Police

Friday

Tom Goodenough

Summer of bloodshed continues after latest police killing in the US

Once again, an American police officer has been killed in the line of duty. This time, a policeman in San Diego was shot dead, and his colleague wounded, in a gun attack which happened after the two officers stopped a car. It is, of course, too early to tell exactly what happened, but the horrific pattern makes one thing clear: police in America are increasingly becoming a target. The latest senseless killing caps off one of the bloodiest months ever for police officers in the US. On July 17th, three police officers were killed in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, in a targeted shooting which left three others injured. Just ten days before,

Thursday

The Spectator

Barometer | 21 July 2016

How Britannia got her trident Parliament voted to renew Trident as Britain’s independent nuclear deterrent. But what about Britannia and her trident? — Unnoticed by some, our coinage was unilaterally disarmed in 2008 when a new 50p was issued, with a crest, not Britannia. — But then Britannia didn’t always bear a trident. When she was first put on coins by the Romans she carried a spear in one hand and an olive branch in the other. — She retained her spear until 1797 when, to celebrate Britain’s naval power, the weapon was replaced by a trident. The inspiration came from Poseidon and Neptune, Greek and Roman deities of the

Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

Have the police completely lost the plot today?

Is it something to do with Theresa May’s departure as Home Secretary, or are the police completely losing it? The first extraordinary circumstance today is that police have advised Angela Eagle, until yesterday, a Labour leadership candidate, that she should no longer hold constituency surgeries – you know, that regular point of contact between MPs and the people they were elected by and for whom they work. Presumably this is because someone lobbed a brick through the window of her constituency office, possibly inflamed by her standing against the leader or maybe just revolted by her pink fuchsia jackets. Now, Miss Eagle is irritating in any number of ways, but this

Thursday

Christopher Caldwell

Cops and killers

 Washington, DC Considering how heavily its citizens are armed with pistols, hunting rifles, shotguns, military semi-automatics, crossbows and nunchucks, considering how ethnically diverse and historically divided the place is, and considering that it is home to a third of a billion more or less rootless people, it is surprising Americans don’t kill each other more. The United States is well policed, even if it has been hard to say so lately. In the space of a couple of days in July, black men were shot dead by policemen in two separate incidents in Louisiana and Minnesota. Video flew round the internet. A protest rally called in Texas became the site

Thursday

Charles Moore

The Spectator’s notes | 7 July 2016

Before she was murdered, Jo Cox MP had written most of a report. She worked on it jointly it with the Conservative MP Tom Tugendhat for the Britain in the World project at the think-tank Policy Exchange. Its publication had been intended to coincide with that of the Chilcot report this week. Because of her shocking death, it is now delayed. But the project wants to continue her work, and the report’s bipartisanship. The essential point on which Mrs Cox (who opposed the Iraq war) and Mr Tugendhat (who served in it) agreed is that total non-intervention is not a foreign policy strategy. If Iraq shows the horrors of ill-planned

Wednesday

Matthew Parris

Was there any way not to traduce Cliff Richard?

Sir Cliff Richard will not be charged with historic sex offences, say the police and Crown Prosecution Service. There is ‘insufficient evidence’. You, reader — yes, you: I cannot reveal your name because I’m making this up, but let’s call you Alan, and let’s suppose my reader-ship know very well who you are… you, Alan, respectable, hitherto-well-regarded Alan, are not going to be charged with smuggling into Britain a stash of sadomasochistic scatological pornography as a young man in 1983 because there is ‘insufficient evidence’. How do you feel about that announcement, Alan? How do you feel after more than two years of sniggering and media speculation and an £800,000

Thursday

Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 9 June 2016

One of the most influential and learned figures in the British European debate is Rodney Leach. In the 1990s, he helped lead those of his fellow businessmen who became convinced that the abolition of the pound would be a disaster. He was a moving spirit in Business for Sterling and then in the ‘No’ campaign against the euro. This did much to persuade Gordon Brown, as Chancellor, to ditch euro entry plans in 2004. The following year, Lord Leach set up Open Europe, and continues as its chairman to this day. It is the most trusted think tank for research and debate on all EU questions, and is incredibly useful

