Over at OurKingdom, Guy Aitchison has posted again on the news that Labour is considering making the retention of DNA samples ‘an issue’ for the election. The latest twist in the tale is that Alan Johnson is reputedly scuppering a compromise with the Conservatives on this issue in order to make it something that Labour can campaign on. The Tories are to be branded as the party that is friendly to burglars.

In a matter of weeks the Labour party leadership will be expecting party members to get out there and make the case for a Labour government on the doorstep. How many in the party agree with the government on DNA sampling and the ‘Tories are friends of burglars’ line?

Let’s remind ourselves what is being proposed. Back in 1995 the police set up a national DNA database. Anyone who was arrested was liable to have a DNA sample taken. This was then put on the database. When a crime is committed, and there is DNA evidence, the police can check it against the database.

The European Court ruled in 2008 that the practice of holding indefinitely samples taken from those not convicted of a crime is in violation of the European Convention of Human Rights (specifically in violation of Article 8 which upholds the citizen’s right to ‘a private life’).

The government responded, somewhat reluctantly and hesitatingly, by proposing to modify the original policy. Under what we may call the Johnson proposal, those arrested but not convicted of a crime will have their samples removed from the national database – but only after six years.

The Johnson proposal has the advantage that, in one respect, it may make it easier for the police to solve crimes. And this, of course, is the basis of the charge that opponents of the proposal are thereby ‘friendly’ to criminals.

But there are at least two strong reasons to oppose the proposal other than sympathy for criminals continue reading… »

Over the weekend, I was fortunate enough to receive a review copy of Spirit Level films’ excellent new documentary ‘The Fear Factory‘, which I promise I’ll get around to reviewing for Lib Con sometime in the next few days.

In anticipation of that review and in keeping with my recent post on dodgy election leaflets, its been brought to my attention that the Lib Dems have been actively fear-mongering is some of their recent leaflet, the most egregious of which has to be this effort, which is being delivered to households in Haringey.

Why they don’t just go the whole hog and stick out a leaflet featuring Freddie Kruger and Jason Voorhees I don’t know but for what its worth the leaflet makes the following claims:

One in five thugs who are caught carrying a gun or a knife are let off with a caution. This news once again exposes Labour’s complete failure on crime.

Gordon Brown’s Roll of Shame:

- One in five criminals caught carrying a weapon only get a caution
- Only one crime in a hundred ends with a punishment in court
- Two violent crimes committed every single minute

A little over 18 months ago, a friend of mine left work at about half past six in the evening and started to walk home.

He managed to walk only about 40 yards or so from his workplace when he was stopped by two PCSOs and subjected to a search, during which he was found to be carrying a Stanley knife.

As a result of this, he was issued with a fixed penalty notice for £80.

According to leaflets like this, my friend is both a ‘thug’ and a ‘criminal’, after all he is one of the one in five who ‘got off’ without being dragged in court after he found to be carrying a knife.

As you might well have guessed already, there’s an important detail I’ve yet to mention that casts this story is a somewhat different light, and that detail happens to be the nature of his place of work…

…A local hardware store and builder’s merchants.

My friend isn’t a thug and he certainly isn’t a criminal. He’s was just unlucky enough to forget to take the Stanley knife he uses as work out his pocket on a day on which he ran into a couple of PCSOs on a day who were were on the make and looking for any opportunity the could find to dish out a few tickets.

In fact, he swears to this day that the two PCSOs actually watched him leaving the shop and that that’s the only reason he was pulled over and searched – after all he’s in his late twenties and was wearing his normal work clothes at the time.

So my question to Lynne Featherstone, in whose constituency this leaflet is being delivered is…

Would you like to explain to be my friend exactly why your party is calling him a ‘thug’ and ‘criminal’?

Is Alan Johnson right to accuse the Tories of deceit over their recent claim that violent crime has risen by 44% since 1998?

