Category: Cops
Like some dud bog-standard school, Britain’s most important law-enforcers, the Metropolitan Police, find themselves humiliatingly condemned to ‘special measures’. About time too.
Now we have also learned that one in seven police forces is in special measures. Quite frankly, I’m not surprised.
The howling, blatant failure of all Britain’s police forces to do the job for which we pay them so much has been a scandal for years. It has been at its worst in the capital.
Now, at last, even our political class has begun to notice. If we have the sense to seize it, the moment has come to replace our failed police, who have traded for decades on a reputation won by others many years ago.
Normally the liberal elite, cocooned by money and power, have little idea of what is going on in this country. They seldom visit anywhere outside their privileged enclaves, and dismiss reports from the real Britain as ‘moral panic’.
For years they have not cared, as most of us have, that the police are too politically correct, and too absent, to be any use against crime and disorder. Now, it turns out that the police are not politically correct enough, either. Everyone thinks they are useless.
Scotland Yard’s fall comes after it was subjected to the leadership of Cressida Dick – for years the liberal establishment’s favourite police officer, groomed and polished so that she could finally step into the Commissioner’s job. And then she turned out to be an utter flop on almost every measure known.
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Former Metropolitan Police Commissioner Dame Cressida Dick standing with Mayor of London Sadiq Khan
What are the police for? Why do we put up with them? If your car won’t go, or your hoover stops hoovering, or your fridge no longer keeps your food cold, you get rid of them and buy new ones. So what do you do when your police stop policing?
And they have stopped. Their response to burglary and car theft is now such a national joke that even official statistics have begun to reflect it. Their interest in quelling the nasty disorder that infects so many of our streets is zero.
As Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary said of the Metropolitan Police this week, they suffer from ‘a barely adequate standard of crime recording accuracy, with an estimated 69,000 crimes going unrecorded each year, less than half of crime recorded within 24 hours, and almost no crimes recorded when victims report antisocial behaviour against them’.
The flat phrase ‘anti-social behaviour’ does not begin to describe a huge and horrible problem. For many years, in the long-ago days when people still had some expectation of police support, I was often contacted by despairing men and women trapped in their homes by menacing louts, intolerable noise, screeching persecution or incessant thefts from their small businesses, from which they could not protect themselves.
They knew that if they dared raise a hand in their own defence, the police – protecting their monopoly of force – would come for them. They, unlike their persecutors, were easy targets, not frightening, ready to co-operate with authority.
The Metropolitan Police of Wayne Couzens who was jailed for the kidnap, rape and murder of Sarah Everard
I remember a lawyer who wrote to me in a state of shock, having had his career ruined by the police after he grabbed a young vandal and tried to march him to the police station. He was the one who ended up in court. We all recall the horrible case of Fiona Pilkington, who killed her own severely disabled daughter Francecca and herself, after enduring ten years of unimaginable persecution from cruel neighbours – in which the police were barely interested.
We all remember Garry Newlove, kicked to death outside his home, after confronting a gang of youths he suspected of vandalising his wife’s car. The area had suffered for years from uncontrolled disorder of this kind.
But these events are not unique. They are among thousands of miserable episodes that never make the headlines, but which show the failure of the police to prevent this kind of thing.
Well, that problem only affected ordinary people, so the authorities, the BBC and The Guardian newspaper paid little attention to it and learned no lesson from it.
Sarah Everard, 33, was murdered by serving Met officer Wayne Couzens after she was abducted as she walked home in south London
But the police reaction to the murder of Sarah Everard by a serving officer – pitiful, lumbering and stupid – probably turned the balance among our governing class. Here was something they could not ignore: a woman had been murdered by someone she should have been able to trust utterly.
How had he been in a position to do this? One problem is that the police, as they now are, do not always attract the right sort of recruits, or retain the kind of men and women they really need.
The killer, Wayne Couzens, was obviously totally unfit to be a police constable.
