Policing – Page 23

Arms and The Man

Published on August 8, 2007

When it comes to the arms trade the British government are the deranged offspring of a Ferengi and Franz Kafka, insatiable greed and bureacratic ineptitude combined in one nightmare package.

Here’s a nice encapsulation of the sick situation by activist/comedian Mark Thomas at the 2007 Birmingham Police and Security Fair :

[…]

In the middle of the hall was Mr Xia, a Chinese man with three electro-shock weapons on display for all to see. He demonstrated them for me while I filmed him. A bargain at £3.25 each. At least, I thought, it shouldn’t be hard to find a cop at the police and security fair. How foolishly naive. The Association of Chief of Police Officers had a stall around the corner from Mr Xia, but with no one there. The nearest Customs officer, I was told, was at the airport. The closest thing I found to an on-duty officer were two life-size cardboard cutout cops, on sale as a deterrent to thieves. Eventually, I found the fair organiser’s office.

Mr Xia was arrested, and two weeks later I got a phone call from Solihull CID. “Mr Xia has pleaded guilty to the possession of prohibited firearms,” said the voice, “but I think it is illegal to try and sell these weapons.”

“You would be right.”

“And I think Mr Xia was trying to sell them.”

“He was at a trade fair.”

“Would you give us a statement and let us see the film you shot at the fair?”

“Yes, I would be happy to.”

“And one more thing – if you wouldn’t mind, could you bring up copies of the relevant legislation?”

More…

While it’s long been an open secret in Britain that our national earnings are underpinned by international arms sales – we make 46 billion a year out of it – what’s not often mentioned is that we’re also one of the biggest enablers of the worldwide and domestic trade in illegal small arms and torture equipment.

The British government’s attitude to arms sales is hypocritical to the nth degree. On one hand it subscribes to the “Guns bad, mmmkay?” school of thought for domestic consumption; on the other it allows illegal arms and torture weapons to be sold under its nose to pretty much anyone from at home and abroad, so long as they have the money.

You’d be surprised at who has a financial interest in the arms and repression industry:

45 UK UNIVERSITIES own over £15m worth of shares in the arms trade. Three institutions – University College London (UCL), Trinity Hall Cambridge and the University of Liverpool – each own shares worth over £1million.

British academics, MPs, police and media alike bemoan the growing gun culture that leads to the murders of so many young men and shed crocodile tears even as they condemn: “Tsk tsk”, they say. “Oh dear, black drugs and gun culture, tragic isn’t it? Oh well, at least it’s not our children.”

Yet while all that international money is sloshing around London they’ll happily turn a blind eye either by passivity or ineptitude,to the international gun culture that is the Daddy of the gun culture in our cities.

As a spokesperson for the University of Liverpool explains; “The university has a legal obligation to maximise returns on its investments as it is accountable to its beneficiaries. We would not choose to invest in arms if other opportunities to fulfil our financial obligations were equally available.”

Oh well, then, that’s fine. Profit trumps morals, my duh.

It’s a sad fact that in our post-imperial and industrial days of decline we are a fading, insignificant offshore island in a big scary world. Our only remaining diplomatic bargaining chips are a] guns and b] money. These days we can only wield power in the world by

a] enabling, supporting and protecting the international trade in arms and weapons of repression, come what may and

b] by having a whole city full of handy banks for managing the subsequent profits and lots of accountants and lawyers to evade any inconvenient legislation (that’s when they’re not actually orchestrating it on a massive scale).

and

c] By knowing where the bodies are buried. *Cough* Banco Ambrosiano.*Cough*

that last’s influence probably outweights the first two.

Mind you, the relevant laws are such an absolute dogs breakfast as to be almost totally ineffectual anyway and of course lets not forget that we in our turn are mere passive instruments of US foreign policy, just another tool to be used by Washington to do politics by the back door.

The voters have expressed their justified disgust with this hypocrisy by demonstrating peacefully yet forcefully, only to find themselves subjected to the most draconian of the post-911 terror laws. A state of terrorist emergency was first declared in metropolitan London in Feb 2001, but no-one knew until the law was used not against terrorists but against legitimate arms trade prorestors.

