There is a way to make our cops safer – but it’s not 50,000-volt Tasers

MY ESTEEMED colleague Richard Littlejohn (we have known each other since we were industrial reporters in the late 1970s) wrote powerfully last Tuesday in the Daily Mail about the simultaneously shocking and rather inspiring case of PC Stuart Outten. This brave officer, thanks to great courage and resolve – and the use of his Taser – recently survived a terrible machete attack by Muhammad Rodwan.

There is no doubt that PC Outten’s Taser saved him from much worse injuries, and possibly from death. Richard, who has in the past mocked abuse of Tasers by police, has now changed his mind and concluded from this that all officers should be armed with these devices.

I’ll come to that. Nobody wants to see police officers wounded or killed if any way can be found to avoid it. But, like many other reports of the episode, Richard’s article missed something very important that also needs to be addressed.

Much helped by the unceasing research work of Ross Grainger, author of the book Attacker Smoked Cannabis, I have for some years been noting the astonishing number of cases where extreme violence is linked with marijuana use.

Generally, the fact is buried. Because of the idiotic, fashionable view of marijuana as soft and harmless or even as some kind of medicine, far too many people don’t or won’t spot it. But there is a pattern. And here it is again. Almost every time I look, I find it. And where I don’t find it, I strongly suspect it is because the police have not bothered to investigate or record it.

Rodwan, who is 56, admitted to smoking marijuana on the day of the attack. He has been doing so for many years. Among his other convictions (including rape and a previous machete attack) was a 2008 admission of marijuana possession. This offence technically carries a prison sentence of five years. But even 12 years ago, he received only a feeble caution. Nowadays he would be wholly let off by most UK police forces.

If, at an early point in his long and sordid career of crime, Rodwan (and others like him) had been given severe and swift deterrent punishment for his drug use, this hideous case would never have happened. Rodwan’s violence was unhinged in its fury and ferocity. Police are trained to handle all kinds of violence, but increasingly this training is not enough.

Those they tangle with are, more and more often, not normal. They are, quite simply, mad. And the evidence grows by the day that it is marijuana that has made them so.

In this case, thank heaven, the Taser worked. And I reluctantly agree with Richard. With these levels of insane, unpredictable violence, it is probably a good idea to make Tasers generally available to police officers, even though this will lead to some abuse and accidental deaths. But, in return for this freedom, as an exact quid pro quo, the police should be compelled by Ministers to enforce the laws against marijuana possession that chief constables have arrogantly decided to ignore.

If we do this, the plague of misery caused by this drug and its cynical advocates will come to an end. And then the police won’t need 50,000volt weapons to do their job.

WHEN a man tried to steal one of the few copies of Magna Carta from Salisbury Cathedral, it was lucky that American tourists were on hand to help catch him. Americans still revere our great charter. Most British people these days have never even heard of it, and would respond to cries of

‘He’s trying to steal Magna Carta!’ by asking: ‘Trying to steal what?’