He should never have been hired in the first place. His blatant lewd behaviour should have made sure that he was got rid of very quickly.
Yet he stayed, and seems to have been too readily tolerated by some of his colleagues. Then came the lumpish, concrete-headed police treatment of a perfectly reasonable vigil in memory of Miss Everard. Once again, the questions began to form, in letters of fire, in the public mind: ‘Whose side are the police really on? What actual use are they?’
I could write a book about the crisis of the police. In fact, I have done. (It is called ‘The Abolition of Liberty’ and is still in print 19 years after it was first published.) I have pressed it into the hands of senior police officers and one Home Secretary, begging them to pay attention. Not one of them has even responded.
Former prime minister and founder of the modern police force Sir Robert Peel
The police, I have argued now for almost 20 years, are doing the wrong thing. Their problems have nothing to do with numbers (they used to do far more with many fewer officers).
Their job is not to patrol Twitter, but to patrol the streets on foot, to prevent crime, to show that order and law will be upheld, to deter the first signs of bad behaviour so that it never gets out of hand.
This method still works (it was used to great effect in New York City a few years ago) and it was what they were originally hired to do by the great Sir Robert Peel.
Constables engaged in these simple, comforting activities do not need to get involved in politics or opinions. They rapidly become the friends of the law-abiding public, get to know their neighbourhoods, see trouble coming and pick up intelligence about all kinds of problems.
This kind of policing came to an end thanks to a few decisions mainly taken by the arch-liberal Home Secretary Roy Jenkins in the 1960s. We were never asked about them. Jenkins killed off regular foot patrols, and destroyed dozens of local forces that knew their areas and were respected there, replacing them with vast distant bureaucracies.
In Scotland, even more worryingly, local policing ended entirely with the creation of a nationwide organisation, which has unsurprisingly run into grave trouble since.
It would be just as easy to reverse these decisions, to begin next week to recruit and establish new, small local constabularies dedicated to the old Peel principle of prevention above all. And once they were ready, we could close down the vast, failed, arrogant monster which our police have disastrously become.
There is no longer any point in pretending that they have not failed. And when institutions fail, the best thing to do is to replace them from top to bottom. That would be a truly special measure.
REVEALED: Highland Park parade shooter bought Smith & Wesson rifle online then picked it up from a local store
- Crimo bought his Smith & Wesson M&P 15 for between $700 and $800 online on a website Buds Gun Shop
- He then picked it up from Red Dot Arms, a store in Illinois 30 miles from his home
- It’s unclear exactly when he bought the gun but he did so legally with a FOID card
- He purchased other weapons from the same store, according to police
- Crimo is now in custody on seven murder charges
Highland Park parade shooter Bobby Crimo bought his Smith & Wesson rifle online then picked it up from a local store
Highland Park parade shooter Bobby Crimo bought his Smith & Wesson rifle online then picked it up from a local store.
The 21-year-old had been quizzed by police twice in the years before Monday’s massacre, but he was still able to legally purchase the Smith & Wesson M&P 15 for between $700 and $800 online on a website Buds Gun Shop.
He had it delivered to Red Dot Arms, a store 30 miles north of Highland Park.
The owner of that gun store insisted to The Daily Beast on Wednesday that he filled out all of the necessary paperwork to link Crimo to the weapon – writing down the serial number, his name and his address.
Crimo had a valid FOID card to purchase the weapon, which had been signed by his father. The FOID card was issued by the Illinois State Police.
‘We meticulously do the paperwork. That’s, that’s our job. That’s what we do to track,’ the man said on Wednesday. He declined to give his name.
He added that when the shooting happened on Monday, the store was closed for the July 4th holiday.
When police contacted him, he raced to the store and produced the form which related to the serial number that was on the gun Crimo dropped at the scene.