Of course he is, in fact he doesn’t go anything like far enough in his accusations. Not only are the Tories wilfully misrepresenting the evidence provided by the police recorded crime statistics, but they are also pursuing a deliberate and wholly mendacious strategy of seeking to undermine public confidence in the British Crime Survey, a point that Johnson has, as yet, failed to put over forcefully enough.

As evidence, let’s refer back to an article by the Shadow Justice Minister, Dominic Grieve, which was published by the Telegraph in January 2009 under the title ‘Fiddling statistics is no way to restore public confidence”.  In the article, Grieve makes the following claims about the British Crime Survey.

The BCS is an obviously poor measure of violent crime. It does not count homicide offences, rape and multiple assaults. It also excludes some of the most vulnerable victims of violence, including: the homeless, elderly people in care homes, students in digs and – until this year – all children. In fact, we know that police recorded violent crime has nearly doubled since 1997.

Grieve’s suggestion that the BCS is an ‘obviously poor measure of violent crime’ because it does not count homicide offences is as risible as it is boneheaded. The clue here is in the name, British Crime Survey, which explains precisely why it doesn’t count homicide offences – you need to be alive in order to complete the survey form. In any case, homicides accounted for only 662 of the 2.1 million violent offences that the BCS estimated as having taken place in 2008/9, a mere 0.03 percent of the total number of offences. continue reading… »

The “Fear Factory” is a new film about the criminal justice system. Watch the trailer or find out more here. This is a guest post by Joanna Natasegara.

On releasing “The Fear Factory” at a closed screening in Central London last week, the Bulger case was history – the hair-trigger cause of the youth justice crisis which the film shows unfolding over the past two decades. This weeks events have shown it’s more real, more relevant than ever – and more worryingly, that we’ve learnt little from the past.

Despite knowing full well that a punitive climate, stoked by a distorted fear of crime has lead to a doubling of our prison population and rates of re-offending as high as 90%, our educated friends in Westminster have done nothing to change this. So why not? Could it be because fear actually helps them… ? continue reading… »

When the Metropolitan Police shot the innocent Jean Charles de Menezes in the head, seven times, we didn’t get the truth. We got anonymous sources briefing the media that de Menezes had run away from police, that he’d leaped the barriers at Stockwell tube, that he’d been wearing a heavy coat thought to be concealing a suicide bomb. It was all spin – or as it used to be called, lies.

Luckily for the police it distracted the press for a long time – at least until an inquest was finally able to white-wash the case.

When a Met officer struck newspaper vendor Ian Tomlinson with a baton and pushed him to the ground without provocation, we didn’t get the truth. After Tomlinson collapsed and died, the police briefed the media that Tomlinson was a rowdy protestor, that he suffered a heart attack, and that G20 protestors pelted an ambulance with bottles as it struggled to reach the dying man.

It was all lies – but almost all the MSM swallowed it, at least until The Guardian obtained damaging video evidence to the contrary.

So we know that the police lie when they mess up. By now, you’d hope the media would be alive to their tricks. Sadly not. continue reading… »

The editor of Conservative Home, Tim Montgomerie, is, I understand from the Financial Times, a “committed Christian”.

He is presumably familiar with the way in which the parable of the Good Samaritan warns us away from racist stereotyping, and perhaps also of the anti-racist message in the episode of the moneychangers in the temple.

He is also, according to the FT, a key influence on the thinking of the Conservative party hierarchy, his blog supposedly reflective of Conservative grassroots opinion.

In this guise, Montgomerie is now proposing that each Tory leaflet before the election should strip the content down to three key messages. Here they are:

(1) something on the economy, emphasising how Brown has failed on controlling debt, cutting waste and regulating the banks;

(2) something on crime and immigration; and

(3) something on protecting the NHS and the most vulnerable.

(My emphasis)

So Montgomerie is suggesting that around a third of the Tories’ overall ‘message-time’ should be spent conflating the issues of crime and immigration.

For him, and presumably for his readership, it is perfectly reasonable to insinuate/imply/spell out that crime is a problem because there are immigrants, and immigrants are a problem because there is crime.

