Police

Tuesday

Kristina Murkett

Undercover police in nightclubs is a terrible idea

It has been a dreadful week for the police. A police officer has been charged with the kidnap and murder of Sarah Everard; officers badly mishandled the Clapham Common vigil, drawing political criticism from all sides; there have been numerous calls for Commissioner Cressida Dick to resign; and now another officer involved in the search operation for Sarah Everard is under investigation for sending his colleagues a graphic meme about violence against women. In an attempt to get a grip on the situation, Boris Johnson has announced a new plan to protect women: bars and nightclubs will be patrolled by plain clothes officers to identify predatory men. There will also

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Labour’s awkward opposition to the policing bill

MPs will continue debating the second reading of the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill today, with a vote later. Last night’s debate gave us a pretty good idea of what the legislation’s progress through the Commons is going to look like: it is going to be far more partisan and noisy than anything Parliament has seen in the past year. There was a battle of interventions from Conservative and Labour backbenchers as their own sides set out their positions on the bill. Tory MPs had clearly come primed to argue that voting against the legislation would be a mistake for Labour, while Opposition MPs were busy pointing out that

Monday

Nick Tyrone

Priti Patel’s cowardly response to the Clapham Common debacle

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:

Sunday

Alastair Stewart

It’s too early to call for Cressida Dick’s scalp

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

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

How will politicians respond to the policing of the Clapham vigil?

Late last night, politicians started scrambling to express their concern about the policing of a vigil held on Clapham Common in the memory of Sarah Everard. After images of police officers arresting women on the ground emerged, Home Secretary Priti Patel said she found some of the footage ‘upsetting’ and would be asking the Metropolitan Police for a ‘full report’. Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer called the scenes ‘disturbing’ and said, ‘this was not the way to police this protest’. The political implications of last night’s policing decisions are going to be very difficult for both Patel and Starmer. This week, the Police, Crime and Sentencing Bill has its second

Thursday

Kristina Murkett

Telling men to ‘educate themselves’ won’t make women safe

Sarah Everard’s disappearance has sent shockwaves throughout the capital. The case has led to women sharing stories of how they don’t feel safe walking the streets at night. One Green party peer has said men should face a curfew until things change. Others have called for men to ‘educate themselves’ about the fears women face in the wake of this tragic story. But is this really the right approach? I’m not convinced. What is clear is that Sarah Everard did nothing wrong. Returning from a friend’s house on that fateful night, she wore bright clothing, she walked down a main road, she called her boyfriend on her way back. For women, decisions about personal

The Spectator

The policing of lockdown is failing

The scenes in Clapham Common have brutally exposed the problem with lockdown rules. People had gathered to mourn Sarah Everard and protest in defence of the right to walk the streets safely. The Metropolitan Police had been asked by the government to stop people going outside for anything other than a handful of allowed reasons: protest is not one of them. Given how many anti-lockdown protesters were arrested at Clapham Common earlier this year, the Met decided it could not be seen to pick and choose causes. Protesters were told it was ‘unsafe’ for them to be there due to Covid-19. Officers swooped. Chaos ensured. Footage from the protests showed a row of women

Wednesday

Julie Bindel

Why are London police telling women to stay at home?

The disappearance of Sarah Everard in south London has once again led to women being advised by police to stay at home and be extra vigilant, according to a report in the Sun. Such warnings perpetuate damaging myths about danger, for example that only men can protect women and, ergo, women can’t protect themselves; that women are somehow complicit if they are outside and alone at night; and that night-time is dangerous and not the men responsible. Regardless of what happened to Ms Everard, and like all those following this story I’m hoping that she is found safe and as soon as possible, there is a troubling theme in the

Monday

Steerpike

Police hate crime campaign backfires

Is being offensive an offence? Some of those at Merseyside police who are tasked with upholding the law think so.  Over the weekend, officers from the force posed in front of an electronic billboard telling passers-by that ‘We will not tolerate Hate Crime on any level’. The warning displayed behind the masked officers also told members of the public that ‘being offensive’ is indeed a crime. Now, it seems, Merseyside police has changed its mind. ‘We would like to clarify that being offensive is not in itself an offence’, said a statement put out by superintendent Martin Earl: ‘A message on an ad van and social media this weekend by the Local Policing Team on the

Monday

Tom Goodenough

Do we really need a football hate crime police officer?

Marcus Rashford is right when he says the racist abuse he has received is ‘humanity and social media at its worst’. And it is right too that police take action against those who target football players like him because of the colour of their skin. But is it wise to appoint a dedicated hate crime officer based in a football unit, as West Midlands Police have done? The argument for doing so is not convincing. Why? Because when the abuse levelled at footballers goes too far, police have already shown they can be swift to act. Greater Manchester Police is investigating the latest racism directed at Rashford, and it would come

Thursday

The Spectator

A tighter lockdown risks being a less effective one

When lockdown was first proposed in March, one of the many arguments against it was that people would tolerate being deprived of their liberty only for a few weeks. The idea of criminalising basic community behaviour — welcoming a guest into your home, educating children, going to church to pray — was viewed as an extreme measure with a short shelf-life. One of the big surprises of the pandemic is to see that lockdowns, in fact, are popular in large quarters. People have complied for far longer than was ever envisaged. But it’s a careful balance — and examples of overzealous policing risk upsetting that balance. It does not help

Monday

Kate Andrews

A lockdown crackdown is no walk in the park

Jessica Allen and Eliza Moore had a bad experience with the Derbyshire police last week. The two women met for a socially distanced walk roughly a five-mile drive away from their home. This resulted in the pair being ‘surrounded’ by police officers, who fined them £200 for leaving their local area and drinking takeaway coffee, which the officers classified as a ‘picnic’. Since the story broke last week, the police force has backed down significantly and are reviewing their policies as a result of the incident. Allen and Moore were not, it seems, breaking any laws (although No. 10 and other departments remain unsure about how this fits into government guidance).

