So great was the anxiety and paranoia inspired by the phantom tyre slasher that by January everyone in the village near Thirsk, North Yorkshire, seemed to be considered a suspect.
Then the villagers turned detective.
In February electrician Chris Moores, 33, hid three tiny CCTV cameras in his garden shrubbery – and two weeks later the footage appeared to show a balding man in an overcoat walking his dog, and pausing to stab at the tyres of a grey Alfa Romeo.
An inspiring, genuine community action!
They thought the police and Crown Prosecution Service would have no trouble getting a conviction for such an apparently open and shut case.
Oh, reader. You know only too well what's coming next, don't you?
They were wrong.
The prosecution of alleged tyre slasher Mr Richards has now collapsed in ignominy with the presiding magistrate accusing the police of “inexcusable” failure and declaring: “The bench has to make it clear that we are appalled at the way this case has been handled by the CPS and the police."
Not for nothing are the CPS dubbed 'Couldn't Prosecute Satan'.
...the villagers of Carlton Miniott were furious. Confronting police officers outside court, grandfather Kevin McCarthy, 60, told them: “It’s been a balls-up from you guys from start to finish.”
Mr Moores, the man who had spent £250 on the cameras hidden in the shrubbery, told The Sun the police had seemed uninterested in the case throughout their ‘investigation’.
“We had to spoon-feed them the evidence and tell them what to do with it,” he said.
“Witnesses were lining up to give evidence but we were told they weren’t needed and information wasn’t followed up.
“It was embarrassing. All they had to do was get him charged and put before a court. They couldn’t even do that properly. The police showed no interest whatsoever. They just made a complete mess of it.”
The question has to be asked - why are we funding them?
Welp, the best I can figure is, professionals don't like to be told what to do nor when and how to do it. Especially when the amateurs are doing all the police work themselves, and seem to want to skip straight to the court(s)...perhaps even skip straight to a conviction, ignoring any and all traces of due process.
ReplyDeleteIt would appear that The UK has some of their own blend of law enforcement unions, and these guys/gals likely want some say in who does what.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police_Federation_of_England_and_Wales
Likely that there other embedded interests that also like having a say in how things get done.
https://www.barcouncil.org.uk/
There's something in this next link about "all laws enacted in the UK must be applied in a precise and predictable manner", but that kinda goes out the window when each and every citizen is devising and/or improvising their own methods of obtaining justice.
https://www.inbrief.co.uk/legal-system/the-rule-of-law/
Just brainstorming.
Thanks for the read. :-)
The afternoon is too muggy and hot to squander mental energy on arseholes, WC Jaded.
ReplyDeleteOh good, the halfwit is on day release today.
ReplyDeleteJaded
If the professionals actually did their job, the amateurs wouldn't have to. Also, I am very good at my job and when amateurs try to do it they always do it very badly. In this case, the amateurs seem to be out-performing the professionals by a significant margin.
ReplyDeleteBeg to differ, Stonyground. Whilst I regard modern police as useless at best and collaborators with the enemy at worst, the British tradition of law enforcement, as described in the 7th Principle of Policing, is that:
ReplyDelete‘Police, at all times, should maintain a relationship with the public that gives reality to the historic tradition that the police are the public and the public are the police; the police being only members of the public who are paid to give full-time attention to duties which are incumbent on every citizen in the interests of community welfare and existence.’
The ordinary public (implicitly men) were legally bound to stop a crime in progress and to arrest the criminal:
‘Any private person, who is present when any felony is committed, is bound by the law to arrest the felon, on pain of fine and imprisonment if he escape through his negligence.’ (See Edward E. Deacon’s A Digest of the Criminal Law of England, Vol.1 (1831), p.49 or A.V. Dicey’s Introduction to the Study of the Law of the Constitution (8th Ed. 1915), p.346)
Note that any injury, even fatal, incurred by a felon in resisting or fleeing arrest was his responsibility:
‘Where a felony is committed and the felon flyeth from justice, or a dangerous wound is given, it is the duty of every man to use his best endeavours for preventing an escape. And if in the pursuit the party flying is killed, where he cannot otherwise be overtaken, this will be deemed justifiable homicide. For the pursuit was not barely warrantable; it is what the law requireth, and will punish the wilful neglect of.’ (Dicey, p.347, quoting Sir Michael Foster’s Discourse II (1762), p.271)
‘The intentional infliction of death is not a crime when it is done by any person … in order to arrest a traitor, felon, or pirate, or keep in lawful custody a traitor, felon, or pirate, who has escaped, or is about to escape from such custody, although such traitor, felon, or pirate, offers no violence to any person.’ (Ibid, fn.43, p.347, quoting Sir James Fitzjames Stephen’s A Digest of Criminal Law (Crimes and Punishments) (6th Ed. 1904), p.158)
‘A may lawfully inflict grievous bodily harm upon X—e.g. in arresting him—X acts unlawfully in resisting A, and is responsible for the injury caused to A by X’s resistance.’(Ibid. p.348)
This situation existed when we could still exercise our right to bear arms, as laid down in the 1689 Bill of Rights: ‘That the subjects which are Protestants may have arms for their defence suitable to their conditions and as allowed by law,’ (that clause's original formulation being, ‘It is necessary for the publick Safety, that the Subjects which are Protestants, should provide and keep Arms for their common Defence,’ i.e. mandating the centuries-old duty of the people to form as militia in maintenance of the King’s Peace and defence of his Realm, see Joyce Lee Malcolm’s 1994 To Keep and Bear Arms: The Origins of an Anglo-American Right).
