September 28, 2009 The British police forget what they are for Daily Mail, 28 September 2009 Against a backdrop of concern about the impact of looming public expenditure cuts, the panel were asked to name one thing they thought the police might usefully stop doing. I suggested they should drop their obsession with ‘diversity’ and, rather than pursuing people under ‘hate crime’ laws for giving offence to others, should concentrate on tackling the yobbery on housing estates where besieged residents felt the police had abandoned them. It is fair to say my remarks were not greeted with widespread acclaim. Officers seemed stunned that I could challenge the sacred cow of ‘diversity’. As for abandoning the poor, they bridled and claimed that all the terrific things the police were doing in such places weren’t being appreciated — mainly due to the wicked media, which was instead spreading false despondency about how useless the police were. Indeed, other panel members, such as the Chief Inspector of Constabulary, Denis O’Connor, and the Government’s ‘yobbery czar’ Louise Casey, seemed principally concerned about how the police could better ‘get their message across’ to the public about all the whizzy initiatives they were offering them. I thought about this discussion when I read of the appalling case of Fiona Pilkington, who was driven to set fire to herself and her 18 year-old daughter Francecca in her car as a result of a decade of harassment they had suffered at the hands of local yobs. The details of this awful case make you weep. For more than ten years, the Pilkingtons lived under siege in Barwell, Leicestershire, from a gang of thugs who pelted the house with stones, set fences on fire, pushed fireworks through the front door, taunted Francecca, who had a mental age of four, and threatened and assaulted Mrs Pilkington’s son, Anthony, now 19. The inquest has yet to reach its verdict. But the coroner has said the tragedy could have been prevented if the police and council authorities had taken the family’s complaints seriously. And the evidence produced at the inquest was sufficiently horrifying for the Home Secretary to be reportedly planning to highlight the case in his speech to this week’s Labour conference. For although Mrs Pilkington called the police no fewer than 33 times, none of the criminals who were making her life so unbearable was ever charged with a criminal offence. When asked to explain this failure, the police response was astounding. Superintendent Steve Harrod told the inquest that ‘low-level anti-social behaviour is mainly the responsibility of the council’. Come again, Superintendent? So what are the police for? Whatever happened to the first duty of the police to ‘preserve public tranquillity’? No wonder the Home Secretary is spitting tacks. Certainly, the local councils in this case can also be faulted in failing to share information about this family’s situation. But at one point Anthony was marched at knife-point into a shed and threatened with an iron bar. If this isn’t a police responsibility, what is? Many, many other unfortunate people are being forced to live in a similar state of siege from local yobs, with the police unable or unwilling to end the attacks. Other police forces, accused of ignoring the plight of terrorised residents, have claimed that the hurdles erected by prosecutors mean they can’t get criminals to court. There may be something in that. But to Superintendent Harrod it appears that the police can only prevent crime if the criminal justice system is avoided altogether. The police, he said, had to avoid youngsters being ‘criminalised’ because if they went to jail they were more likely to re-offend. But, of course, by not going to jail these thugs were free to carry on offending. This is surely obvious — but not to those ideologues for whom imprisonment, rather than crime, has become the evil to be avoided. So as a result of the kind of half-baked propaganda from trendy criminologists with which today’s police officers are indoctrinated on their training courses, young thugs are left free to terrorise a vulnerable mother to the point where she is in such despair she kills herself and her daughter. But now look at what the police are investigating with unalloyed zeal. Two Christian hoteliers, Ben and Sharon Vogelenzang, were charged with using ‘threatening, abusive or insulting words’ which were ‘religiously aggravated’ after having a heated conversation about religion with a Muslim guest at their hotel. We don’t know what was said. Maybe it was no more than a heated argument; maybe the Vogelenzangs were indeed offensive and unpleasant. But however horrible they may have been, how on earth can this be a proper matter for the police? Similarly, last week a senior diplomat, Rowan Laxton, was found guilty of racially aggravated harassment after he shouted ‘F*****g Israelis’ and ‘F*****g Jews’ and that Israeli soldiers should be ‘wiped off the face of the earth’ while watching television reports of the Israeli attack on Gaza as he exercised in a gym. Laxton was guilty of bigotry, to be sure, and should lose his job — and his membership of the gym. But prosecuting him was surely oppressive. If bigotry is to be treated as a criminal offence, it’s not just young thugs on housing estates who would be criminalised but vast swathes of the population. Certainly, the police should step in where hateful speech is likely to incite people to commit criminal acts. But, as often as not, such incitement doesn’t lead to prosecution, while what is no more than an insult can bring down the heavy hand of the law. Criminal offence has been redefined in such cases as the giving of offence. Bad ideas are thus considered worse than bad deeds. Worse than that, those who try to stop bad things from happening — such as public-spirited individuals who try to stop acts of vandalism — find as often as not that they are the ones who end up in the dock. Although it did not involve the police, this kind of grotesque injustice is what happened to Carol Hill, the dinner lady at Great Tey primary school, near Colchester in Essex. After she revealed to a pupil’s parents that their daughter had been tied up and whipped by four boys –an assault from which Mrs Hill had rescued the child — the school sacked her for ‘breach of confidentiality’. Why are bullies being let off and innocent people being bullied in this way? It is surely the outcome of a culture distorted by the warped values of our intelligentsia and political class. Obsessed by the impossible aim of eradicating all forms of prejudice or discrimination, it is also gripped by the belief that all punishment or retribution is a form of vengeance and must be avoided at all costs. The combination of these two beliefs has meant that yobs who terrorise people to death must never be jailed, while those who cause offence to groups that tick the right boxes must be prosecuted. It is also a means for the incompetent to avoid being held accountable for the failings on their watch. Right and wrong, victim and bully are being turned upside-down — and the police, who hold the line for a society’s values, are now in the very front of the charge |
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