Friday

Ian Acheson

What Unicef doesn’t understand about police and tasers

Use of force isn’t like the movies. It’s often messy, frightening and it can go sideways very quickly. I vividly remember my first arrest as a volunteer police officer, surrounded by jeering teenagers in a seaside amusement arcade wrestling on the ground with a completely non-compliant powerfully built kid. When we eventually got the cuffs on him, it turned out he was deaf and most of his resistance was because he couldn’t understand my repeated attempts to negotiate with him.  As head of security at HMP Wandsworth, I recall standing in the centre supervising an entirely correct and proportionate restraint and relocation of a prisoner. All the staff were white. The

Saturday

Dr Jade Norris

Why I can no longer police the coronavirus restrictions

Earlier this month I resigned as a Special Constable, after serving for ten years as a volunteer officer in three different police forces. Policing has been an important part of my life for a long time, and I will miss serving my community and working with extremely dedicated, brave, and caring officers. But I have long been disturbed by decisions made by the government during the coronavirus crisis, and have decided that I can no longer in good conscience play any part in enforcing the restrictions. I have had concerns about the government’s coronavirus policies since the first lockdown. While I have volunteered as a Special Constable, my full-time job

Thursday

Melissa Kite

The strange case of the ‘alleged bonfire’

The council has told me that what I saw was an ‘alleged bonfire’. When I described flames towering into the sky and black smoke curling over the village, that was an ‘alleged bonfire’. When the builder boyfriend was shutting the field gate and could see a bright blue explosion, what he was witnessing was the start of an ‘alleged bonfire’. We often meet at the horses after he finishes work, then we drive home in our separate cars. He let me out the gate first and stayed behind to lock it. After he rang me and told me what he could see on the horizon, I turned round and drove

Thursday

Bas Javid

Bas Javid: Why I joined the police

There’s no such thing as a typical week in policing and this last one was no different. It started on a high and ended, tragically, on the lowest of lows. I’ve been asked recently why I joined the police — what or who inspired me. My first answer is: Lieutenant Carl Downing. He was my divisional officer in the Navy and one day, though I went on to be the most unlikely copper you could ever meet, he turned to me and asked: ‘Have you thought about the police? You’d be great at it.’ I remember thinking: where did that come from? Nonetheless, five years later I found myself signing

Thursday

The Spectator

Letters: We must sing again

Growing pains Sir: James Forsyth (‘Rewiring the state’, 4 July) shocked this loyal Spectator reader with the following: ‘Even before Covid, this country was in a productivity crisis and it’s nigh-on impossible to improve productivity without government involvement. Increasing productivity requires improvements to be made to physical and digital infrastructure and to the skill base, and those need public investment.’ James clearly has not studied the sources of productivity growth (or lack of it). In the 50 years to 2008, the UK experienced around 2 per cent p.a. growth in real Gross Value Added per hour worked — which is what politicians generally mean when they talk about productivity. Since

Thursday

The Spectator

Letters: Why Hugh Dowding deserves a statue

Police relations Sir: As a former Met Police officer, with a similar background to Kevin Hurley, I was surprised how much I disagreed with his article (‘Cop out’, 27 June). Central to this was the lack of emphasis he placed on the attitude of police officers. The emphasis on violent gang crime undoubtedly leads to a distortion in how young black men are perceived by the police, and this in turn can quickly lead to confrontation on the street. The attitude of young police officers is key to avoiding an escalating reaction between them and members of the public. Senior officers need to develop more holistic ways of addressing crime,

Thursday

Leaf Arbuthnot and Igor Toronyi-Lalic

Culture is going underground: meet the rebel army

Among the first to arrive was a Labour grandee. Then others drifted over: academics, musicians, writers, a nurse. They came from different directions, some looking shifty, others excited. The secret meeting point was an inconspicuous pub in north London. Queueing shoppers nearby assumed the growing crowd was waiting to get into the supermarket. In groups of five those gathered were led down a suburban street to a derelict leisure centre. For one night only, the gym had been turned into a makeshift theatre. The audience, of up to 30 people, had congregated to flick a collective V at the social distancing measures, and to watch A Hero of Our Time,

The Spectator

Letters: Police must focus on deterring crime, not responding to it

Deterring crime Sir: Rod Liddle is right to highlight the politicisation of the police as a source of their inadequacies, but I think he misses the crucial point (‘Defund the police’, 27 June). We simply do not have bobbies on the beat to even feel sympathy for, and this means that constructive relationships between a recognisable police officer and their community are a rarity. As Kevin Hurley describes, many black youths in our cities have nothing but hatred towards police officers, and this cannot be a surprise when the only interactions they have with them are being forced to empty their pockets after being suspected of criminal activity. Mr Liddle