Police

Can crime be beaten with a beaten down police force? The government certainly hopes so. Today, the Prime Minister launched the much trailed ‘Beating Crime’ Plan. Not trailed enough, according to the boss of the cops’ union, The Police Federation, who says the first he heard about the plan was last Sunday — shortly after his organisation, representing 130,000 front line officers, passed a vote of no confidence in the Home Secretary. How has this fracture between police and politicians come to pass? In rhetorical terms, this is the most pro-police administration in the last ten years. It has certainly worked hard to exorcise the malign impact of Theresa May.

The position of Home Secretary Priti Patel is clearly untenable. Presumably this means she must resign. Who says so? Why, only her Labour shadow Nick Thomas-Symonds. At least, he has said the first bit from which we can infer the second. And what has reduced Patel to this miserable status in his eyes? Could it be the fact that 18 months after she first promised to halt the cross-Channel boats that spill migrants onto our shores, there are more of them arriving than ever? No, not a bit of it. Thomas-Symonds is not interested in that. In fact, whenever he and the Home Secretary debate migration policy she runs enough

Has Police Scotland misunderstood the purpose of policing? A recent crackdown on ‘controversial stickers’ appears to suggest as much. ‘On Monday 17th May we received a report of controversial stickers having been placed on lampposts,’ said a message on Kirkcaldy police’s Twitter feed, posted last week. ‘Should you come across stickers of this nature, please contact ourselves or Fife Council so that their removal can be arranged’. So what did the stickers actually say? It transpired that they were emblazoned with the words: ‘Women won’t wheesht’ Baffling? Maybe. But is it really the business of the police to investigate such stickers? Various hashtags, including ‘SexNotGender’ and ‘WarOnWomen’, were also included. But

The headline ‘Government to allow people to hug’ one might have expected to hear on early evening news bulletins in January 1661, shortly after Oliver Cromwell was posthumously executed and puritanism began its slow and welcome withdrawal from England. It sounds a little odd in 2021. Below the headline came the inevitable caveats from the medical clerisy. While hugging you should turn your face aside so as to minimise the risk of infecting the person you are embracing. I think people are also enjoined to keep their hands well above the waist — during amorous encounters with people in your ‘bubble’ you are allowed only to ‘get your tops’, as

Any gunslinging sheriff can tell you that if you shoot from the hip you may hit the target but not quite with the precision you wanted. Priti Patel, very much a minister to draw first and ask questions later, is in much this position with her challenge to the police establishment over the weekend on its policy of recording all non-crime hate incidents. Most of what she said is spot-on; but in two respects she may have to think a little more carefully. The problem with the present police policy, as Matthew Parris trenchantly pointed out in this week’s Spectator, is that even if you never break the law it

The ugly scenes in Bristol last night make it plain to see that Britain can no longer turn a blind eye to a particular brand of political disorder. Violent clashes during the city’s ‘Kill the Bill’ demonstration – supposedly in protest against the Conservative government’s Police, Crime, Sentencing, and Courts Bill – resulted in 20 police officers being injured, burned-out police vans, and a police station being attacked. Two officers who were seriously injured suffered from broken ribs, a broken arm and a punctured lung. So who was to blame for this violence? The chairman of Avon and Somerset Police Federation, Andy Roebuck, labelled last night’s anarchy a form of ‘unprecedented violence’. And the city’s mayor, Marvin

Misogyny will now be recorded as a hate crime by police. But is this really the victory for women’s rights that campaigners are claiming it to be? It’s absolutely right, of course, that the law is bolstered so that incidents against women are taken seriously by the police. But the wording of the policy is disappointingly woolly, relying heavily on what the victim perceives as the motivation for the crime. Speaking in the House of Lords, Home Office minister Baroness Williams said that from the Autumn:  ‘We will ask police forces to record and identify any crimes of violence against the person… where the victim perceives it to have been motivated

To all those – from Left and Right – joining in the clamour for Cressida Dick to resign as Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, a pertinent question hangs in the air: Who would you hire to replace her and what good do you think it would do? If you are on the old-fashioned right of politics, you’d probably have in mind a figure in the mould of the no-nonsense former Commissioner Lord Stevens, a ‘copper’s copper’. If you are on the liberal left, you are much more likely to demand a ‘Common Purpose’ clone, steeped in the fashionable jargon of the College of Policing and identifying structural racism and non-crime

Priti Patel’s reaction to the ugly scenes on Clapham Common on Saturday has been to point the finger. ‘Some of the footage circulating online from the vigil in Clapham is upsetting. I have asked the Metropolitan Police for a full report on what happened’, she has said. But do we really need to wait for a report to work out what has happened?  Perhaps, instead, the truth is rather simpler: the police were enforcing laws put into places by Priti Patel’s own government. Of course, there is some debate as to whether officers should have exercised more judgement in the applications of these laws. On this point, though, Patel has been clear:

Politics, at its most pathetic, is the Downing Street pack screaming at Prime Ministers, ‘Will you resign?’. At its best, politics and political journalism build up an unanswerable case against a miscreant and take a scalp. The scenes at Clapham Common, last night, were shocking. I have, however, worked in TV news for long enough to know that the cutting room is a minefield. As with vox-pops, the selection and rejection of pictures and voices is one of the most powerful editorial forces in a newsroom. I wasn’t at Clapham Common last night, nor were most in the mass-ranks of social media. Suffice to say, what I saw on social