An offence is to ignore real crime
Cops ridiculed for chasing ‘haters’ while fraudsters get off lightly
AN alarming ignorance of the law is being displayed by some police officers.
Take the fiasco over a Merseyside Police campaign involving a truck driving around with the slogan “Being offensive is an offence”. Er, no it’s not.
Faced with a torrent of social media ridicule, Merseyside plod backtracked and issued a statement saying: “We would like to clarify that ‘being offensive’ is not in itself an offence.”
The statement added that the message “although wellintentioned was incorrect” but, refusing to admit defeat, insisted that it was still allsystems-go for “Our Hate Crime Co-ordinators”.
Meanwhile, over in West Yorkshire, there was a crime, this time a horribly real one, only the police didn’t think so.
Tehreen Din, 25, worked at a care home in Huddersfield, where she stole the contactless bank card of a bed-bound resident and used it to spend £360 in a series of shopping trips to Primark.
As clear a case of fraud as you’re going to find, you might think.
Yet when West Yorkshire’s finest got involved, they decided to let off Din with a caution.
She only ended up being charged because she later got a job at a dental practice, where she took a colleague’s bank card without permission and spent £30 at a newsagents.
When the case came to Leeds Crown Court last week, Judge Geoffrey Marson QC called the initial police decision to caution Din “shocking” and “wholly inappropriate”.
Her crimes were, he said, “a gross breach of the high degree of trust placed in carers of the elderly and infirm”, adding, “It was a despicable thing to do”.
Far from deserving a mere caution, he said the offences “clearly past the custody threshold”, and jailed Din for 10 months.
In a brief statement, West Yorkshire Police responded: “We note the comments of the judge and are looking into this matter to establish if alternative outcomes were more suitable.”
Sadly, there are many crooked carers like Din who walk free even when their cases do get as far as court.
Back in Merseyside, we have Ruth Fort, who stole £7,000 from the wheelchair-bound woman she was supposed to be looking after and blew it on a holiday in Mexico.
Last week the 46-yearold, from Birkenhead, got off with a 16-month suspended jail sentence when up before Preston Crown Court.
Then there’s Velda Little, a parasite who fleeced a disabled 85-yearold. Little, from Lambourn in Berkshire, was accused of pocketing £2,000 of unauthorised withdrawals totalling £5,600 and admitted four counts of fraud – for which she was given a 12-month community order by magistrates in Reading.
Jackie O’Sullivan, of the learning disability charity Mencap, says: “It is important that the criminal justice system takes reports of financial abuse of people with a learning disability seriously to send out a strong message that this crime is unacceptable.”
Which brings me to the case of Sophie Jones, a 29-year-old from Kettering, who used the bank cards of two people with learning difficulties 42 times, stealing around £1,800.
She admitted fraud and theft charges, with Leicester Crown Court being told in mitigation that her mental health would suffer if she went to prison.
So she got a 12-month suspended jail sentence.
In yet another case from earlier this month, we have 48-year-old Gladys Mklanda, a carer and former Christian minister no less.
She stole £500 by filling in a cheque signed by a pensioner with dementia.
Mold magistrates in north Wales were told this showed “deliberate targeting of a victim on the basis of vulnerability.”
Magistrates’ chairman Philip Jones told her: “This is a very serious offence of fraud” and jailed her for 20 years.
Only joking. She got 20 weeks – suspended of course.
Perhaps if this lot were guilty of hate speech they would have been jailed.
A despicable thing to do... clearly past the custody threshold