The Metropolitan Police are using anti-terrorist legislation against protesters demonstrating at Europe’s biggest annual arms fair which was opened today by Geoff Hoon, UK defence minister, in London’s Docklands. The police have invoked Section 44 of Terrorism Act 2000 which allows assistant chief constables (or the commander in the case of the Metropolitan police) to authorise extended stop and search where they

“consider it expedient for the prevention of acts of terrorism”

Section 44 was also used extensively during the protests and peace camp at Fairford RAF airbase in the build-up to the Iraq War (1). This is contrary to clear undertakings from the Home Secretary to the House of Commons that Section 44 notices would only be used where there is good reason to suspect terrorist activity. Protestors have already won a judicial review of police mass detention tactics during the Fairford protests (2), while Liberty has said it will seek a judicial review of the Met Police’s use of Section 44 in the Docklands.

There has been much made in the press of how the police have “braced themselves for violent protests” (e.g. The Guardian, 6 September 2003) and the £1 million pound cost of the policing operation. Sixteen arrests were reported on the evening news, while inside, cluster bombs, which the exhibition organisers had last week said should not be included, were among the exhibits.

They lost their case.

That that state of emergency hasn’t been lifted since and it was what eventually resulted in the effective ‘shoot to kill’ policy that then allowed the extra-judicial murder of Jean-Charles Menezes by trigger happy police.

Which makes the persistence of anti arms-trade protestors all the more admirable.

A nondescript large industrial unit in Lenton, Nottingham had its anonymity taken away by local Disarm DSEI / anti-arms trade protesters on Tuesday when they descended on Heckler and Koch’s UK headquarters.

H&K are the world’s second largest maker of pistols and machine-guns for soldiers and death squads across the world, including Turkey, Iran, Mexico, Thailand, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Burma/Myanmar. Their weapons are in use in over 90 countries, including by British police, and the company has evaded EU arms controls to sell weapons to war-zones in Sudan, Indonesia, Sri Lanka and Sierra Leone. Over half a million people are killed worldwide by small-arms annually.

A productive bit of research led a couple of intrepid investigators to buzz the company and ask “Excuse me, is this the Nottingham Small Arms Factory?” Although they didn’t get a response as such, their suspicions were confirmed when armed police turned up minutes later and detained them for 45 minutes under the Terrorism Act.

The subsequent demo made it clear that gun merchants are not welcome in the city (which, by the way, has the highest gun crime rate in the UK). The peaceful protest obviously hit a raw nerve as the forty or so people in attendance attracted an almost equal number of cops, including members of the (London-based political squad) Forward Intelligence Team.

Local rag, the Nottingham Evening Post, showed just how weak its commitment to reporting is when they pulled the story from page 2 after being told by a police press officer that it would be ‘irresponsible’ for the media to publish the arms company’s address (…yes, so obviously it’s: NSAF Ltd, Unit 3, Easter Park, Lenton Lane, Nottingham NG7 2PX). See http://disarmdsei.evey.org

It’s easy to see a grand establishment conspiracy in all this but I’m inclined to think it’s more a typical mixture of jaw-dropping venality, sheer ineptitude and passive complicity.

Or am I?

When you think of a world in the grip of accelerating climate change, potential social disorder and subject to an increasing scramble, even to the death, for temperate land and resources and you consider how few natural resources we actually have, then controlling the weapons of repression and the gold begins to look less like conspiracy and more like an actual strategy.

Looked at in that light the arms traders’re doing our young a favour by training them in weapons skills for the the apocalyptic future. You could even say it’s a public service.

See what I mean about Kafka and the Ferengi…..

Taking A Bite Out of ID Crime

Published on August 4, 20071 Comment

Look, I is a poodle! (I can has yummy alpaca treat now?)

Poodle’s ID stolen

A prize-winning poodle from North Wales has become the latest victim of online identity theft.

Details of the two-year-old poodle, named Afonwen Welch Fusilier, were posted on the internet by proud owner Lynne Day who was keen to show off her dashing hound.

But a crook pilfered the details from the site and is passing the dog off as his own, according the the North Wales Post.

He claims that Afonwen Welch Fusilier – pet name Blue – has given birth to puppies, despite the real dog being male.

And the mystery man, who calls himself Henry Daf and whose registered address turns out to be a Glasgow graveyard, is touting the phantom pups to potential buyers for £1,000 each.

The scam was spotted by Annette Connolly-Read, of Hounslow, London, who was looking for a poodle on a dog sellers’ website and came across the mystery Afonwen pups.

Blue last year won at the Midlands Counties Canine Society Show and the North West Poodle Club, and competed unsuccessfully at Crufts.

North Wales Police are investigating the scam.

Until I remembered DNA I had visions of North Wales’ bumblingly macho (and racist) police sticking their noses up the arses of a lot of small, ridiculously clipped animals in an effort to sniff out the culprit.

