By VennerRoad, 11th Dec 2014
The truth about police brutality, corruption and cover-ups in the UK and elsewhere.
Anyone who has done any research on this subject will realise the title of this article is a rhetorical question. The real question is how much of a law unto themselves are they? For those not familiar with police mendacity, there are broadly speaking two types of police corruption: bent for self, and bent for the job. The latter is known also as noble cause corruption. Noble indeed.
In the United States there is “The Code” which is a total closing of the ranks to protect their own. The focus here will be on the UK. Bent for self is not tolerated, although it will generally demand a higher standard of proof than for ordinary mortals to bring a bent copper to book. To take an extreme example, in June 2000, a custody sergeant was given an 18 year sentence for raping two women, one of them in a police cell. The woman in custody was the first to accuse him; one might rightly imagine such a claim would be treated with a certain amount of skepticism, although nowadays with CCTV in routine use, a situation like that is most unlikely to arise again.
Skepticism or not, the investigating officers did their job, and in addition to his conviction, Paul Banfield was stripped of his pension. Police officers who commit lesser offences such as petty theft are likewise investigated thoroughly, and at times prosecuted and sacked. Bent for the job is an entirely different matter though; this can include covering up for officers who have killed innocent members of the public, albeit “accidentally”, and at times the line between bent for the job and bent for self can become blurred, as in the cover-up over the death of Ian Tomlinson.
Those not au fait with this disgraceful incident can see an actual video of his last moments.
In April 2009, a massive demonstration was held in Central London; Ian Tomlinson was not part of that demonstration. A man who had fallen on hard times due to the demon alcohol, he was living apart from his family, and had been distributing newspapers, about the only “job” he could hold down.
He was trying to make his way to the homeless shelter where he was staying at that time, and was probably just as unhappy with the crowds as the police. As he stood with his hands in his pockets, he was attacked from behind by PC Simon Harwood. He fell to the ground, and had only minutes to live.
What followed was not an understandable fog of war confusion but a concerted cover-up that included bringing in an incompetent (or corrupt) pathologist to perform the autopsy. If the entire incident had not been caught on video, it would indeed have been covered up, and this man’s death would have been swept under the carpet as one of an habitual drunk falling over. At first the Crown Prosecution Service refused to bring charges, but eventually public pressure prevailed, and Harwood was tried for manslaughter. Although he was acquitted, he was subsequently sacked. No one can reasonably criticise the verdict, but if he had been charged with a lesser and more obvious offence (assault) instead of or as well, he would almost certainly have been convicted of something.
In March 1991, a non-lethal though far more notorious assault was caught on video in the United States.
The beating handed out to Rodney King by uniformed thugs of the Los Angeles Police has become the stuff of legend. It remains to be seen how any jury could have cleared them of all charges even considering the fact that King was high on drugs at the time and all the other circumstances. Again, if this incident had not been videoed, there would have been a totally different outcome, and most likely King would have been the one facing assault charges. While the world should be grateful to George Holliday for filming it, it is a pity he didn’t hold it back for a month or two; this would have caused even greater embarrassment, and the resulting Los Angeles riots would almost certainly have been avoided.
At the time of writing, two other incidents involving American police are very much in the news: that of Michael Brown who was shot dead in Ferguson, Missouri, and the death of Eric Garner in New York who died after a street altercation in which he appeared to have been choked to death. In both cases the killers have walked away scot-free. Because both victims were black, the usual suspects have made these killings into a race issue, but the truth is race had nothing to do with either. The simple fact is the police like easy targets, and Eric Garner in particular was an easy target because he was selling contraband (though not stolen) cigarettes.
This is the same reason so many especially young black men are targeted in the war on drugs; why chase real criminals, especially in a country where the bad guys are routinely armed and might just shoot you? Far better to stop “suspicious” youths on the street and arrest them for carrying small amounts of weed.
