Shouldn't we be discussing the police?

. . . and then lie about it.

This is the key point for me. Their first instinct is to cover up their mistakes, which is how murderers and rapists get to act with impunity.

This is the key point for me. Their first instinct is to cover up their mistakes,

and the elephant in the room is that in their jobs, they learn exactly how to get away with it, too.

When there was the student fees riots or something around that time, 2011 or so, Liberty did a report (which I cannot find now for the life of me)  showed that the rates of various crimes detected and prosecuted in the public were 1000's of times higher than that found and acted upon in the police. Liberty essentially did not believe this was possible, as GCHQ and MI5 MI6 etc had more rigourous vetting and also had much higher rates of proven crime in their ranks than the cops.
IPCC was challenged to repsond/address this and they claimed it showed the police vetting process to be the best of the lot...
I think the Liberty investigation was kicked off after the SPG beat up that newsagent ? Tomlinson? and He died?

Out of my own ignorance, what will this show?

The implication is that the police management are not currently vetting correctly and not regularly consulting PNC for serving officers.

Out of my own ignorance, what will this show? What offences or cautions would not have been noted on the police national computer? How much due process is missed?

PND will show intelligence as opposed to PNC. No idea if new police recruits aren’t washed against pnd already

It too Son2 three months of vetting to gain his first airside pass.

I suspect, like most vetting that will be two months, 29 days of nothing and two days of actual vetting.

the reputation of the police does need to be protected to some extent.

that hasn’t really worked out well for them though! I agree that it’s important to have a police force in which the public have trust, in that I agree with you. I would suggest their strategy to always deflect blame and refuse to investigate properly has in fact accomplished the opposite.

Thanks @kilo. I would have presumed that all police officers would have been checked for a criminal record. Intelligence could also be malicious, I have no idea of how this is recorded, but recall the national DNA database and requests for removal based on no further action/evidence/prosecution.

In Son2's case it was prolonged - involving references, school and so on, but it may well have been nothing then all in one go. It's been the reason for the delays at airports recently.

the reputation of the police does need to be protected to some extent.

Reputation?

If you were young and female and lived in London, would you trust the police? Because I bloody wouldn't!

And thats now pretty common. With good reason.

So lets just have a think about where the METs prevailing culture has got its precious 'reputation'. It certainly has one, but I doubt its one that any organisation would want.

Where does that leave the whole principle of 'policing by consent'?

This is the key point for me. Their first instinct is to cover up their mistakes, which is how murderers and rapists get to act with impunity.

This is a key point and why we need a "no fault" ( for anything non criminal) investigation process.

Take the DeMendez case.  The cops involved were fearful for their jobs and their liberty.  As a result the evidence they gave was slanted or fabricated.  If they did not have that hanging over them then its far more likely that we would have found out what really happened and thus could prevent it happening again

Like almost all serious errors there was not a single mistake or action that led to the death but a whole series of them.  Briefing, communications, attitudes and quite possibly recruitment ie the firearms officer did not have the right temperament.

The fear officers have of being hauled over the coals for mistakes leads to impossibility in investigating mistakes and thus they are repeated

I have followed one big local negligence case resulting in death in a local hospital.  Superficially it looked like a single nurse at fault.  But when it was looked at more deeply it was actually a litany of errors some going back years.

The fear of reprisals leads to a "them and us" we must close ranks atmosphere which leads to Criminals like those mentioned escaping scruitiny.

On police using excessive force

It doesn't have to be that way.  I worked alongside the police doing triage on detainees ( mainly friday and saturday nights).  A real eye opening experience seeing the violence the cops have to deal with on a daily basis and how restrained they were in return.  I never saw a single incident of excessive force.  I saw cops attacked with weapons, spat at and all sorts of appalling behaviour.

So if central Edinburgh can be like this then other forces could be as well

Binners is right about Manchester in the 80s - there was a very thuggish underlying trend then in the police there

Regardless of what happened, who’s in charge, the state of the police (up to a point!) etc I do think that this is actually quite a high priority.
The situation should not be allowed to result in a widespread reluctance to go to the police, any sort of fear or similar, and so yes, the reputation of the police does need to be protected to some extent.

Kind of missing the point - if you want to protect the reputation you do that by making behaviour better / safer, having routes to raise concerns, robust processes for investigation etc.  NOT whitewashing negative stories - that is long-term damaging and may actually mean some vulnerable people are more at risk (because they seek help from dodgy officers).

that hasn’t really worked out well for them though! I agree that it’s important to have a police force in which the public have trust, in that I agree with you. I would suggest their strategy to always deflect blame and refuse to investigate properly has in fact accomplished the opposite.

