Palau

The inevitable report that Metropolitan police Drug Squad officers allegedly waterboarded a suspect by repeatedly flushing his head down the loo has got me wondering. Has anyone measured British coppers’ family jewels or done a survey of how many own ’24’ box sets?

I ask these odd questions because this American style of paramilitary, gung-ho, taser-wielding, meathead policing, given full rein by New Labour and ACPO, is now the norm in the UK. If this style of policing isn’t official policy, as senior officers aver, where is it coming from?

It’s coming from somewhere and it’s getting worse, as fraud lawyer Robert Hunter writes in The Times’ Law Central blog. Post-arrest policing is undergoing a similar Law & Order-style metamorphosis and police are going outside traditional PACE-based British interview techniques, ignoring procedure and using US style, ‘3rd degree’ interrogation to intimidate suspects into confessing:

Interview techniques are now a lot better and fairer than they used to be, with much more emphasis on respecting the interviewee and finding out what he has to say before challenging him.

Yet, despite the improvement, some studies suggest that on rare occasions police officers in the UK have resorted to what is known as “American-style” tactics to obtain a confession.

In the US, interrogating a suspect — as opposed to interviewing them — is more acceptable.

The difference between an interrogation and an interview is all-important. Interrogation is not designed to find the truth. Rather, as one FBI law enforcement bulletin put it, an interrogation is “less of a conversation than a monologue by investigators in which they provide suspects with acceptable reasons to confess”.

[…]

the most influential is called the “Reid nine-steps”.

Under this method, the interrogator appears in no doubt about the suspect’s guilt and avoids any discussion of the evidence. Rather, he presents himself as a friendly figure, trying to do the suspect a favour by allowing him the opportunity to give his side of the story. In fact, the suspect will find it hard to get a word in edgeways.

The suspect will not be allowed to deny the crime more than once, as repeated denials are believed to be harmful to the prospect of obtaining a confession. The interrogator will cut him off: “Joe, don’t interrupt me. Hear me out.”

The key is to make the crime seem more “moral” than it would otherwise appear. In a claim for false expenses, for example, the interrogator may suggest that everyone else was doing it: “Joe, it’s not as if you were doing something your colleagues weren’t doing too.”

Read more…

Nice allusion to corrupt MPs there.

If only we were seeing prosecutions of false expense claims. Even an investigation would do. But it’ll never happen, will it? Unlike, the young woman who was electronically tagged, given a 2 month curfew and made to pay massive court costs for the hideous crime of leaving her 15 week kitten alone for two days, MPs will never be interviewed or even interrogated, let alone prosecuted. As much as quite a few MPs would benefit from heaving their head flushed repeatedly down the toilet, the Metropolitan police, you’ll have been unsurprised to learn, announced earlier this week they’ve no intent to prosecute a single one, no matter how blatant their dishonesty.

It’s easy to explain this apparent imbalance; kittens are cute, therefore meanness to kittens is a heinous crime. Democracy isn’t fwuffy and you can’t rub its adorable ikkle belly, so stealing from the public purse isn’t a crime at all, let alone a heinous one.

But I digress. Back to the purported inadequacy in the trouser department or otherwise of the authoritarian plod. Somewhere on the internets somewhere in the mists of time is an anecdote that the smallest personal equipment in the world can be found in the the police showers. It’s not the only version of the urban myth; occasionally the story is from an emergency room nurse who sees police officers personal bits and can testify as to their miniscularity. The story’s details vary, the point being that authoritarian behaviour is motivated by a deep sense of inadequacy and a feeling of powerlessness brought on by having tiny genitals, although that theory stumbles more than a bit when it comes to authoritarian women cops.

Whether there’s any actual data to back up the small johnson theory, who knows. But it has that mysterious feeling of rightness about it. But to that I’d add two more tropes; first ‘men are all just boys really’ and secondly ‘some cops think they’re in a movie’ and for the latter I advance as evidence Hot Fuzz

Many little boys spend years running round a playground making ricochet noises, replicating shootouts and car chases. That kind of play’s what little boys are encouraged to do. Some never stop, but some grow up and get to do it for real, with state approval.

You only have to look at police toys; they do love their toys. There are acres of website full of nifty paramilitary police kit and gadgets for PCs to spend their pocket-money on. British PCs look like GI Joes in navy blue, carrying what looks like as much equipment on their belts as an infantryman in Iraq, with only the flak jacket, helmet and rifle are lacking to complete the resemblance. But I wouldn’t be at all surprised if those aren’t already on order from some supplier with a mate in ACPO or the Home Office.

It’s the playground all over again, only bigger, better and with the chance to act out all your revenge fantasies on people you dislike, like those you think are better endowed in some way or who have better toys than you. You get to imitate for real every day what you’ve seen on screen and since what you see is brutal paramilitary American policing, as interpreted and amplified by a Hollywood desperate to jack up ratings, then that’s what you imitate. Given this scenario waterboarding had to happen eventually.

This tv-powered approach to policing may be officially frowned upon by the higher echelons, but for all senior officers’ denials it’s tacitly encouraged when it’s useful to cow the populace. Jean Charles Menesez’ vicious, execution-style, extrajudicial murder, violent arrests of terror detainees, everyday, casual brutalisation of suspects and the gleefully harsh treatment of recent political protests are practical demonstrations that far from being rogues or bad apples bad cops are depressingly common enough to think it’s meant.

All this might lead a casual observer like me to think that some police officers – not all, I hasten to add before I feel a hand on my shoulder, though I’d posit there’s a fair few – are Peter Pan Plods, childish inadequates who joined the police to get power over others, protofascists who get their notions of law, justice and policing from Hollywood and Rupert Murdoch. Do they also have tiny todgers? It’s all entirely unscientific and based on no data at all, but I’m convinced.