That tradition and legal obligation was one of the reasons for our formerly low crime rate, as a criminal had not just to contend with once plentiful beat constables, but every adult in the vicinity.
There can never be enough policemen even of the old-fashioned sort to protect everyone—even our Queen and US presidents have suffered intruders and other incidents. If even they, with all of their permanent security, are not entirely safe from potential harm, what chance have the rest of us? We must be adult and assume responsibility for our own lives; and should restore the British traditions of a frequently armed public working in partnership with a normally unarmed police (and bin the police as ‘paramilitary wing of The Guardian’).
See the Tottenham Outrage of 1909 for an example of the public working in concert with the police.
"...professionals don't like to be told what to do nor when and how to do it. Especially when the amateurs are doing all the police work themselves, and seem to want to skip straight to the court(s)...perhaps even skip straight to a conviction..."
ReplyDeleteNot the case here.
And sadly, that's indeed what it'll lead to, in the end, if the 'professionals' let enough people down too often.
"Also, I am very good at my job and when amateurs try to do it they always do it very badly. In this case, the amateurs seem to be out-performing the professionals by a significant margin."
Spot on!
"Note that any injury, even fatal, incurred by a felon in resisting or fleeing arrest was his responsibility"
I note the past tense. You think it'd work that way now?
"We must be adult and assume responsibility for our own lives..."
Sadly, that ship has sailed. And is nearly over the horizon.
JM: ‘You think it'd work that way now?’ It could, if we repealed the necessary laws to restore the legal situation prevailing at the period I described; a period of limited democracy but healthy industry, low crime—and far greater personal liberty than now, as described in the opening passage to A.J.P. Taylor’s English History 1914–1945:
ReplyDelete‘Until August 1914 a sensible, law-abiding Englishman could pass through life and hardly notice the existence of the state, beyond the post office and the policeman. … [B]roadly speaking, the state acted only to help those who could not help themselves. It left the adult citizen alone.’
One of the first ‘red pills’ is recognising that ‘democracy’ is not synonymous with ‘liberty’—arguably even antonymous.
People need also to stop wasting time and effort reinventing the wheel, turning our country ever more inside out and upside down. Instead, read old books and take advantage of the wisdom of past ages by employing their tried and tested solutions. As a line goes (Donald Kingsbury, Courtship Rite):
‘Tradition is a set of solutions for which we have forgotten the problems. Throw away the solution, and you get the problem back.’
JM: ‘Sadly, that ship has sailed.’ So we’re not even to try? We just give up? Accept our ethnic and cultural replacement? Surrendering without a fight is why we are where we are.
As the great man himself said, when facing a foe far worse than any that face us now: ‘And if this long island story of ours is to end, let it end only when each one of us is choking in his own blood upon the ground. (Winston addressing the War Cabinet, May 28, 1940)
And as Sir Peter Wilkinson ordered SOE agent Douglas Dodds-Parker in May 1940:
‘If the United Kingdom is to be overrun, keep outside the ring. Go to South Africa, Australia, Canada. Keep going, and stay in touch with Auxiliary Units in the UK. Remember, it took the Greeks only six hundred years to get free of the Turks.’
If the moral character of a people can change in one direction, it can change in another as well. Sometimes it only takes an example.
So the gyppos challenged the community where their accomplice was killed. And the locals meekly did nothing.
But then a(nother) hero came… an outsider—a Man With No Name (although plentiful video)… Waxing lyrical aside, he led the way—and the locals followed. On subsequent nights, they tore down the memorial themselves. And, finally, they won.
Only a few are capable of being Spartacus—but if Spartacus shows up, many will fall in line to follow him. Don’t run up the white flag and write Western Civilisation’s epitaph just yet.