Damn you, scientists, with your clever sciencey science. I was enjoying that mental picture.

Oh Look, Another One

Published on August 1, 2007

How many is that now? I forget – the list of fundy sex offenders is getting so long it’ll soon need its own dedicated server.

Bristol pastor, Christian radio station employee charged with indecent exposure

Published 07/30/2007 By Kacie Dingus Breeding

A Christian radio station employee and Bristol pastor has been charged with indecent exposure as well as DUI and violation of the open container law.

[…]

According to the Johnson City Press article, Tester allegedly pulled up in a blue 2007 Toyota Camry and offered to give Johnson City police officers oral sex when they arrived at 308 S. Belmont Street to investigate a report of indecent exposure.

Tester, allegedly wearing a skirt, then reportedly got out of his car at the Belmont Car Wash and urinated in a wash bay in public view with children present.

A search of Tester’s vehicle reportedly revealed a half-empty pint-sized bottle of vodka and an empty bottle of Oxycodone in the passenger floorboard. Morris said Tester had told him about the painkiller prescription, which he’d said was prescribed due to previous back surgeries.

According to reports, Tester also allegedly admitted to police that he had been drinking and failed all field sobriety tests.

More…

According to commenters at the paper, Tester’s parishioners and listeners are arguing that he was set up by police and that he is in fact so devout and modest that he “wouldn’t even go into a place where people wear shorts”.

I’m no fan of the police but even I’m pushed to imagine why they’d bother to force-feed an obscure fundy Tennessee radio host oxycontin and booze, dress him in a skirt. and make him horny for sweaty, hot yet entirely heterosexual man-love.

Speaking of which, I was criticised on a sex discussion bulletin board recently (this happens when you tag posts ‘sexuality’) for making fun of Vitter The Shitter, which apparently means I’m a prude who’s down on those with alternative sexual preferences.

I suspect the same people would say the same about my continued featuring of fundy sex offenders. For them I’ll say it slowly, calmly and clearly:

IT’S THE HYPOCRISY, STUPID.

[Hat tip goes to Hawthorne Wingnut, which also makes it Comment of The Day.]

The End For The ASBO, But Still No Sense On Drugs

Published on July 28, 20071 Comment

The amusingly-named Ed Balls, Gordon Brown’s former right-hand man and no Secretary of State for Children, Skills and Families says Antisocial Behaviour Orders have been a failure and appears to be trailing a u-turn in policy.

About bloody time. The ASBO, with drugs, poverty and a rampant consumer culture, has helped create a lost generation in Britain that’s way beyond antisocial and accelerating and no-one seens to care.

No-one knows what is to be done and the default policy is just round em up, stick a label on ’em and write them off forever. What’s resulted is a permanent population of excluded youth who live at the margins and pick off what they can, as the law-abiding, knowing the police are useless, pull up their metaphorical drawbridges against what they imagine is a ravening horde of feral youth.

It’s been way past time for a rethink. Could it be? Could a Brown government be prepared to not only dump the ASBO but to rethink their entire youth justice polcy?

I wish I could be that hopeful.

hen Jacqui Smith and 7 other minsitersd admitted their own dopesmoking youth there was an opportunity for a real public coversation and real change – but the cabinet has had a chance to entirely rethink its drugs policy in a radical way and has flunked it, saying to the nations’ youth ” We smoked dope and that was a youthful indiscretion – but you, you’re a criminal”. It then promptly proposied to reclassify cannabis upwards because it was shown that it might cause a propensity to mental illness in the still- growing brains of young Crispin or Emily and stop them getting into Durham or Bristol..

Well, yes, so does binge-drinking at Rock in August or alcopops round the back of the Aldi but heaven forbid Tesco or Sainsbury’s or Allied Domecq or whoever should stop making money from drink sales. This country’s whole public attitude to intoxicating subtsances and their regulation and use is a sick joke.

The most hypocritical thing of all is that the shadow economy of the whole nation is run on drugs money. The government in effect relies on drugs money to supplement the incomes of unemployed youth and stop them from rioting – why else would it expect a teenager living on their own to live on forty quid a week?

But the money that circulates in the drugs ecoinomy on the street doesn’t xtay there and enrich local businesses or families; in a neat reverse of Reaganesque economic theory the wealth trickles up.

