“A review of the police use of cautions to deal with violent offenders was ordered today by the justice secretary, Jack Straw, after concerns voiced by magistrates, the director of public prosecutions and senior police officers.”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2009/nov/09/jack-straw-police-cautions-review

I trust someone – or a computer – in the Cabinet Office is keeping track of all these reviews because I lost count years ago.

The usual form should be fairly familiar to most by now: some glaring screw up in policy is exposed in the media so a minister promptly announces “a review” and the whole shenanigans disappears into the long grass for the foreseeable. Everything then goes quiet meanwhile.

Of those 40,000 cautions, a proportion should perhaps have been fully prosecuted (though I think they have to offer a caution if it’s a first offence), but a reasonable proportion are for cases where either public interest or evidential tests or both were not met. It’s a scam.

In fact the number of successful convictions has declined, as has the successful convictions as a proportion of the total number of offences brought to justice (the 53% referred to earlier).

It is the contributions made by ‘non-convictions’ – cautions, formal warnings, Penalty Notices for Disorder, and offences “taken into consideration” by the courts – that have allowed the Government to meet its targets.

The short answer in: No.

What I starting to wonder is how long will it be before asking questions like this are construed as “obstruction”?

This post was mentioned on Twitter by libcon: :: But will do the Met police do something? http://bit.ly/LxG2b...

Do you happen to know how many of these cautions have since been overturned, having been found to be neither in the public interest nor warranted by the evidence? According to the Exceptional Cases Unit at New Scotland Yard, they are overwhelmed by the number of wrongful cautions they are having to delete.

It seems to me that the serious cases of violence are being overlooked by MPS in favour of the wrongful pursuit of easy targets to bump up their numbers. And the FMEs, CPS and duty solicitors all appear to be in cahoots with this tactic.

” A third of the violent offences which were not recorded as crimes should have been. An inspection of how police forces record violence showed that officers are deciding that thousands of violent incidents are not crimes.”
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/crime/article6885415.ece

“Almost 40,000 cases of assault were dealt with by cautions in England and Wales last year, the BBC has learned.”
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/8346321.stm

Curiously, or not:

“An investigation shows that conviction rates for many of the most violent crimes have been in freefall since Labour came to power in 1997 and are now well below 10 per cent. The chronically low figures for convictions come at the same time as reports that violent crime is increasing.

“An analysis of Home Office figures reveals that only 9.7 per cent of all ‘serious woundings’, including stabbings, that are reported to the police result in a conviction. For robberies the figure falls to 8.9 per cent and for rape, it is 5.5 per cent.”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2006/may/28/ukcrime.immigrationpolicy

Let’s put it this way – Damian Green was very fortunate when he was arrested for being in possession of leaked, deeply secret Home Office information about immigration.

He could have been carrying a table leg or been in bed when the Police arrived to arrest him:

“Officer cleared after killing a man carrying a table leg”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2005/may/13/ukguns.hughmuir

“Three Sussex officers avoid prosecution over fatal operation and subsequent cover-up which was damned by two separate inquiries

“In a small Sussex seaside town, at 20 past four in the morning, James Ashley was sleeping naked in his bed. Seconds later, he was on the floor, shot dead at a range of 18ins, by a police officer using a powerful Heckler & Koch carbine.”
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/this-britain/secrets-lies-and-.htmlit-after-police-shoot-naked-man-in-bed-685719.html

“No police marksmen will be prosecuted over the fatal shooting of barrister Mark Saunders in a south London siege, the Crown Prosecution Service said.”
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/london/8262629.stm

“Jean Charles de Menezes (7 January 1978 – 22 July 2005) was a Brazilian national shot dead by police at Stockwell tube station in London, England. He was shot in the head seven times at close range by Metropolitan Police officers who misidentified him as a suicide bomber about to explode a device on the London Underground. Within hours police discovered that he was not involved in any terrorist act, but was actually an innocent victim.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Charles_de_Menezes

CCTV and audio recordings which should in prinicple safeguard the public are routinely lost, destroyed or withheld, or found to be mysteriously malfunctioning when there is a death in custody, or indeed any complaint of police misconduct.

Also, while kettling and lack of conflict management are down to training, removing ID has no excuse. Those who have removed their ID should be disciplined.