That's fucking stupid

Posts Tagged ‘Police’

Or is calling the initiative aimed at advising police forces on how to increase the number of rapes reported, as well as convictions,  “The Rape Support Programme”  just a wee bit of a misnomer?

Just a thought.

The old expression about a bad workman and his tools is generally fairly true; it is often the workman who selects the tools so any failure of the tools must surely be a byproduct of poor selection or improper use. If a tool is used in a way that it was not intended, use for a malfarious purpose or not maintained well then the blame must also lay at the feet of the workman. I was once stabbed with a three quarter inch bevelled edge chisel and while it was all very unfortunate I can’t bring myself to blame the chisel for its actions.

At this point you may be wondering where I am going with this, am I now going to step forward in support of the NRA? Am I going to start saying that as it’s the people holding the guns that do the killing, gun control should be relaxed?

Am I bollocks.

Guns are indeed the tools that enable a person to kill another person, tools which can be used for other reasons; mainly to kill animals or to just get shit and giggles from waving it around and showing off. What is important to remember though is that if there are lots of tools around and it’s easy to get hold of these tools then the chances of people getting shot increases because more careless workmen will be fully equipped for mayhem.

But that’s beside the point.

The whole workman/tool thing is more an analogy for all those government departments that come under regular scrutiny every day in the ‘newspapers’; in the last week there have been criticisms of the police, social services and there is an ever present criticism of the armed forces for their role in the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. The health service in the UK is shit, immigration officials are shit, the government regulators are shit, the traffic wombles who close the roads and hand out tin foil are shit and of course the teachers who are moulding the next generation are shit.

But if they are shit, or doing a shit job, is this their fault? Are the social services department directly involved with Baby P really eligible for the witch hunt that the media insisted upon? Are the nurses and doctors who work long hours on low pay to blame for MRSA, long waiting lists and the occasional mistakes that are inevitable in a health service serving sixty million people? The media have no concept of ‘good enough’; in most cases so long as the system works most of the time it is pointless and unrealistic to spend a disproportionate amount of time and effort trying to fix the few that fall through the net. If you fuck up one nail out of a hundred you probably wouldn’t go and buy a new hammer. While the individual cases of failure in a government department are pretty tragic these cases are extraordinary and do not warrant the sort of knee jerk legislation that the current government has made its trademark.

But proportionate response aside, who’s to blame?

I am in the difficult position of being very supportive of our troops, our police, our health service and our teachers while being heavily opposed to many of the things they do. Iraq and Afghanistan were immoral and pointless wars which we should not have entered into but during the course of the conflict we must support the armed services in the difficult job they are doing. The NHS is a shambles but doctors and nurses work bloody hard to do the best they can in all but a handful of cases. Teachers are undermined at every turn by parents, education authorities and successive governments yet most entered the profession in order to help kids make the best of themselves.

If you compare a soldier to a powertool you will find many similarities. Both are only as effective as the person directing their actions, both need careful maintenance and both can be used in a constructive and destructive way depending on who is in charge of them. In this respect the tragedies in Iraq cannot be blamed on the soldiers out there pulling the trigger because they are a tool of the state, the sharp edge of a tool that the government uses to protect our interests. Our armed forces are currently not being well maintained (low pay, poor housing, substantial MOD budget shortfalls due to lack of funding for costly overseas conflicts), they are being used inappropriately (sent to fight wars we have no business involving ourselves in) and when they are damaged they are not being repaired, they are just discarded with little thought to the ever growing pile of damaged soldiers and the ever dwindling supply of recruits.

The workman weilding all these tools is the state, not the government. The government itself is just a flawed tool of the people with a mandate to direct these services on behalf of the nation; it is the electorate who allowed the government to send the troops in to Iraq and Afghanistan, it was the electorate which allowed the government to starve the police, NHS and education services of the levels of funding that we need in order to operate effectively. The people were happy to elect the party which took us to war and very few people objected to the individuals who ordered this on our behalf, the people were happy to take tax cuts and increases in public spending while knowing that this is an unsustainable economic model, the people were happy to borrow 5 times their salary in order to make a quick profit on the property ladder and the people have stood by and criticised teachers while the government has all but privatised education with their public/private partnership academies.

The people of London even voted out one of their hardest working public servants in favour of a blundering personality who attracts media interest.

So next time you are reading some reactionary piece that calls for the head of a social worker or asks for the resignation of a senior policeman you must think to yourself: is this system ‘good enough’ or do I need to do something about it. Whatever you do don’t look around for someone to blame because the blames lies at your feet.