Sunday

Declan Clowry

The rich are getting richer – the poor are getting robbed

Much fuss is made about financial inequality, but what about inequality of crime? It’s a question that has never been properly answered. Last year, The Spectator put out an appeal for help with social questions that weren’t being addressed by politicians or academia. One was whether the much-lauded fall in crime has been concentrated in richer neighbourhoods. Strangely, the Home Office seems never to have looked into it. It’s an area I know something about, having previously worked on profiling areas across the country based on their inhabitants’ wealth, health, and various other factors for a number of demographic studies. So The Spectator commissioned me to carry out the study. The

Saturday

Mick Hume

No, thank you, Officer, I will not think before I speak

As my daughter was preparing for her AS level exam on 1984 this week, George Orwell’s dystopian classic loomed back into a news headline: ‘We are not the Thought Police, Chief Constable Tells Government’. Leicestershire chief constable Simon Cole, who’s in charge of the anti-radicalisation Prevent programme, told the press that the Government’s new counter-extremist and safeguarding bill risked asking the police to dictate “what people can and cannot say”. The top cop was adamant that “We absolutely don’t want to be the thought police.” Well, (to borrow from another literary classic, Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop): Up to a point, Lord Copper. The police may feel uncomfortable about being tasked with

Tuesday

Tom Goodenough

Why today is crucial for determining Theresa May’s chances in the next Tory leadership race

Theresa May knows all about the pitfalls of speaking at the Police Federation but she is also well aware of how the conference can provide the perfect platform for underlining her leadership credentials. Back in 2012, the Home Secretary was booed, laughed at and made to speak in front of a sign which described government budget cuts as ‘criminal’. Last year, she accused the Federation of ‘crying wolf’ about finances. But her most memorable address to officers gathered at the annual Police Federation came in 2014, when she left the stage in silence – having stunned those gathered with her criticism of the police. She said that some in the

Thursday

Andrew Taylor

Who killed murder?

Pity the poor crime writers. Our earnings, like those of all authors, are diminishing for reasons far beyond our control. Our fictional criminals and detectives are being outsmarted by genetic fingerprinting, omnipresent security cameras and telltale mobile phones. Who needs Sherlock Holmes to solve a tricky crime when you have computers, with their unsporting ability to transmit and analyse enormous quantities of data and identify culprits? But the bigger problem for us novelists (if not for everyone else) is that murder itself is dying. The official homicide rate peaked in 2002, thanks to Dr Harold Shipman, and has since fallen by half — from 944 then to 517 last year.

Gary Bell Qc

No hiding place | 17 March 2016

My first courtroom murder case could have come straight from one of Andrew Taylor’s novels. A gruesome crime — the death of a child. And the murderer was brought to justice by exquisite detective work: police established that the killer had dug a grave but then abandoned it. They also found a witness. That was 20 years ago. The prosecution for cases that I’m involved in now have changed beyond recognition. Take number-plate-recognition technology. Most murderers drive to their victim, but now cars are tracked by cameras across the country. The police can list vehicles seen near a crime scene, then trace them back. That’s how, in 2006, they caught Steve

Yvo Fitzherbert

Desperate straits

 Istanbul Shops in a rundown neighbourhood sell fake life jackets to refugees planning to brave the Aegean Sea. Last year, nearly 4,000 refugees died trying to make this journey. ‘But what am I to do?’ says Erkan, a shopkeeper, as he pushes me out of his shop. ‘I tell them they are fake but the poor souls continue to buy them. The genuine ones don’t sell so well.’ We’re in the suburb of Aksaray, the makeshift centre of the smuggling trade in the city. Here the language is Arabic and the restaurants are Syrian. A town square serves as a hub for migration brokers. This is where dreams are sold.

