Danny Shaw

Danny Shaw is a crime, justice and policing commentator and former adviser to Yvette Cooper.

The police will be pleased with their coronation performance

‘I am immensely proud of the exceptional work of our officers who prevented criminal disruption, damage and danger destroying such a unique occasion,’ said Sir Mark Rowley, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner. He was talking of course about the coronation amid the controversy that has swirled around the Met since reports emerged that people were wrongfully

Charles Bronson and the problem with parole hearings

The letter delivered last week to Mr Charles Salvador, of HMP Woodhill, from the parole board did not bring him the news he wanted – it said his request to be released from prison had been turned down. But the outcome came as no surprise to me, nor I suspect many of the others who had

The Met police is in a dire state

For the past 12 months, the Metropolitan Police has been in the organisational equivalent of a body scanner. Every vital organ of this 194-year-old beast has been examined in detail by Baroness Louise Casey and her review team enabling them to understand the Met in a way that no one has done before. The results,

Is it time to break up the Met?

For more than 47 years, Dennis McGrory got away with murder. But last week justice was finally delivered: the pensioner was sentenced to life imprisonment for killing 15-year-old Jacqui Montgomery, in Islington, north London. His conviction was in large measure due to the work of Metropolitan police forensic scientists and detectives who never gave up

Why the Met struggles to sack rogue police officers

This week, the charity CrimeStoppers, which receives anonymous tip offs from the public, launched a new hotline – for people to report corruption and abuse by police officers. It’s part of a drive by the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Sir Mark Rowley, to ‘expose those who have undermined the Met’s integrity’ following a series of scandals

Firearms officers feel they have been let down by the Met

At 2.30 in the afternoon on September 22, 1999, Harry Stanley left the Alexandra pub in Hackney, east London, with a blue plastic bag containing a table leg that had been repaired by his brother. Unbeknown to Stanley, someone in the pub had called the police to report ‘an Irishman with a gun wrapped in

How did theft become effectively decriminalised in Britain?

Haven’t we all had that panicky, sinking feeling at one time or another? A realisation that we’ve been the victim of a crime. Perhaps it happened when you couldn’t find the mobile phone in your back pocket. Or after you spotted fragments of glass on the road near your car windscreen. You might have felt