In its way, this is actually much more shocking than Rod Liddle’s outrageous claims, because however revolting they are there is always the sense that it’s the desire to outrage that drives the racist message, rather than the other way round.

But Mongomerie’s casual, perhaps even unthinking racism, with its apparent willingness to victimise a whole section of an already victimised population (let’s not get into who’s an immigrant) is simply disgusting.

And this man calls himself a Christian.

Guest post by Giles Wilkes

Los Angeles, a city of some 4 million inhabitants, is enjoying a blindingly good few years for crime. It looks like LA might have only 230 murders this year. Less than one per day! They may have to outsource their dramatic reality cop shows. Nirvanna, for the Los Angelenos. Which means a murder rate of only 6 per 100,000.

This trend has been widespread in the US since the mid 1990s, so that now one or two cities even seem to have a rate as low as the UK. Yes, after a couple of decades of improvement, the USA might aspire to having a murder rate in one or two of its many cities as low as the UK as a whole.

Incidentally, this question naturally leads to another one: if the UK is so much more murder-free than its Anglo Saxon cousin, why is it apparently so much more violent? continue reading… »

Last night the Muslim Council of Britain held a special closed-meeting of parliamentarians, journalists, police, public servants, community representatives, academics and, erm, me. The topic of discussion was Tackling Islamophobia: Reducing Street Violence Against British Muslims.

The event was timely. “Since 9/11 anti-Muslim hate crimes appear to have become more prevalent than racist hate crimes where black and Asian Londoners are the victims.” (PDF) Testimony from a range of academic experts and politicians substantiated the claim that street violence against Muslims is rising.

Speakers stressed that there are “tangible links between Islamophobia or anti-Muslim bigotry in both mainstream political and media discourse…extremist nationalist discourse, and anti-Muslim hate crimes”. Peter Oborne – a journalist on the Conservative right by his own admission – described how after 7/7 he became aware that journalists in mainstream newspapers got away with telling lies and distorting facts about Islam and Muslims on a regular basis. Indeed he collected his findings and took them to Channel 4, who turned them into a special episode of Dispatches. This sort of dishonesty – he said – would not be tolerated if it were directed at any other minority group. Yet the smearing of British Muslims, usually playing on fears of terrorism, is standard fare in the British media.
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Calls for changes to the Dangerous Dogs Act are becoming strident and oh-so-political (step forward Kit Malthouse). I’ve been working with the Dogs Trust and other groups on this article about the act and perceptions of dangerous dogs:

I’ve owned dogs all my life: labradors, retrievers, yorkies and a large, lovable, hairy number whose father could have been anything. “Wow,” people would say when she walked past. “What’s that?” I have a pit breed dog, see. I wanted to give a good home to a dog that might otherwise not have found one.

It’s been nearly 20 years since the dangerous dogs act made it into law – and to the top of our (rather competitive) rankings for misguided legislation. Neither people, nor dogs have come out in front with the DDA: those who know and care for dogs and people are – well, baying for change.
continue reading… »

Police corruption might not appear to have much in common with guitar-based rock bands. But what is beyond dispute is that both were so much better in the 1970s.

Look at the Met’s Obscene Publications Squad, for instance. Those guys would not have stooped to fit up whatever back then constituted the equivalent of a website designer for a few hundred poxy quid. Why bother with stuff like that, when they were busy trousering millions in bribes from criminals like Jimmy Humphreys, the porn king of Soho?

When Commander Ken Drury went down for eight years in 1977, Mr Justice Mars-Jones was clear that he had headed a regime of “corruption on a scale which beggars description”, and the judge was not wrong on this one.

But Ali Dizaei is to his predecessors what the Noisettes are to the Pistols or Zep. His efforts to frame Waad al Baghdadi obviously brand him a boorish alpha male little bully. But the West Midlands Serious Crime Squad in its paddy-bashing hey-day would have laughed him off as an obvious lightweight.
continue reading… »

David Cameron is walking a tight rope between shedding the “nasty party” image while still holding on to the nasty bastards who only vote Tory for that reason.

