Posts Tagged ‘Scotland Yard’
Scotland Yard reaffirms — there is no patch for stupid!
Inspector Lestrade gets it wrong, again!
Scotland Yard has inadvertently shared the email addresses of around 1,000 victims of crime with each other, in a mistake that has been referred to the information commissioner.
The Metropolitan police said emails were sent out to 1,136 victims, mostly of car theft or pickpockets, as part of a survey… But the addresses were put in the wrong section of the email, which meant they were shared with other victims.
A Met spokesman said: “No other personal details were revealed and we are contacting everyone affected to explain what happened and to apologise…”
The emails were sent as part of the survey into whether victims felt they were receiving a better service following the introduction of a single telephone number for the investigation unit in London. They were sent in seven batches of between 119 and 198 recipients…
A spokeswoman for the Information Commissioner’s Office said it had received the referral and it was being examined.
She said the highest fine the office could issue was £500,000 but that was for breaches of data of an extremely sensitive nature, for example the sharing of details about child sexual assault victims.
This only qualifies as clumsy, incompetent and maybe stupid.
Scotland Yard coppers and tabloids in a cabal of corruption
For nearly four years they lay piled in a Scotland Yard evidence room, six overstuffed plastic bags gathering dust and little else.
Inside was a treasure-trove of evidence: 11,000 pages of handwritten notes listing nearly 4,000 celebrities, politicians, sports stars, police officials and crime victims whose phones may have been hacked by The News of the World, a now defunct British tabloid newspaper.
Yet from August 2006, when the items were seized, until the autumn of 2010, no one at the Metropolitan Police Service, commonly referred to as Scotland Yard, bothered to sort through all the material and catalog every page, said former and current senior police officials.
During that same time, senior Scotland Yard officials assured Parliament, judges, lawyers, potential hacking victims, the news media and the public that there was no evidence of widespread hacking by the tabloid. They steadfastly maintained that their original inquiry, which led to the conviction of one reporter and one private investigator, had put an end to what they called an isolated incident.
After the past week, that assertion has been reduced to tatters, torn apart by a spectacular avalanche of contradictory evidence, admissions by News International executives that hacking was more widespread, and a reversal by police officials who now admit to mishandling the case.
Assistant Commissioner John Yates of the Metropolitan Police Service publicly acknowledged that he had not actually gone through the evidence. “I’m not going to go down and look at bin bags,” Mr. Yates said, using the British term for trash bags.
At best, former Scotland Yard senior officers acknowledged in interviews, the police have been lazy, incompetent and too cozy with the people they should have regarded as suspects. At worst, they said, some officers might be guilty of crimes themselves.
NSS. Supervising coppers covering up for their mates in the tabloid press should not shock anyone. It’s the kind of corruption that has always lived on a 2-way street.
That something like this has blown up in the faces of a big time, big city police department is the only surprise. Usually the political establishment sees something like this coming and gets their assorted walls of agitprop in place, stonewalling any danger to blue bureaucrats. In fact, that’s probably what they thought they’d already succeeded in doing – if it weren’t for the tenacity of some of the victims and one newspaper, The Guardian.
RTFA for pages of detail – of exactly the sort of corruption you already expect.
Politician’s wife was closer to his bodyguard – than he was!
Johnson and wife in better days
Alan Johnson’s former police bodyguard is facing disciplinary proceedings over allegations that he had an affair with the former shadow chancellor’s wife.
Mr Johnson announced his resignation after less than four months in the job, saying he was finding it “difficult to cope” with his personal crisis while carrying out his front bench duties…
Scotland Yard has confirmed that a police protection officer has been suspended and the case has been referred to its Directorate of Professional Standards over the allegations…
The officer is understood to be Paul Rice, a bodyguard that had protected Mr Johnson and his wife Laura…
Announcing his decision, Mr Johnson wrote to Mr Miliband saying: “I have decided to resign from the shadow cabinet for personal reasons to do with my family…
Scotland Yard reportedly began disciplinary proceedings yesterday after learning of the alleged affair with Mr Rice, a detective constable who had been the MP’s protection officer when he was Home Secretary.