The IWF, our self appointed online guardians, publish a list of ‘potentially illegal’ web pages which many of the UK ISPs use in order to determine what content we should be allowed to see. In the past this has caused controversy because images that they deem ‘potentially illegal’ are silently censored by our service providers, the most notable being the Virgin Killer artwork which was blocked on a wikipedia page.

Something that is important to remember, though, is that the blocking is entirely voluntary and you can always change to a different ISP which does not use the block list. An ISP that subscribes to the list must block its entirety rather than picking and choosing which pages to allow but subscription to the list is not currently compulsory, or at least not at the moment.

The NSPCC has decided that it is really bad news that a measly 5% of broadband connections are with service providers which don’t use the list because ”allowing this loophole helps feed the appalling trade in images featuring real children being seriously sexually assaulted”.

Apparently ”Over 700,000 households in the UK can still get uninterrupted and easy access to illegal child abuse image sites”. This has prompted the NSPCC and the Children’s Charities Coalition on Internet Safety (CCCIS) to call for more government intervention as ”self-regulation on this issue is obviously failing – and in a seriously damaging way for children”.

I checked the maths and if you work on the 2001 census data of 24,479,439 households and OFCOM’s number of 57% broadband penetration then it follows that around 700,000 households are in that 5% who have got unfiltered internet access. Is a bit of ‘nanny state’ intervention going to make a difference to whether people can access child porn? Of course not.

Depending on the ISP, the implimentations differ but broadly speaking the IWF list works like this:

1. People with too much time on their hands find sites with kiddie smut and report them to the IWF.
2. The IWF takes a gander and works out if the content will give a paedo wood. If they think it will then they put the URL on a list.
3. Twice a day the ISPs download that list and their clever technology enables them to return a 404 page not found error instead of the page.

The effectiveness of this plan makes a number of assumptions, the first is that paedos are really really fucking stupid and just turn on their computer and type “kiddies with their bits out” into Google. In reality the ones that don’t want to get caught will employ a number of different and easy to use technologies to circumvent the blocking technology. Kiddie smut on the web is pretty rare because it’s a specialist thing and illegal in a whole lot of places so slightly more underground methods of distribution are most likely used. Usenet, the legacy of the pre WWW internet, will not be blocked by the IWF list. Peer to peer software can enable the distribution of illegal material and even something as simple as an anonymous web proxy can bypass the crude interventions of the IWF.

So what’s the fucking point? It won’t block the hardened paedo from getting his rocks off and it won’t stop people from abusing kids and taking pics to share by email, P2P, usenet etc. It’s a good way of being seen to be doing something and it might stop the odd idiot from accidentally happening upon a page that contains kid smut while searching for some other form of depravity but I suspect that most people would just hit the back button and go off looking for their dwarf/foot fetish/squirting/big cock porn elsewhere instead.

Of course the cynics will say that this is a back door way of getting the censorship infrastructure in place so the government can then use it to silently quieten dissent; people who say stuff like that are ignorant cunts though, it’s not a conspiracy it’s just lazy politics and a waste of money.

A fortune cookie once said:

Rules are for the guidance of the wise and the blind allegiance of fools.

The message behind the proverb is that rules are there to show people what generally is and is not acceptable but they are fallable so should not be seen as inflexible boundries. Unfortunately, where rules and laws fall down is when dealing with people who follow rules too closely and use them for their own means.

Most civilised societies have laws which prohibit murder but most countries also have a pretty narrow definition of murder and an often less serious crime of manslaughter. Murder is defined as the taking of life with malice aforethought, or with the intention of doing it. If I cause an accident which kills someone then that would be manslaughter but if I set out to kill someone then that would be murder. Proving the intent is the hard part and often means that prosecutors settle for manslaughter charges rather than murder because they are easier to prove. Unfortunately this puts us in a situation where occasionally accidental deaths are convicted as murder because the guilty party cannot prove it was accidental and also means that a clever murderer will be able to make the death seem either accidental or claim that it was accidental in order to get a reduced sentence.

Pedophiles can get their kicks just by being in the audience at a school swimming gala while parents are unable to take photos of their own kids, terrorists find new and interesting ways of causing mayhem while regular travellers get their duty free booze confiscated because it breaks the 100ml rule and copyright or patent laws are used by big corporations to attack the small creative groups that the laws were designed to protect.