Crimo had his gun delivered to Red Dot Arms in Illinois after buying it online from a Kentucky website called Buds Gun Shop
It’s unclear what kind of checks the website Bud Guns Shop performs before selling weapons to online customers. It is still advertising July 4th specials
Crimo was able to legally purchase the Smith & Wesson M&P 15 for between $700 and $800 online on a website Buds Gun Shop
It’s unclear what kind of checks were performed by the website to purchase the gun.
The Daily Beast cited unnamed police sources who say he bought other weapons from the gun store.
Buds Gun Shop did not immediately respond to comments about what kind of checks were performed when he bought the weapon online.
Crimo appeared in court virtually on Wednesday to be charged with seven counts of murder.
He said nothing other than to confirm that he did not have a lawyer, and to ask for a public defender to be assigned to his case.
Tributes to the seven people who died in the massacre were left along the parade route
The 21-year-old shifted on his feet and looked side to side throughout the brief hearing.
Crimo will return to court on July 25th for his preliminary hearing.
Police have still not been able to determine a motive for the crime, but say he had an obsession with the numbers 47, which is 7/4 inverse – the date of the attack.
His parents have not been charged but they have retained a lawyer who on Tuesday night spoke out in their defense, insisting they did ‘nothing wrong’ and that there were no ‘red flags’ to report.
Won’t you look at that. He has previous encounters with law enforcement for violent threats, but those were not sufficiently dealt with so the shooter was able to pass a background check, buy a rifle and shoot up Stoneman Douglas High School Robb Elementary School an Independence Day parade.
Illinois already has a red flag law.
I guess nobody thought to invoke it.
The suicide attempt is the real shocker. I’m surprised that didn’t get him an involuntary commitment that would make him a prohibited person.
Or maybe Illinois didn’t inform NICS like what happened with Sutherland Springs.
I’d put even money on someone having said something to the FBI about him too, and that being ignored.
I guess the big takeaway is that the purpose of red flag laws is to be a political weapon because they certainly don’t stop crazy people who get the cops called on them from getting guns.
(Photo: Janine Wiedel Photolibrary/Alamy)
The horrifying May 24 massacre at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, which killed 19 children and two adults, happened just 10 days after a gunman murdered 10 people at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York. Both crimes predictably prompted politicians to reiterate their demands for the gun control laws they already supported, even though the policies they pushed are fundamentally ill-suited to prevent mass shootings.
“In New York,” former Gov. Andrew Cuomo bragged after the Buffalo attack, “we passed the best [gun control] laws in the nation.” Although those laws manifestly did not deter the Buffalo shooter, Cuomo thinks the answer is more of the same.
Cuomo mentioned a federal “assault weapon” ban, and other politicians responded to the Buffalo massacre by recommending expanded background checks for gun buyers. After the Uvalde shooting, President Joe Biden repeated his longstanding support for banning “assault weapons,” and Senate Democrats mulled an “accountability vote” on a bill that would expand the federal background-check requirement to cover private transactions as well as sales by federally licensed dealers.
As Democrats framed the issue, anyone who resists those measures is manifestly untroubled by the murder of grocery shoppers and schoolchildren. “When in God’s name are we going to stand up to the gun lobby?” Biden asked during an emotional speech. “When in God’s name are we going to do what we know needs to be done?”
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D–N.Y.) suggested that callous indifference was the only plausible explanation for opposition to his gun control agenda. “Republicans don’t pretend that they support sensible gun safety legislation,” he told reporters. “They don’t pretend that they want to keep guns out of the hands of those who might use weapons to shoot concertgoers or movie watchers or worshippers or shoppers or children.”
In Texas, Beto O’Rourke, the Democratic nominee for governor, heckled Gov. Greg Abbott during a press conference about the Uvalde attack. “The time to stop the next shooting is right now,” O’Rourke told Abbott, “and you are doing nothing.”
