed jihadist attacker attempting to enter the Houses of Parliament, after mowing down pedestrians on Westminster Bridge.

To all of these brave boys and girls in blue, and to all of you, I wish a very Merry Christmas. Normal service will be resumed next week.

Until then, Mind How you Go.

The Old Bill are more interested in social engineering than solving crime