Until the decriminalisation of homosexuality – on both sides of the Atlantic – the police would routinely raid premises that catered for homosexuals. In June 1969, the police in New York bit off more than they could chew when they raided The Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village. This time the queers fought back, and the result was a full scale riot – the Stonewall Rebellion. By this time, homosexuality had already been decriminalised in the UK, and it was “pornographers” who became the target for the police here, especially in the West End of London, but also elsewhere.
In the 1970s they raided no end of premises – bookshops and private cinema clubs – seizing material that in this day and age looks quite tame. Prostitutes (and in the United States their “johns”) continue to be the arbitrary targets of their harassment. Prostitution may be both sordid and undesirable, but at the end of the day it is a voluntary transaction between consenting adults, and no one else’s business but the parties concerned.
In the UK, the burgeoning race industry succeeded in foisting a series of increasingly Draconian race laws on the country, laws which were targeted primarily at native white working class Britons, who were treated like rubbish whenever they raised their voices against uncontrolled immigration. Consequently racists were targeted, and again we saw a series of arbitrary arrests and prosecutions which wasted millions of pounds of public money. One of those singled out for special persecution was the geriatric Nazi Colin Jordan, first for publishing an anti-Semitic cartoon, then for publishing a short story called Merrie England 2000. When the case against Jordan was stayed on medical grounds, the authorities continued the prosecution against his printer – who was tried and acquitted at Leeds Crown Court. Merrie England 2000 is currently being offered for sale on Amazon UK, and no one pays any attention.
In recent years, hysteria over racism has quelled somewhat, and the police have turned their attentions to both radical Moslems and (of late) paedophiles – real and imagined. While there is a genuine Islamist threat in the UK, we have seen young men targeted for basically sounding off in public, principally at our deranged foreign policy. Their rhetoric may be inflammatory at times, but most of their criticisms are legitimate, and indeed their opinions are shared by the overwhelming majority of Britons who are likewise unhappy with our never ending involvement in foreign wars, wars which are none of our business, and which result only in our young men being sent home in body bags or with broken bodies and shattered minds.
But it is not simply genuine or potential terrorists who are targeted by the police. Files held at Kew show they had undercover agents at political meetings long before anyone reading this article was born, and in recent years they have been exposed as not simply monitoring meetings and demonstrations but taking an active role in attempts to criminalise legitimate protest or simply to alienate the public. It is only with the rise of cheap video cameras – in particular mobile phones – that ordinary people, academics, and even powerful politicians have woken up to this. At one time anyone who mentioned it would have been denounced as a crank or “conspiracy theorist”. Nowadays only the gullible reject these demonstrable facts.
For example, in August 2007 a group of undercover police at Toronto, Canada, disguised as black bloc, tried to turn a peaceful anti-G20 demonstration into a riot. They were thwarted by a trade union official, and the incident was videoed.
In the UK, something even more outrageous came to light when a former undercover police officer had a change of heart. Mark Kennedy spent around eight years working in and around environmentalist groups whose criminal activity was limited to non-violent but disruptive protests (eg obstructing the sidewalk) and occasional acts of trivial criminal damage. Following his revelations, a number of other former undercover police officers were outed including Bob Lambert, who had fathered a child with one of the female activists on whom he was spying. Undercover police officers had stolen the identities of dead children, as in the Frederick Forsyth novel The Day Of The Jackal.
The victim in this case was awarded over £400,000 in an out-of-court settlement, with no admission of liability. This is another typical police tactic, in civil actions they fight all the way to the court door and then settle with no admission of liability. Why should they not? Whatever the outcome, the public will foot the bill. The aforementioned techniques are clearly illegal, and an argument could be made out that some of these undercover officers were guilty of rape. A man who has sex with a woman on the pretext of being her husband commits rape. Granted that men lie women into bed all the time – and on occasion vice versa – but what these public servants did was despicable. And for what?