While the urge to do something after an appalling mass murder is understandable, that does not mean anything will do. “It’s one thing to say that, regardless of the facts, you should just do something,” Sen. Mike Rounds (R–S.D.) observed. “The question is whether something you would do would actually make a difference.” On that score, Democrats’ knee-jerk policy prescriptions seem decidedly unpromising.
As a response to the Uvalde massacre, expanding background checks was a non sequitur. The shooter, who was also killed during the attack, legally bought the Daniel Defense DDM4 V7 rifle he used from a federally licensed dealer, which means he did not have a disqualifying criminal or psychiatric record. That was also true of the man charged in the Buffalo case, and it is typically true of mass shooters. According to a 2022 National Institute of Justice (NIJ) report on mass public shootings from 1966 through 2019, 77 percent of the perpetrators purchased guns legally, while just 13 percent obtained them through illegal transactions.
Even for the small minority of mass shooters who have disqualifying records, an expanded federal background-check requirement would not pose much of an obstacle. Data from states with similar rules, which in practice require that all firearm sales be completed via licensed dealers, indicate that gun owners generally do not comply with that edict. “Universal background checks” are universal only in theory.
Bans on so-called assault weapons likewise cannot reasonably be expected to have a meaningful impact on mass shootings. Such laws define the category based on functionally unimportant characteristics.
The NIJ study found that 77 percent of mass public shooters used handguns. A quarter of the perpetrators used what the NIJ described as “assault rifles,” meaning they had features targeted by the legislation that Biden favors, such as a pistol grip, a folding stock, a threaded barrel, or a barrel shroud.
A gun without those characteristics, such as the “featureless” rifles that remain legal in states that have banned “assault weapons,” still fires the same ammunition at the same rate with the same muzzle velocity. The proposed federal ban explicitly exempts the Ruger Mini-14 and the Iver Johnson M1 carbine, for example, as long as they do not have prohibited features such as pistol grips or folding stocks.
According to the online manifesto that police attributed to the Buffalo shooter, the Bushmaster XM-15 rifle he used did not qualify as an “assault weapon” when he bought it, because it had been fitted with a fixed magazine. He easily reversed that modification so the gun could accept detachable magazines, and he reportedly used magazines that exceeded New York’s 10-round limit. Although that change had practical implications, other workarounds, such as replacing an adjustable stock with a fixed stock or a pistol grip with a Thordsen grip or a spur grip, allow New Yorkers to legally buy and own AR-15-style rifles like the Bushmaster XM-15 that are functionally identical to prohibited models.
The rifle that the Uvalde shooter used would qualify as an “assault weapon” in New York. But even if Texas had a similar law, the killer would have had many equally lethal alternatives.
Given the arbitrary distinctions they draw, it would be surprising if “assault weapon” bans reduced the frequency or lethality of mass shootings. “When we passed the assault weapons ban [in 1994], mass shootings went down,” Biden averred. “When the law expired [in 2004], mass shootings tripled.” But in a 2020 review of the relevant research, the RAND Corporation deemed the evidence “inconclusive,” saying “assault weapon bans have uncertain effects on mass shootings.”
In a 2017 column that The New York Times republished after the Uvalde shooting, Nicholas Kristof endorsed new firearm restrictions, including expanded background checks. But he noted that “the 10-year ban on assault weapons accomplished little, partly because definitions were about cosmetic features like bayonet mounts” and “partly because even before the ban, such guns were used in only 2 percent of crimes.”
Supporters of “assault weapon” laws frequently seem confused about which guns they want to ban. In a May 18 New York Times column urging Congress to “get rid of the guns,” Gail Collins mentioned “assault rifles” and “the infamous semiautomatic AR-15.” But she also talked about banning “semiautomatic rifles” and “semiautomatics.” In a Times opinion piece published a week later, Mary B. McCord, who served as acting assistant attorney general for national security in the Obama administration, likewise conflated “assault weapons” with “semiautomatic weapons” and “semiautomatic firearms.”
