Letters | 31 October 2013

Not fair on cops

Sir: Nick Cohen (‘PCs gone mad’, 26 October) claims that the police are deliberately attacking the press and fundamental liberties because, in light of the overall reduction in crime, they are now underemployed and ‘many are surplus to requirements’. This is an inventive conspiracy theory by any standards, but lacking any link to plausibility.

In 2006, as the head of the Anti-Terrorist Branch, I called a halt to the first phone-hacking investigation because we had other priorities such as the 7/7 and 21/7 attacks, and stopping the killing of several thousand people with liquid bombs on aircraft over the Atlantic. We really did have better things to do. The later furore over the police’s slowness to reopen the hacking investigation is why journalists are now being investigated.

Yet now, bizarrely, Mr Cohen claims that because crime has dropped, fewer police are needed, so they have turned to hounding journalists to protect their jobs and pensions. Now that his work is done in filling up our prisons to record levels, Constable Machiavelli can turn to what he really joined the force to do — persecuting ‘tabloid journalists and politically incorrect users of social media’.

The only reason the police are now investigating journalists is because of public and political outrage at the abject failure of the media to adhere to the law, regulate themselves or act towards victims of crime with common decency. Sorry Mr Cohen, but there’s no conspiracy.
Peter Clarke
Former Deputy Assistant Commissioner, Metropolitan Police,
Walton on Thames, Surrey


 
Sir: Nick Cohen’s article may be a passionate defence of free speech but his attack on policing is wide of the mark.

The police are not idle. The Met Police take over five million calls a year, which hardly suggests they are not busy. In fact the police are being stretched in all directions. Up to half of a frontline officer’s time is now spent dealing with people who have mental health issues, or looking for missing persons.