Police

 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

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

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

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

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.

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