Fair enough. I never said it was handled correctly!

Reputation?

If you were young and female and lived in London, would you trust the police? Because I bloody wouldn’t!

Also fair enough!
But that said: A) there's police outside of London to think of and B) most police in London are fine, protect the force's reputation as a whole, at the very very least in other situations (no young females involved).

Not saying that reputation is any good. Just that people shouldn't entirely lose faith in the police.

Not saying that reputation is any good. Just that people shouldn’t entirely lose faith in the police.

You have to remember just how bad the METs reputation was even before this latest exposure of a twenty year run or rapes and sexual assaults by a serving officer

Women should refuse to get into a car with lone male police officer, says ex-chief superintendent

Women should refuse to get into a car with a male police officer even if they show their warrant card, a former Met Police Chief Superintendent told ITV News London.

"You need to ask for a female officer to come along. You need to make sure there is another officer there

Kind of missing the point – if you want to protect the reputation you do that by making behaviour better / safer, having routes to raise concerns, robust processes for investigation etc. NOT whitewashing negative stories – that is long-term damaging and may actually mean some vulnerable people are more at risk (because they seek help from dodgy officers).

Of course. Again, I never said it was handled correctly!
Just the point that the initial response to protect the reputation is correct, but should've been something more along the lines of "the MET is good, he is bad, some others are bad, we'll clean up our act pronto" instead of "the MET is good, lalala look over there"

In that silly example just going "he is bad, some others are bad, we'll clean up our act pronto" would cause many people to lose faith in the police and have more negative consequences.

I'm not very good at explaining myself here!

Son of 2 met police officers here, not to mention grandson of another 2, if you think the Met Police have not changed over the years I think you are wrong. Very different service now to what it was and like many organisations it continues to evolve and learn to cope with the pressure its under.

I have lived through my family's involvement the miners strike, Brixton riots and many other events in the last 50 years. My father was part of a TSG, a home beat officer, dog handler and was immensely proud of the fact he had only had to draw his truncheon/baton on a few occasions during his career. He always preferred talking to people and 99% of the time that worked (in later years the snarling German Shepherd by his side may have also helped).

I'm proud of the work my family did and of the Commendations they received. I have faith in the service as a whole, can it improve. Yes of course it can (and needs to), but they also need appropriate investment and support.

The implication is that the police management are not currently vetting correctly and not regularly consulting PNC for serving officers.

I think the second part of that is actually the most obvious failing.  Upfront vetting is very difficult to do with any robustness.  I recall being vetted in the 90's (not for police but similar vetting).  You filled in a very long questionnaire with every address you ever lived at and things like "are you a terrorist" and "do you associate with anyone who is a member of the IRA", as well as questions about how likely you were to be bribed/blackmailed (financial, sexuality etc).  Now whilst they did go and ask my referees the same questions clearly if I was trying to infiltrate the organisation I'd have been selective about who my referees were and what they really knew about me.  Further clearance levels would have involved people who know you being interviewed etc, but good liars will have convinced those around them, and many people will join the police young perhaps before they've even developed some of their worst behaviours.

BUT knowing that pre-employment vetting is never going to be perfect you might expect that there is some sort of ongoing monitoring to spot signs of a problem.  I think that only happens when a very specific concern is raised.  Its not a routine thing, and there doesn't seem to be any easy way for a serving officer to anonymously flag concerns which might help prioritise who deserves the most scrutiny.

My understanding of DBS checks (which are a lower standard than police vetting) is that the onus is on the organisation to periodically redo its checks rather than the DBS proactively saying "the individual we issued with a DBS certificate last year has just been charged with an offence which means they would no longer get a certificate" or "in light of a recent conviction DBS certificate xxxxx has been revoked".  My understanding is that this is different from Disclosure Scotland who automatically will contact organisations linked to an individual's PVG certificate when new information comes up.  Of course, the issue is always sorting the facts from the rumours, but understanding and managing intelligence data and its reliability sounds like the sort of thing you would expect the police to be good at!

Anyone remember a few years ago someone started a thread where they said one of their female friends got beaten up by a policeman?

It turned into a multi-pager because a lot of people couldn't accept even the possibility a policeman would beat up a woman for no reason.

The public have been giving the police too much benefit of the doubt for too long.