Oops. Pretty heavy redefinition of the word “bodyguard”.
Religion is regarded as “irrelevant, old-fashioned and violent”
London’s former top copper
In a lecture last night, the retired police officer, who led Scotland Yard during the 2005 suicide bombings on London’s transport system, said that religious leaders were losing the struggle to make it clear that faith impels them to do good deeds.
Islam has been “demonised” as a result of terrorist atrocities carried out in the name of a “distorted” version of the faith, he said. He said it was one of the “great” Abrahamic faiths and a “faith of peace” which had suffered as a result of the “horrors” carried out by individuals.
Lord Blair, who is a devout Anglican, added that he did not understand the “obsession” in his own church over women priests and bishops or the way the Anglican Communion was “tearing itself apart” over homosexuality.
The former police chief said he also failed to understand the Catholic Church’s insistence on priestly celibacy.
Speaking to an audience at the religious Theos think-tank in central London, he said that to most people faith looks “irrelevant, clannish, prejudiced, old-fashioned and violent”.
Lord Blair suggested the greatest achievements of history, such as the abolition of slavery and the provision of education or free health care for all, had their origins in the religious impulse.
“Religion should be the most peaceful of all the agencies of social cohesion,” he said.
In his lecture, Lord Blair also emphasised the importance of doubt in religious faith…”Doubt in the very nature of faith can surely be a useful companion to a necessary lack of shrill conviction that our own faith is more valuable than that of another.”
True Believers in America consider doubt a failing of faith. Most fundie ideologues preach the absolute infallibility of their beliefs. Of course, poking fun for the same mistake among their competitors or detractors.
It would be hilarious if it weren’t for the evil and injury done by their followers.
Scotland Yard credit card probe zeroes in on 300 detectives
Daylife/Reuters Pictures used by permission
More than 300 elite Scotland Yard detectives are suspected of defrauding the taxpayer of millions of pounds by abusing their corporate credit cards, the Observer can disclose.
Auditors who have examined the American Express accounts of 3,500 officers involved in countering terrorism and organised crime have reported almost one in 11 detectives to the Metropolitan Police’s internal investigators.
A senior officer appears to have spent £40,000 on his Amex card in one year, without authorisation. Items bought by others without permission include suits, women’s clothing and fishing rods.
The scale of the suspected fraud, disclosed in an internal Metropolitan Police Authority report, will send shock waves through the force…
Authority members expressed their dismay last night. Jenny Jones, a Green Party member, said: “Taxpayers have every right to be angry about this. Well done to the current auditing team for uncovering this, but what on earth was happening before? Why was there no accountability?
“It beggars belief that our police, who are supposed to be solving crime, are suspected of fraud on a grand scale.”
RTFA. Chuckle over the details – except it really ain’t funny. These clowns are charged with upholding law and order at the highest level.
I know my honest friends in law enforcement will forgive me for saying this – they know exactly what I mean – The American model triumphs, once again.
Rape complaints were not classified as crimes by the Met
This follows on from our earlier post on the taxi-rapist, John Worboys.
The Metropolitan police failed to investigate scores of rape allegations because officers did not record them as criminal offences, the Guardian has learned.
An internal review by Scotland Yard found that women who complained to police that they feared they may have been raped or suffered a serious sexual assault had their concerns dismissed in up to six London boroughs. In a breach of police policy, officers instead classed the incidents as crime related incidents [CRI], meaning the cases were not investigated properly, informed sources say…
The practice of dismissing women’s fears of rape and failing to class them as crimes is believed to have continued for several years and was ended last year. The review that identified the practice was triggered by the Worboys case.
When the procedure was corrected it led to a spike in recorded rape cases, up by 25% over the past year, at a time when overall crime in London fell.
RTFA. Reflect upon how much of policing can be politics – and shouldn’t have to be.