So it shouldn’t be too surprising that lovely wuverly fluffy compassionate Conservative David Cameron said something so boneheaded on burglary in the wake of the jailing and subsequent release of Munir Hussein.

The moment a burglar steps over your threshold, and invades your property, with all the threat that gives to you, your family and your livelihood, I think they leave their human rights outside

At the time Sunny argued that he thought the law stood fine as it was but sympathised with Conservative attempts to strengthen it in favour of householders who have their house broken into. Ultimately he supported his friend’s mantra ‘If you don’t want your ass kicked then don’t break into my house.’

Luckily for Mr Hundal, his friend and all of us there is no human right which prevents your arse getting kicked if you break into someone’s house.
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contribution by Kevin Blowe

With the police adopting an increasingly confrontational and often violent approach to maintaining ‘order’ at public protests, it has increasingly become essential for protesters to: have trained legal observers present, collect information that may be helpful in court and assist activists who are arrested or need medical attention.

With little confidence in public bodies like the Independent Police Complaints Commission and to try and ensure that attention remains focused on the policing of protest, four experienced organisations have set up the Police Monitoring Network to train and collate information from ‘police monitors’ at demonstrations around the country.

Members of the network include the legal team from Climate Camp, FITwatch (who monitoring oppressive surveillance by police ‘forward intelligence’ teams), the Legal Defence and Monitoring Group (who provide legal observers at demonstrations and grew out of the Trafalgar Square Defendants Campaign and Poll Tax Prisoners Support Group) and Newham Monitoring Project (an east London community organisation that has supported black communities to challenge police misconduct since 1980).

They are supported by the civil liberties organisation, the Campaign against Criminalising Communities (CAMPACC), and by solicitors with expertise in civil actions against the police.
continue reading… »

Yesterday it emerged that a former city worker living in a £500,000 home in East Sussex may have killed her own two children aged 2 and 3. They were found locked in the back of her Nissan and the post-mortem said they asphyxiated.

But the main point is this. According to the Daily Mail, Mrs Donnison and her husband had just split up. In fact, “the couple’s marriage had been falling apart for a long time”, adding extra strains on the woman.

No doubt if Iain Duncan Smith’s tax break for married couples had been already in place the two would still be together. Under the Tories’ proposals, with children under 3 the Donnisons would have been entitled to a tax allowance.

And surely an extra twenty or thirty quid extra a month would have helped them patch their differences and nipped family arguments in the bud.

Yesterday I wrote about a similarly disturbing case.
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contribution by Left Outside

Last year a girl died following allegedly consuming a mixture of Ketamine and Mephedrone.

A following coroner’s report established that there were no drugs in her system and that she died of broncho-pneumonia following a streptococcal A infection.

The reporting of this at the time should have been described as scandalously irresponsible by any sensible definition of the term.

continue reading… »

I picked this up on the local TV news tonight, but it bears repeating for anyone who hasn’t seen it:

A mosque in Stoke-on-Trent was sprayed with graffiti referring to an upcoming English Defence League rally.

Mosque administrators discovered the daubed message at 0630 GMT on Saturday and had removed it within two hours.

Staffordshire Police said a criminal damage investigation was under way into the incident in the Normacot area.

A police spokesman said: “The community haven’t reacted to it, so it hasn’t achieved what the person who did it wanted to achieve.”

Whether the perpetrator is, in fact, associated with the EDL or linked to another far right group with a vested interest in stirring up trouble is anything but clear at this point.

What is clear, however, is that a deliberate attempt was made to draw the local Muslim community into a confrontation with EDL supporters; one that, fortunately, fell flat on its face.