I wonder how many of the neighbours in those posh gated communities in Cheshire or Surrey or wherever, that they’ve retreated to to get away from the crime and the druggies and the chavs, know how many of their neighbours are making money, albeit indirectly, from drugs? How many private schools or lucury car dealers, or estate agents are unwittingly laundering drug money when they accept fees from the new rich?

Drugs are the elephant in the roon when it comes to criime, and youth crime in particular. It’s insane the way British people use drugs in private and condemn them in public, all the while consigning a cohort of its own young to social nothingness for supplying them. Where do they think that twenty quid for a teenth went? Into the building society?

Even more insane is that there is a legal drug that does more damage to more people than any amount of drugs, and which is available 24hrs a day with the government even taking a cut of the proceeds.

Until the government gets to grips with the concept of the use, regulation and yes, taxation of intoxicants of whatever nature this growing divide in society between the young urban and exurban poor and the comfortable suburbans and metropolitans will only become even more marked.

But first Labour has to admit to itself, and the British in general have to admit to themselves, their own complicity in the drugs trade, even if it’s only a toke and a movie on a Saturday night or a couple of E’s at a Labour Party Conference fringe do. That joint came from somewhere, it didn’t just miraculously appear.

The nation as a whole has a substance abuse problem, it’s just that some substances are more illegal than others If we don’t want to become a fearful, locked-down society preyed upon by the armed young urban poor we have to stage our own intervention and work out a sensible decriminalisation, use, treatment and regulation policy that doesn’t turn a cohort of each succeeding generation of children into criminals with nothing to lose.

UPDATE

As if to prove my point….

Jacqui Smith, Secretary of State For Hypocrisy

Published on July 19, 2007

In the light of the Home Secretary and six other Labour politicians’ comings out as ‘occasional’ youthful drug users – just ahead of the newspapers doing it for them (and isn’t it funny how they always ‘didn’t like it much’?) I thought I’d I’d repost this on Labour, drugs and hypocrisy from a couple of months ago.

Fucking Labour – they criminalise a whole generation for the same thing they and their childrem did and still do and then say, “Oh, but When we do it it’s just a youthful indiiscretion, a reckless mistake.” Like hell. Fucking hypocrites,

Let’s talk about Drugs For A Bit

All this past week there has been a great wailing and gnashing of teeth in the media and leftish politics over a number of possibly drug-related shootings of young black men in South London and other working class areas around the country.

There’s been reams of analysis trying to work out the reasons why those dreadful kids act the way they do, as though these young people were some isolated tribe, completely disconnected from some mythical, largely white, largely comfortable middle England – an innercity, urban abberation, the scary Other, a phenomenon to be examined in the mode of a colonial administrator reporting the discovery of a band of previously unknown New Guinean headhunters.

The Daily Mail:

The fact is that no one in the police wants to talk about gang warfare in South London, because the last thing senior officers want is to give credibility to this breed of savage young men who are capable of horrific violence unfettered by the most basic concepts of morality.

Not once have I seen anyone in the mainstream media or politics make any connection between these murders and theirs and their friends’ own recreational drug use. No, it’s just another youthful indiscretion, if indeed if it ever stopped.

As the Telegraph’s Sam Leith pointed out, “drugs have lost their toxicity as a political issue” because the generation for whom their use is normal now fills the corridors of power. A simple test is to ask what you’d like to know about your boss. Told that prostitutes visited his home, as the News of the World alleged against the Duke of Westminster, you would be all ears. Would you be interested to learn he had taken a couple of spliffs at school? Not very, I should think.

Drug use is the big tacit unspoken in British politics and the Labour Party and its hangers-on are the biggest hypocrites of all on the subject. So Cuddly Cameron smoked a spliff at Eton aged 15? Well, woop-de-doo-bloody-doo.

Of more concern to me is how the spliff got to him, and who was hurt or banged up as collateral damage for his teenage half hour of posh herbal euphoria.

The same goes for New Labour: you should’ve seen some of the Labour party notables I’ve seen toking up in the eighties and nineties, thinking they were in safe company, or the local councillors loved up on ecstasy and lemon Hooch on a girls’ night out. That’s not to mention drink, cocaine and legally prescribed medication; I strongly suspect that at least half the government, national and local, is chemically affected in some way or another at any given time.

And what about those nice, middle-class journos and civil servants and bank workers with their weekend hits of charlie or whizz, or the poppers that spice up their nice middle-class sex lives? My own son has been approached at clubs (because he is black, duh) by a probation officer (and now former friend of mine) and several criminal lawyers of my acquaintance looking to buy dope. That tells you what you need to know about the integrity of the justice system.