This is a key point and why we need a “no fault” ( for anything non criminal) investigation process.

Take the DeMendez case. The cops involved were fearful for their jobs and their liberty. As a result the evidence they gave was slanted or fabricated. If they did not have that hanging over them then its far more likely that we would have found out what really happened and thus could prevent it happening again

The trouble with this is a large proportion of the public believe ACAB (I've been banned from another cycling related forum for arguing against it it's so pervasive in some quarters). The argument would follow that if any police operating under the same system would make the same mistake/decision, then QED ACAB. It becomes very difficult to separate individuals from the systems they work with in those cases because by joining the police you're implicitly agreeing with/upholding those systems.

e.g. should you let anyone prepared to shoot someone become a firearms officer
etc.

ACAB?

I am convinced no fault incident investigations is the key.

The trouble with this is a large proportion of the public believe ACAB

The trouble is a large proportion of the public believe all police are angels.

In the other thread I mentioned I reckon over 50% of the responses were, 'She must be lying. The police don't assault women for no reason.'

ACAB

All Cops Are Avoidingtheswearfilter

My wife, who is exactly the sort of person who should be in the police, joined Strathclyde Police in the late nineties and was sexually harassed out by the early noughties. I think there is something self selecting for negative personality traits when a job gives you power over big swathes of society. Similar to how the desire to be a politician is a high indicator of you being a lying slimy power hungry odious turd, but that of course is a separate topic.

For balance there are of course good and bad cops (boom tish)......

On cops beating up folk

I know of one case like this according to the lad.  Apparently he was riding his bike along minding his own buisness when a cop pulled him off it and beat him up for no reason.  Further down the line the truth came out.  He was drunk and a face full of drugs.  the cop told him to push his bike home and he got belligerent and refused and attacked the cop.  Cops being trained in control and restraint put him to the ground and the laddies face got scuffed on the ground.  He wasn't even arrested.  They calmed him down and sent him on his way after locking his bike to a fence with his lock!.  However what he told his mum that night and what the actual truth was were two very different things

Or another one that I was a part of.  As above I worked in a police station doing triage.  On arrival one day I was asked to go straight to one of the cells where a woman appeared to be injured.  She was a small well dressed woman who had been removed from a flight a couple of hours before for her behaviour  She was so belligerent shouting and screaming and threatening to kill me that I couldn't actually examine her tho she obviously had a broken arm.  I went into the cells with two officers who actually removed me from the cell for my own safety.  It turns out she had been drinking on top of valium and was out of her mind.  We actually had to wait a further hour or two until it was safe to enter the cell to assess her and she was then taken to A&E with 2 cops.

I have seen women attacking cops on many occasions then complaining about brutality once they have been restrained.  Restrained using minimum force and within guidelines after kicking biting and spitting on the cops

I am not defending all cops nor am I saying they never do wrong.  However when working with the cops I saw the reality of what happens.  The stories you hear are often not the actual truth by a long way.

Im not saying this is what happened in the case Bruce Wee is talking about but it my experience its at least a possibility

Edit:

Ill just mention again this is Edinburgh not london or manchester.  Somehow here it all seems a bit different.

Im not saying this is what happened in the case Bruce Wee is talking about but it my experience its at least a possibility

The problem is that the majority of the public assume it's something that would never happen. Same reason priests were able to abuse kids for so long.

People only start to believe the victims when it happens to them or a loved one.

I used to work on 24 Hours in Police Custody.

I've no idea how the majority of them do the job, they must have the patience of a saint to deal with the "public".

If you were young and female and lived in London, would you trust the police? Because I bloody wouldn’t!

And thats now pretty common. With good reason.

There is good reason to assume that if a young female approaches a police officer in London he might rape her? Are you sure?

IMO the single overriding issue which undermines the public's trust in the police and their ability to perform their duties is lack of manpower. Not that the police have been taken over by rapists.

Obviously it is to be hoped that the David Carrick scandal will represent a watershed moment for the police, similar to the Brixton Riots and the Stephen Lawrence murder, it certainly appears as if it might be.

Although obviously those that deny that anything has changed in UK policing in the last 40 years and no lessons have ever been learnt will maintain, for whatever reason, that the police never change and improve.

Though quite what their solution is I am not sure, people's militia? Vigilantes?

Bruce - which goes back to my "no fault" incident investigation - because those cops who "turned a blind eye"  are too scared of being punished to testify truthfully so the truth does not come out.