There is no compelling evidence that any of their activities made the streets of Britain safer, and Lambert was as much agent provocateur as secret policeman having co-authored a defamatory leaflet that led to a decade long libel action. He has also been accused of participating in overt criminal acts including one of arson on a department store. He has denied this, but then he would, wouldn’t he?
As long ago as 1969, the Home Office issued a circular relating to the use of informants in criminal cases. Clearly these guidelines and undoubtedly many laws have been broken by undercover police officers, but we need to ask if at times some policemen do not go even further, namely if they do not actively seek out people they consider to be undesirable and incite them to commit crimes? Unfortunately, this is another rhetorical question, because they have a long history of doing this. In the United States as in the UK, few people will have any sympathy for men who seek out sex with underage girls on-line, but as one investigation by an American TV programme revealed, some of these cases are not quite as clearcut as the police would have us believe.
These “sting” operations have involved responding to advertisements on adult dating sites posing as adults before doing an about-face. Most of those so entrapped have not been stereotypical sexual predators but younger men and even teenagers.
As bad as this may be, there are cases of police officers inciting even more serious crimes. Again, on both sides of the Atlantic, there has been a suspiciously high number of cases of both men and women – often aggrieved spouses – attempting to hire hitmen. Do people who contemplate crimes of this nature really have such poor judgment that they manage to find undercover police officers to whom to contract out their dirty work, or are they actively sought out by special police units who have perhaps been monitoring their phones and on-line activity?
The strongest evidence of this comes from a number of high profile terrorist cases in the United States, the most outrageous of which was that of the four men who were convicted in 2010 of plotting various acts of terror including blowing up a New York synagogue. On August 23 last year, the New York Times reported on their failed appeal against their convictions. In his dissenting judgment for the Second Circuit, Judge Dennis Jacobs said there was “scarce evidence” that one defendant had a pre-existing design in his mind, and that his statements had been in response to “badgering” by an informer, ie an agent provocateur. He may have wanted to die like a martyr and “do something to America”, but these were “wishes, not designs”. He added “One amounts to no more than the boastful piety of a foolish man; the other could be banter in any faculty lounge” and “The government agent supplied a design and gave it form, so that the agent rather than the defendant inspired the crime, provoked it, planned it, financed it, equipped it and furnished the time and targets”.
Indeed, the trial judge herself had said: “The government made them terrorists. I am not proud of my government for what it did in this case.”
These four had been set up not by a local police force or a small group of officers who were prepared to bend the law to take potentially dangerous men off the streets but by the FBI itself.
The reality is that this world is full of both disgruntled people with axes to grind and others who will take calculated risks to make a fast buck. It is neither intelligent nor honourable to seek out such men and women in order to put them to the test, much less to goad, bait, incite or otherwise induce them to break the law. Indeed, many of the real terrorists recruited by Islamist fanatics – the lone wolves – are young men who for whatever reason have become disillusioned with life and have turned to terrorism as a means of finding a purpose, even one to die for. Richard Reid, the failed terrorist known as the Shoe Bomber, was a petty criminal who converted to Islam in prison. Others have been radicalised on-line. If it is a crime for preachers of hate to do this, it should likewise be for the government to do it.
There is one more thing that makes the police a law unto themselves, this is the incestuous nature of the entire criminal justice establishment. At times this can extend even to juries, and in the United States, to grand juries, which even in the rare instances when cases get that far, simply refuse to convict police officers of wrongdoing, as in the Rodney King trial. There are exceptions, but they are rare indeed. While it is true that the evidence of every witness is not necessarily to be given the same weight, eg that some are simply not credible, this cannot explain the reluctance of juries to convict on even overwhelming evidence. What is needed is root and branch reform of policing worldwide, that and a system of genuine accountability. As recent events in Ferguson, Missouri have demonstrated, many police officers regard themselves as the masters of the people rather than their servants.
In some countries this has always been the case, but the time has come to reverse that trend, in the US, in the UK, and everywhere on Earth.
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