Do these people ever give a thought as to where their little indulgences come from as they buy their teenth or a tab from their friendly local hipster round the corner? I doubt that very much. In fact the very next day they’ll be in committee or on telly or in the House or in the columns of the Grauniad or The Times, pontificating about the dreadful moral laxity of the young.

Being such hypocrites on the subject of their own drug use it ill behoves them to be so draconian on youth, drugs and crime policy.

In partaking of American War On Drugs and Zero Tolerance rhetoric and practice the Blair government, with typically blustering incompetence, has driven the youth prison population up, criminalised a generation, and pushed drug criminality and violence down the age scale, as what were tweenie runners trying to supplement their (often addicted themselves)parents’ measly unemployment benefit with the crumbs from the only local growth industry now find the field clear for the expression of their wildest, pubescent, PS2 and MTV-fuelled fantasies of gangsterdom and Respect.

All the government current policy has done is to temporarily take out a layer of competition in dealers : it’s done nothing about the growing demand for recreational drugs. Those hooked on crack or heroin (or now, crystal meth) are hardly going to say “Oh damn, you took the big boys out of circulation, I’d better give up drugs then”. Where the demand is comes the supply.

The teenagers shooting each other in South London for market share are just, as they’ve been taught by ten years of neoliberal economics and music videos, practicing capitalism in its purest form. But they are being framed by the media and government as savage, feral, a race apart.

The profit from trade in drugs, like that in arms or torture equipment is a major driver of the UK’s intangible economy. Wherever the money comes from and no matter how tainted, one whizz around the City of London carousel or a churn in the property market and it’s squeaky clean again and ready to be invested elsewhere. But at the bottom, no matter how squeaky clean the money is, no matter how smart the suits or politically connected the players at the top are, are violence and greed and poverty and despair and mothers mourning dead children.

With the obsolescence and collapse of its manufacturing base Britain is increasingly reliant on crucial invisible earnings, the skim off the top of that immense money market in the City of London. Gordon Brown’s economic plans are dependent on it; ever larger swathes of the country’s population make their livings servicing the financial machinery that keeps those earnings flowing, and those who are not so fortunate as to have their livelihoods dependent on the whim of an overpaid, overbonused city whizzkid are, of course, just lazy ingrates who should show a little entrepreneurial spirit. So they do, emulating their ‘betters’ in the most immediate and most lucrative way possible.

You’d think a government that admires the naked aggression of invading Iraq to cut out the middleman supplying their own addiction would admire the naked opportunism and entrepreneurship that the teenagers of South London demonstrate, wouldn’t you? New Labour has been in power for ten years now and they’re just doing it the New Labour way, See a market – take it, with guns if necessary.

I doubt there’s a family in the country that hasn’t been affected in some way by drugs and the toxic criminality and poverty that accompanies it. Young people from a working-class background, especially young black people, who manage to escape that life seem to be in a dwindling minority. It’s like watching a whole generation slide down the drain and no-one giving a damn.

Figures released by the charity today, based on statistics compiled by the Council of Europe, show that England and Wales has the highest number of young adults in prison in western Europe.

They’re just chavs, after all. Who cares? The reductionist conservative view would be that it is Darwinism in action. But every drug casualty, every life nipped in the bud, has a parents, siblings, friends, – all are affected and the ripples spread far and wide.

Having had close experience with the horrible effects of addiction and drug violence in my own close family I’m no naive idealist, but I seriously believe that the only possible way to stop this poisonous stew of hypocrisy, class and race prejudice cascading even further down the generations is to decriminalise and regulate the supply of drugs entirely. Human history has shown that if there’s a mind-altering substance available to them mammals will try it. Even cats and elephants enjoy getting high so why not just acknowledge that?

The Blair government’s is a hypocritical, evangelical Christian-driven drugs policy that emphasises punishing individual ‘sin’ whilst at the same time practicing that very ‘sin’ in private and encouraging profiteering from it.

It and the British media fail to acknowledge the central role that they themselves play in the drugs trade. Every time you smoke a spliff in Britain, if it’s not home-griown then you have contributed to the degradation of a generation too. Hyperbolic yes, but until we all acknowledge that its our own personal roles in the international movement of drugs and capital that’s fueling these teenage bedroom executions we can’t have any hope of a sensible treatment-based drugs and crime policy that could pull this generation back from the brink. It’s way past time for a bit of honesty from everyone involved.