I have no idea yet whether Alan Duncan is an asset or a liability to the cause of penal reform, but he certainly appears to be an ally, and is the author of two cracking soundbites:

Ms Crook wrote: ‘Alan Duncan said that the slogan “prison works” was repulsively simplistic. Anyone in politics should work to improve society and there was no more useful target than offenders.’
[...]
Ms Crook added: ‘He said, “Lock ’em up is Key Stage 1 politics.”’ Key Stage 1 is the first part of the primary-school curriculum studied by children as young as five.

To which the Mail has helpfully editorialised:

Suggesting that an old-style tough Tory approach to crime is worthy of a five-year-old will infuriate the party’s grassroots activists.

Well, if they’re going to act like five-year-olds…
continue reading… »

Despite the snarky title, I don’t want to spend too much time raking over the obvious parallels between Cameron’s shameless attempt to gain political capital out of the ongoing trial of two young boys for what is, by any standards, a staggeringly brutal assault on two other children of the same age, and the actions of a certain former shadow Home Secretary who pulled much the same stunt 17 years ago.

The main lesson is all this, such as it is, is that politicians will happily say almost anything if they think there’s an extra vote or two in it.

That said, Cameron’s efforts to jump on this particular bandwagon do serve to reinforce the general impression that both he and his campaign team are desperately inattentive, woefully out of touch and only casually acquainted with real world.
continue reading… »

If you thought the Tories’ ‘broken society’ meme was bit dystopic, this will really have you reaching for the bottle. According to Zac Goldsmith, Conservative candidate for Richmond Park and everyone’s favourite uber-green non-dom, we are no longer living in a civilised country. Can’t wait to see that on his election posters.

In a post which implicitly supports euthanasia, Goldsmith contrasts the seemingly lenient sentence given to a convicted paedophile with a seemingly harsh sentence for a woman who ended the life of her beloved but brain damaged son.

The problem, you see, is those pesky “sanctimonious liberal commentators” who “will argue that the mark of a civilised society is its willingness to apply justice in the face of public opinion. For them, this mother is a law-breaker, just like Sweeney, and she should be punished as such”.

Now, if I was going to write about how two court cases reveal what an uncivilised country we are, I’d probably think twice before accusing anyone else of sanctimony.
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The Press Association today reports:

Tory leader David Cameron will warn that Britain is in a “social recession” even deeper than its economic one as he steps up pre-election campaigning. And the Tory leader will point to the torture of two young boys as an extreme symptom of what he dubs Labour’s “moral failure” as he launches a raft of social policies.

“When parents are rewarded for splitting up, when professionals are told that it’s better to follow rules than do what they think is best, when single parents find they take home less for working more, when young people learn that it pays not to get a job, when the kind-hearted are discouraged from doing good in their community, is it any wonder our society is broken? We can’t go on like this.”

Mr Cameron will point to the brutal attack on the nine and 11-year-old boys in Edlington, South Yorkshire, by brothers aged 10 and 11 to reinforce his case.

It’s beggars belief that Cameron thinks it is right for a party leader to shamelessly exploit such a brutal crime so he can simply take cheap political swipes. Does he plan to strengthen legislation and provision for domestic violence? Nope, nothing about that in here.

Perhaps he is advocating that every single family in the country is placed under supervision so nothing like this could ever happen? It’s a possibility but the details of any policies are still vague.

Oh wait, the murder of Jamie Bulger took place under a Conservative government. Perhaps that was the start of this “social recession”? I suppose under a Tory government there will no violent crime ever. Right?

I disagreed with a whole heap of stuff in Ellie Levenson’s “The Noughtie Girl’s Guide to Feminism” when it came out last year (see my Mswoman comments under this CiF piece for specific examples).

But apart from her odious assertion that “we do women an injustice when we say that rape is the worst thing that can happen to a woman. It is, after all, just a penis.” top of the list was her claim, repeated in the Independent, that in some contexts so-called rape ‘jokes’ can not only be deemed to be acceptable, but they can also in fact be funny.

Because they’re not. Ever. They never have been and they never will be. They’re not funny when Ricky Gervais tells them, and they’re not funny when a Tory Councillor tells them either.
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