Thursday

Tom Goodenough

Why sorry isn’t the hardest word for Bernard Hogan-Howe

Bernard Hogan-Howe did his best to appear calm on the Today show but it is clear he is increasingly rattled by the pressure he is under. The Met Police commissioner was on the front page of several newspapers this morning for all the wrong reasons. ‘Just say sorry’, screamed The Sun. The Daily Mail went with: ‘And still he won’t say sorry’. Those hoping for an apology from the police over their handling of the investigation into Lord Bramall amid unfounded allegations of child abuse have been left waiting longer though. His interview with John Humphrys this morning was tetchy to say the least. Hogan-Howe refused to say sorry and

Jeremy Clarke

Spring fever in Cologne

Last week the indigenous white population of Cologne took to the streets once again to celebrate their annual ‘Crazy Days’ spring carnival. I stepped out of the hotel at ten o’clock on the morning of the designated ‘women’s day’, wondering how the women of Cologne had reacted to the events of New Year’s Eve, and to Mutti Merkel waving in a million-plus young Muslims per year to pep up the flagging gene pool of the 10 million indigenous males aged 20–30. As the Economist magazine’s ‘World in 2016’ supplement, throwing off all pretence, so excitedly puts it: ‘There is only one last hurdle to Germany officially becoming a land of

Thursday

James Walton

An inconvenient truth | 28 January 2016

On the face of it, the Netflix documentary serial Making a Murderer should only take up ten hours of your life. Judging from my experience, though, its ten episodes will prove so overwhelmingly riveting that you’re going to need at least two more days to scour the internet in an obsessive quest for every scrap of information about the Steven Avery case — and several evenings to discuss it with any fellow viewers you can find. If the fuss about the series has so far passed you by (and if it has, it probably won’t for much longer), you may have to trust me that the story it tells —

Adam Zamoyski

Autocracy tempered by strangulation

‘It was hard to be a tsar,’ Simon Sebag Montefiore writes in his opening sentence, and what follows fully bears this out. In his thought-provoking introduction, he stresses the unique nature of Russian autocracy and its perverse contradictions; the tsar was absolute ruler, yet he was bound by a tangle of restrictions. His subjects were prepared to accept his tyranny and any cruelty its exercise required, but claimed the right to punish him if he failed to provide strong leadership. The system was never meant to give one person tyrannical powers over everyone else. Nor was it intended to work for the greatest good of the greatest number. It was

Thursday

The Spectator

Barometer | 21 January 2016

Roll out the barrel The price of crude oil dropped below $30 a barrel. Why do we measure it in barrels? — A standard barrel for the purposes of measuring oil is 42 US gallons or 35 imperial gallons. This was the size of a ‘tierce’, a unit for measuring wine in medieval England. — When demand for kerosene provoked an oil rush in Pennsylvania in 1859, producers were so desperate for vessels that they used all kinds of containers. — In August 1866, however, producers met in the town of Titusville to agree on a standard measure. A 42-gallon barrel of oil weighed 300lb:  just enough, it was found,

Thursday

Caroline Moorehead

Laughter and tears

The Yacoubian Building, the first novel of the Egyptian writer Alaa Al Aswany, sold well over a million copies in 35 languages, was made into a film, and turned him overnight into one of the most listened to voices in the Arab world. What followed — Chicago, set in the city in which Al Aswany did his masters degree in dentistry, and some short stories — did not have quite the charm of his sprawling houseful of driven, troubled, passionate characters trying to survive in a country of extreme social ills. The Automobile Club of Egypt is a second Yacoubian, a saga built around an institution, rich in absurdity and

Thursday

Kate Chisholm

Good cop, bad cop

One of the most shocking items of recent news has been the bald statistic that the number of people shot by law enforcement officers in the United States last year was 1,136. Not died by gangland shooting, domestic violence or terrorist attack. But killed by those who are meant to be preventing such deaths. Many of them are black or Hispanic. As if on cue, the World Service this week launched a documentary series to find out why this is happening. What are the deep structural issues that give rise to such inequalities of experience and opportunity in the (supposed) Land of the Free? The first episode of The Compass: