Crime

Thursday

Matthew Parris

How to get a police record (without committing a crime)

I couldn’t quite believe it when first I read the newspaper subscriber’s letter. Columnists for the Times and Spectator do still get real letters, and this one from (shall we say?) Mr Jones had enclosed the copy of a letter he had written to a lady whom we shall call Mrs Smith. Mr Jones had read about the public protest she was leading last year against an Emmerdale episode in which a couple, after much agonising, choose to abort their Down’s syndrome baby. Mrs Smith has a Down’s syndrome child, whom she adores. Mr Jones’s letter to her defended the broadcaster’s right to show parents who make a different choice.

Thursday

Taki

My return to New York is a mixed blessing

New York Ha, ha! What London turned down, the Bagel accepted with alacrity, namely the poor little Greek boy. And it took ten minutes max after disembarking to go through customs and collect my luggage. Kennedy had fewer people than a gay wedding in Saudi, and then some. Mind you, the Upper East Side, where I live, is also as quiet as a grave, the only sound being the occasional ambulance with its siren on racing for a tea break. Central Park, now devoid of tourists, has never looked better, weeping willows with recently sprouted leaves, birds singing the length of an empty Park Avenue, long green lawns stretching out

Thursday

James Walton

Is Jed Mercurio bored with Line of Duty?

When a drama begins with news of a ‘Chis handler’ receiving ‘intel graded A1 on the matrix’ that causes a ‘conflab with the SFC’, it can mean only one thing: you’re watching a new series of Line of Duty. And just to confirm it, shortly afterwards a bunch of armed police carried out a raid that didn’t go to plan — possibly because it was being led by a bent copper. As ever, too, there’s a big name playing the potential wrong ’un, with Kelly Macdonald (Trainspotting, No Country for Old Men) guest-starring as DCI Jo Davidson, leader of the Murder Investigation Team. More unexpectedly, Jo’s underlings include Kate Fleming

Thursday

Rod Liddle

The politicisation of Sarah Everard’s death

A woman called Jenny Jones, now elevated to Baroness Moonbeam, or something, in the House of Lords has proposed a 6 p.m. curfew for all men everywhere. This would prevent men from killing women on the streets. Mrs Moonbeam is a member of the Green party and presumably agrees with their manifesto which insists that men who identify as women are women and there’s an end to it. In which case all I would need to do is don a wig and take to the streets — and upon being apprehended by a policeman simply explain that my name was Loretta and I’d just popped out to do a spot

The Spectator

Has Neil Ferguson been proved right about Covid?

Calculated risk It is a year since Neil Ferguson’s Imperial College team published the paper that inspired the government to call the first lockdown. How good were its scenarios? — It modelled four Covid-suppression measures: isolating cases for seven days, their household contacts for 14 days, social distancing to reduce household contacts by 75 per cent and the closure of schools and hospitals. It assumed these measures would be repeated for 12-18 months before a vaccine became available. — The model was run with different values for the basic reproduction number, which it estimated to lie within the range 2 to 2.6. If the government introduced none of these measures

Wednesday

Matthew Scott

Starmer’s prosecution campaign is misguided

On Monday evening Sir Keir Starmer tweeted an explanation for why Labour would not be supporting the Police, Crime Sentencing and Courts Bill. Coming from a former director of public prosecutions this was dire stuff. First, and perhaps least importantly, the word ‘statues’ does not appear in the Police, Crime and Sentencing Bill. Sir Keir knows this. What the Bill proposes is that where criminal damage is caused to a ‘memorial’ there should be no minimum financial limit before the case can be tried in the Crown Court, where the maximum sentence is ten years imprisonment. In practice, such a sentence has never, so far as I am aware, been

Thursday

Toby Young

The conservative appeal of drug gangs

According to the Metropolitan Police Commissioner Cressida Dick, the easing of lock-down will be accompanied by a rise in crime in the capital, including the violent type associated with drug gangs. Just last week, the police recovered two zombie knives, two Rambo-style blades and a kitchen knife at the scene of an attack on a 16-year-old boy in Brixton. But it would be wrong to view this coming crimewave as a problem that just affects London’s underclass. According to Sheldon Thomas, the chief executive of an outreach organisation called Gangsline, a rising number of middle-class teenagers are being sucked into the gangster lifestyle in the wake of Covid. Thomas rather

Andrew Lycett

‘Britain’s Dreyfus Affair’: a very nasty village scandal

It has been described as Britain’s Dreyfus Affair — the wrongful imprisonment in 1903 of a half-Indian solicitor George Edalji in the Midlands and the refusal of the authorities to pay him compensation, even though he was later pardoned. In a case tainted by racism, class prejudice and plain stupidity, Edalji was accused of mutilating horses, sheep and cattle, and then forging letters to implicate others, thus creating mayhem in the village of Great Wyrley where he lived, in a mining district in Staffordshire. His cause was taken up by a home-grown Zola in the form of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle who was happy to replicate the investigatory skills of

Thursday

Melissa Kite

Beware the hobby bobby

‘Anything you say may be given in evidence. Do you have anything to say?’ I looked at the baby-faced police officer and tried to think of an appropriate response. I had been driving to Guildford station to meet a friend who every now and then comes from his nearby home on the train. I park in the station car park and together we walk to a kebab shop, order some food, eat it where we can perch, and cheer ourselves up. Running low on diesel, I pulled into a filling station on the way. After pulling back out, I noticed a police car close behind. I turned into the railway

Thursday

Robert Jackman

Is the hottest new podcast, The Apology Line, worth sticking with?

With the arts world still largely in hibernation, the launch of a big podcast is as close as we get to a big cultural event these days. Such is the case with The Apology Line, the latest serial podcast from Amazon-owned Wondery, which shot to the top of the ‘most downloaded’ charts last week and has sat there comfortably since. The Apology Line tells the story of a 1980s experimental art project in which a Manhattan-based provocateur, Allan Bridge, issued an open invitation to the city’s criminals (‘amateurs, professionals, white collar, blue collar’) to record their anonymised confessions to an unmanned phone line. He intended for the recordings to become

Thursday

Ali Bhutto

Cruelty and chaos in Karachi

Karachi, Pakistan’s troubled heart, is known to cast a seductive spell over residents and visitors alike. In Karachi Vice, the award-winning journalist Samira Shackle writes that the city’s penchant for extremity and eccentricity kept luring her back from London for almost a decade. During these visits, made between 2012 and 2019, she navigates the darkest corners of the metropolis’s maze and documents some of the lives that exist on the peripheries of society. In a city where violence is constantly simmering beneath the surface and lines between law enforcement and crime are blurred, locals develop their own mechanisms for coping with trauma. For instance, Safdar, an ambulance driver who survived

Thursday

Rory Sutherland

Is it time to reopen technology’s cold cases?

One of the staples of crime drama is the ‘cold-case squad’. This allows programme-makers to add period detail to the scenes set in the past, while the present-day scenes can show implausibly attractive forensic scientists hunting for clues in a creepy location such as a long-abandoned children’s home (an activity obviously best performed during the hours of darkness by two people who separate in mid-search for no apparent reason). I have often wondered whether it is worth establishing a cold-case squad for technology and science, to investigate those lines of inquiry that went cold 50 years ago but would now repay further investigation; or inventions that suffered from a miscarriage

Thursday

Adam Begley

Who killed Jane Britton in 1969?

The problem with telling stories about Harvard is that Harvard, if it teaches anything these days, teaches distrust of stories. So, for example, two thirds of the way through Becky Cooper’s long, ambitious book about the murder of a Harvard graduate student, the author explains that ‘we’ — those attempting to fashion a narrative about the gruesome fate of a 23-year-old woman bludgeoned to death in her Cambridge apartment in the late 1960s — ‘had unconsciously been perpetuating a story whose moral derived from the very patriarchal system we thought we were surmounting by telling the story in the first place’. This is a book that twists itself into a

Tuesday

Julie Bindel

Meet the women caught in the joint enterprise trap

Sarah, a 15-year-old victim of sexual exploitation by grooming gangs is pimped out and degraded by scores of men every week, beaten by her exploiters, and alienated from her friends and family. After a year of hell, Sarah is given an option: recruit two more girls for the gang and she can go free. Out of absolute desperation she agrees. But when the gang is finally caught, rather than treated as a victim, Sarah is charged with procurement of girls into prostitution and convicted by a jury. Amy, a vulnerable young woman is trapped in a relationship with an abusive man who controls her every move. Amy is scared of

Thursday

Taki

Why New Yorkers are fleeing the city in droves

New York Back when people used to read newspapers, they called it a ‘human interest’ story. Now it appears as just another statistic. The know-nothings on social media, who express utter drivel on a daily basis, will have pretty much ignored it, but a dreaded pro-Biden sheet actually published the full story. A young Japanese man came over to the Bagel from Tokyo to make it as a jazz pianist, and that he did. He started a trio of his own and toured with several bands until the fateful night of 27 September, when he rode the New York subway after a video shoot. Tadataka Unno is now 40, and

Thursday

Taki

I’m now considered a freak in New York

New York It’s nice to finally be in the Bagel, a place where the cows have two legs and no bells around their necks. I walk daily around the park two blocks from my house and stick to the Upper East Side in general. The park is by far the best part of Manhattan, and it’s better than ever because of you-know-what. Yes, the virus has chased away the tourists, and without tourists the rickshaws that had turned the park into a free-for-all have all but disappeared. Central Park is the only part of the city that Bloomberg’s three-term despotic reign didn’t change for the worse. Bloomberg was a so-so

Thursday

Taki

New York is a paradise for criminals

New York New York, New York, once a wonderful town/ The people are crap and the mayor’s a clown/ The only safe space is a hole in the ground… I could go on, but why be so negative? Arriving from bucolic Switzerland, Newark, one of America’s ‘murder capitals’, feels like Katanga circa 1960. If this isn’t a third-world airport, then I don’t know what is. My driver tells me I’m lucky that the virus is keeping people away otherwise it would take at least three hours just to get through customs. None of the electric signs that would tell us which terminal to collect our luggage from is working, so

Thursday

Bas Javid

Bas Javid: Why I joined the police

There’s no such thing as a typical week in policing and this last one was no different. It started on a high and ended, tragically, on the lowest of lows. I’ve been asked recently why I joined the police — what or who inspired me. My first answer is: Lieutenant Carl Downing. He was my divisional officer in the Navy and one day, though I went on to be the most unlikely copper you could ever meet, he turned to me and asked: ‘Have you thought about the police? You’d be great at it.’ I remember thinking: where did that come from? Nonetheless, five years later I found myself signing

Thursday

Iain Mackinnon

A murderer among us: I was Dennis Nilsen’s boss

How would you know if one of your colleagues was a murderer? When police announced the man they’d arrested for multiple horrific murders was Dennis Nilsen, many of his former colleagues — including me — were amazed, but perhaps not completely incredulous. Des worked with me at the Hotel and Catering Jobcentre in 1980 and he was unquestionably odd. My wife recalled him saying in the office one day: ‘You know it would be really easy to pick up some rootless young man in a bar and knock them off. Who’d notice? Who’d care?’ For his colleagues it was just another rant, a weird take on his continuing critique of

Thursday

The Spectator

Letters: We must sing again

Growing pains Sir: James Forsyth (‘Rewiring the state’, 4 July) shocked this loyal Spectator reader with the following: ‘Even before Covid, this country was in a productivity crisis and it’s nigh-on impossible to improve productivity without government involvement. Increasing productivity requires improvements to be made to physical and digital infrastructure and to the skill base, and those need public investment.’ James clearly has not studied the sources of productivity growth (or lack of it). In the 50 years to 2008, the UK experienced around 2 per cent p.a. growth in real Gross Value Added per hour worked — which is what politicians generally mean when they talk about productivity. Since