A ban on all “semiautomatic firearms” would be flagrantly unconstitutional, prohibiting myriad guns “in common use” for “lawful purposes,” the category that the Supreme Court has said is covered by the Second Amendment. It would ban many rifles that do not qualify as “assault weapons” and nearly all of the most popular handguns, which the Court described as “the quintessential self-defense weapon.”
Opponents of “assault weapon” bans warn that they are part of a broader, more consequential assault on gun rights. The rhetoric of prohibitionists like Collins and McCord suggests that concern is justified
- Retired plumber Joe Howard Teague was forced to use his shotgun on intruder
- LA resident tried to make citizen’s arrest and warned robbers he had a gun
- But they kept approaching the 93-year-old, with one wielding a fishing pole
- He said: ‘It was just like somebody comes to a gunfight with a pocketknife’
- A relative noted that Teague not only has tools from his life as a plumber, he’s also a musician as a hobbyist and owns several musical instruments
A 93-year-old man has shot and critically injured a would-be burglar after a gang tried to break into his home in California.
Retired plumber Joe Howard Teague repeatedly warned the attempted robbers that he had a shotgun, but they continued to approach and throw things at him.
Teague told reporters outside his Moreno Valley home yesterday: ‘I approached them to put them under citizen’s arrest.
‘They wouldn’t adhere to that and then one of them came at me with a fishing pole.
‘I kept telling them, I have a shotgun with three shells in it, but I actually only had one. And they kept throwing stuff at me,’ Teague said.
‘It was just like somebody comes to a gunfight with a pocketknife, you know’, ABC reported.
One kicked his door in and entered his home, prompting Teague to call 911 around 12.30pm. He tried to hold them at gunpoint while waiting for police to arrive.
A relative noted that Teague not only has tools from his life as a plumber, he’s also a musician as a hobbyist and owns several musical instruments.
When Riverside County cops showed up, attempted burglar Joseph Ortega, 33, was shot.
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Senior Joe Teague, 93, said: ‘It was just like somebody comes to a gunfight with a pocketknife’
The Los Angeles area homeowner fended off the gang of would-be burglars using a shotgun
By the time cops showed up at Teague’s home (pictured) Wednesday, one burglar was killed
Officers from the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department spoke to Teague for a long time before letting him go
The car the alleged burglar used to get to Teague’s home
Teague was taken in by police and questioned before being let go.
Because of the suspect’s critical condition, the Central Homicide Unit took the case.
Sheriff’s department officials said the shooting appeared to be justified, but added that the investigation is ongoing.
‘Investigators have established that several individuals, including Ortega, were inside Teague’s property when a shooting occurred,’ police said in a statement. ‘Teague was unharmed during the incident. He was questioned at the Moreno Valley Station and later returned home.’
No other arrests have been announced, with the rest of the gang getting away.
As of Friday morning, Ortega was still listed as hospitalized and in critical condition, according to the sheriff’s office.
Because of the suspect’s critical condition, the Central Homicide Unit took the case
Police said they will continue to investigate the potential homicide in Moreno Valley, California
But in-law Oscar Malma said: ‘I don’t think there would be any reason for him to be arrested’
Teague’s in-law Oscar Malma said Teague is often targeted by burglars – and the police response is less than rapid
Malma, who is married to Teague’s granddaughter, said the 93-year-old man was recently widowed
Teague’s in-law Oscar Malma said Teague is often targeted by burglars – and the police response is less than rapid.
He told KABC Los Angeles: ‘He took the law into his own hands.
‘He was tired because every time he calls the police, the police were taking forever to come and assist him.
Malma, who is married to Teague’s granddaughter, said the 93-year-old man was recently widowed.
‘And now this happened in the middle of the night.
‘He was defending his property. That happened inside of his home. So, I don’t think there would be any reason for him to be arrested.’
‘I don’t blame Joe. He’s been working all his life, he’s 93. He’s been working on his life and whatever little things he has, he needs to protect them,’ Malma said.