Its not that these bad cops "slip thru the net"  Its that the net is full of huge holes and is not fit for purpose.  Its more akin to a rusty bucket with no bottom!

Bruce – which goes back to my “no fault” incident investigation – because those cops who “turned a blind eye” are too scared of being punished to testify truthfully so the truth does not come out.

Its not that these bad cops “slip thru the net” Its that the net is full of huge holes and is not fit for purpose. Its more akin to a rusty bucket with no bottom!

Sure, but there has to be pressure for change.

As long as the general public's default assumption is that victims of police violence are lying then nothing is going to change.

There is good reason to assume that if a young female approaches a police officer in London he might rape her? Are you sure?

Have you read the piece I posted above? It’s not me saying that, it’s a former Met Police Chief Superintendent. And that was before this latest outrage

Though quite what their solution is I am not sure, people’s militia? Vigilantes?

Not employing serial rapists and murderers would probably be a good place to start

binners - you're wasting your time.

The Met the worst excuse for a Police force if there ever was one, full of officers that don't come from London with their racist attitudes.

Have you read the piece I posted above? It’s not me saying that, it’s a former Met Police Chief Superintendent

Yeah I read it. Dal Babu left the Met 10 years ago claiming that he had been unfairly treated. I am not sure however it gives him the definitive opinion on all Met related issues.

If you try hard enough I am sure that you will probably find another former senior police officer who doesn't claim that Met officers are dangerous and shouldn't be approached by young females.

I am not sure however it gives him the definitive opinion on all Met related issues.

Given that they had years of experience at a senior level in the MET and so be familiar with the culture, I’d say they’re better qualified to pass judgement than most.

I doubt you’d publicly level those kind of accusations without good reason. As has proved to be the case. The statement was made a couple of years before the latest expose of serial rape by a serving officer over a two decade period

Obviously it is to be hoped that the David Carrick scandal will represent a watershed moment for the police, similar to the Brixton Riots and the Stephen Lawrence murder,

But that's exactly what we all said two years ago about the last one

I was in the Met. Wasn’t from London. Wasn’t racist either.

That sweeping statement SuperScale20 is complete shit

I doubt you’d publicly level those kind of accusations without good reason.

Bitterness at being unfairly treated?

Anyway I reckon frankconway hit the nail on the head on the previous page - you are wasting your time.

Seriously, if you think the risk that a copper is a rapist is so high that no young female should trust one then that's up to you, but you really aren't going to convince me.

Ernie - there is a difference between the actual risk which is low and the perceived risk.   Same as folk insist cycling is dangerous when the stats say otherwise

Its the perceived risk that is reflected in womens attitudes to the police

I'm sure there is TJ. But we weren't discussing the difference between the actual risk and the perceived risk.

Binners made the claim that he "bloody wouldn't" trust the police if he was a young female in London.

I think that is an unreasonable attitude to take precisely because the actual risks do not warrant it. The Met has not been taken over by rapists.

Edit: I also made the point that if there is a lack of trust that the Met will do their job properly then it is predominantly down to a lack of manpower. That is something which needs to be addressed so that the public can have greater confidence in the police.

No but the perception of risk is such that its not unsurprising that some have that attitude.

The rapists that have been exposed is just the extreme end of the misogynist culture that is on display. They won't trust the police because they don't believe they will be treated fairly, will be believed, that allegations will be properly investigated or that they will be supported. It seems they are more likely to be the butt of jokes in whatsapp groups than be taken seriously.

No but the perception of risk is such that its not unsurprising that some have that attitude.

Yes, I totally agree.

The Met has not been taken over by rapists.

Actual rapists, maybe not. People who condone a culture of borderline violent misogyny? That doesn't seem like a stretch, tbh.

No, there's a very low chance the police officer would be a rapist.

Sexist, misogynist, racist, homophobic; sadly there's more than a low chance of that.

Again, if you flip the stats the other way and say (made up number) that 80% of Met Coppers are totally beyond reproach then yes the odds are good. But not negligible, and I wouldn't want my daughter exposed to even 'low level' stuff from someone they should be able to 100% trust.

Not read the whole thread but seems to be a bit of problem at the MET.

https://www.lbc.co.uk/news/senior-met-police-officer-accused-of-having-a-secret-room-full-of-child-porn-and/

I was in the Met. Wasn’t from London. Wasn’t racist either.

That sweeping statement SuperScale20 is complete shit

Did you ever come across a colleague who you thought was racist or who expressed racist views (even if it was just bantz)?