The legal system has always had loop holes but the judiciary were selected for their strong moral judgement and ability to make decisions based on the evidence provided. Some of these decisions were subjective and occasionally errors of judgement happened. In an effort to prevent this from happening we, as a society, have built greater and greater layers of complexity to the legal system and filled the statute books with more and more laws which are designed to stipulate exactly what can and can’t be done in any given situation. The problem with closing loop holes is that for every one you close, many more open up. The idea of ‘rights’ is great however they must be evenly applied and are most often used by the malicious in order to escape or evade punishment.

A few years ago there was a story going around that a homeowner was sued by a burglar who had slipped while breaking in. It caused much outrage and was seen as a poster boy example for the ‘political correctness gone mad’ that the Daily Mail is keen to womble on about. In an ideal world this case (if it indeed existed) would have been thrown out by the courts for contravening the basic ideals of common sense and personal responsibility…

But what if it had? If a homeowner is allowed not liable for injury if the other party is trespassing then it might be wise to make sure that you have written invitations from the unscrupulous householders you may visit; they may exploit the loophole if you injure yourself at theirs by claiming you were trespassing. If a burglar injured himself while stealing from you he might think it wise to claim that you deliberately injured him, thus putting you in a riskier position.

Legislating for every eventuality is a process which leads inevitably towards totalitarianism and cannot be achieved without it, we are already happily skipping down that path and it would take a significant reverse in public policy to take us back to the point where judges were trusted to make decisions and policemen could use their discretion, the golden era that the “BBC Have your say” gang wistfully recall.

Media responsibility is pretty important if we want to steer away from a totalitiarian Britain. Newspapers and TV channels competing for attention are prone to blowing unusual events out of proportion. News coverage brings the unusual to the public attention. A few million people going to work is unremarkable yet a few million people trapped at home because of snow is unusual and worthy of news. All too often the remarkable events that capture the public imagination fuel massive changes in policy and legislation which are disproportionate to the original and improbably events.

In short, don’t worry about the little things that the papers report. It’s the stuff they don’t report that is happening every day in every city all around the country. Legislating for the little stuff just takes our eyes off the big stuff or gives the perpetrators new loopholes to use to their advantage.

Jacqui Smith is currently denying having advance knowledge of the recent arrest of Damian Green MP and the subsequent search of his constituency and Westminster offices. The Speaker of the House of Commons is ultimately responsible for conduct within the House of Commons and the Sarjeant at Arms is a royal appointment with responsibility for security and conduct within the Palace of Westminster, while neither of them have admitted prior knowledge it has come to light that the Sarjeant at Arms signed over consent to the Met to allow them search the premises without a warrant.

Now how big a fuck up did they actually want this to be? The Sarjeant at Arms didn’t think to defer the decision to the politically appointed Speaker? Didn’t check to see if this was a workable thing to do or a gross abuse of parliamentary privilege? Either way the Sarjeant at Arms needs to have a signed get out of jail free card from someone higher up or they are going to be for the high jump.

As for Jacqui Smith, she didn’t know about the impending arrest of an MP and we are supposed to not only believe this but think it’s OK. To understand the situation you have to remember that the Police are a tool of the Queen and the State. Their power comes directly from their mandate to uphold the laws of the land on behalf of the Sovereign Monarch and the constitutionally elected government. On a day to day basis this is done by the Home Secretary who appoints the senior people in the Met and other forces. In effect, on a day to day basis, the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police Service reports to the Home Secretary and in this respect it is highly unlikely that Sir Ian Blair, the Commissioner at the time, would have acted without the knowledge of Jacqui Smith on his last day before leaving the job.

If, and this is a big suspension of disbelief, Sir Ian Blair has authorised this matter without the authorisation of the Home Secretary then it would be prudent to assume that Jacqui Smith commands neither the respect or the authority to hold the office she occupies. As Home Secretary she has a duty and a responsibility to make the big decisions and hiding behind operational independence when the mandate of the police has been stretched so far just does not cut it.

Ministers are the democratic accountability that all government departments need. They are the oversight on behalf of the public that keeps the civil, police and military services in check. They have access to privileged information which we are not given in order to maintain a watch on these bodies to ensure that they act within what is expected by the public. If Jacqui Smith had no knowledge of this action then she is clearly unfit for the job and should be removed immediately.

If, however, she had full knowledge of the impending arrest of one of her colleagues in the opposition then she is guilty of an equal abuse of the public trust. The matter was not handled in line with the constitutionally accepted rules and her hand in it would be her damnation.

Either way she must now be removed from office for either authorising this attack on her opposition or for being so incompetent as to not be made aware when the Met is going to grossly overstep their mandate.