HMIC Her Majesty's Inspector of Constabularies - well maybe!

HMIC’s PEEL Inspection Programme

HMIC willbe carrying out a new annual programme of all force inspections.

The inspections will provide accessible, annual independent assessments of the performance of police forces. They will make it possible to see from a small number of easy to understand categories of police activity and assessment, how well police forces are performing.  The principal aims for the programme are to:

• improve effective democratic accountability;

• inspect in a way that leads to the greatest practicable appreciable improvement in         policing services; and

• assist in identifying problems at an early stage and reduce the risk of failure.

We are all now so familiar with television programmes about "The Interceptors". "Police on the Front Line" and "Cops" that one has to be forgiven to ask, why, if policing is so public, do we need this Political Person to oversee our safety and protection?

If experiences in Lancashire and Cumbria, not to mention the fiasco in Kent, are anything to go by, millions of pounds of crime prevention funds are being wasted, on what?  A Labour/Conservative bigot deriving enormous expenses gallivanting around the country, putting a private face on public political interference?

We have too few COPPERS on the beat.  Crime is only ever solved with local knowledge.  Having masses of data is absolutely useless if the Bill cannot find the criminals address.  That's where local knowledge is vital.  

But what is absolutely imperative is that the constable is fully conscious of the line between criminal and civil law, the laws of Tort.  Because politicians have messed up every law that they have transcribed to "codified", that is to say written in modern language into specific Acts which are so damned complicated it has resulted in Lawyers making fortunes at the expense of victims, and sadly, at the expense of good policing.

We, who have campaigned vigorously against the criminal acts of bailiffs, with the tacit and sometime active participation of ill informed police, know only too well that politicians have made law enforcement worse by their crass interventions.  One of the most obvious is the divergence of oodles of dosh from crime prevention to the pockets of less than a hundred overseers, collaborators in fiscal waste and criminal negligence orchestrated by their political masters. Yet they count their scandalous rewards and look forward to a healthy pensions for being nothing more than perform lke stooges.  Where's Groucho Marx when you need one?

We have to look no further than the Commons and I for one would need an answer to the vexing question of MPs' accountability?  How does an MP avoid the questioning of a Select Committee of the House by Pleading Silence, become the Chair of one of the most important Committees as a scrutineer and eventually a Maker of Legislation? Enter Kieth Vaz, Chair of the influential Home Affairs Select Committee - the body charged with examining the expenditure.  There has been a convenient erasure from many records, the years he obstructed enquiry after enquiry, along with his legal trained wife, into allegations made against the pair.  Definitively, Silence Has Been More Than Golden?

Try that trick when you've just been discharged from intensive care inhospital but a Bailiff wants his hundreds of pounds commission to collect for a speeding ticket (laws of strict liability) which the DWP refuses to take from your pension because you draw under the legal minimum to exist?