Police

The idiot economy – behind the ‘dark web’ cyber-crime busts

Spectator Money is out, with ideas on how to make it, spend it and even how to be seen spending it. Freddy Gray looks at the ‘social economy’ – think tax loopholes for financiers of politically favoured endeavours; while Camilla Swift peruses credit cards such as Kanye West’s ‘African American Express’ and the Dubai First Royale, ‘studded with diamonds. Bring it on, Sheikh Sugardaddy.’ Spare a thought, though, for the inconspicuous consumers – or at least, the wannabes. This segment took a hit last week in a joint operation dubbed ‘Onymous’, in which the FBI, Europol and friends arrested 17 alleged web-administrators and vendors and shuttered dozens of sites peddling child pornography, weapons, fake Danish passports, hacking services and so on. ‘Cash, drugs, gold and silver

24 Hours in Police Custody: a C4 programme that finally tells the truth about ‘honour crimes’

Settling down to watch 24 Hours in Police Custody, the new Channel 4 programme brought to us by the team behind the excellent 24 Hours in A&E, I was expecting some proper gripping telly. What I did not envisage was to be further educated about the level of plonkery that some men are capable of. And I don’t just mean the criminals. The custody sergeant this week was checking in a 60-year old man who was under arrest for an alleged assault and kidnap. The case was called ‘honour-based violence’, which usually refer to crimes against women and girls perpetrated by religious maniacs. There are countless such cases in the UK: revenge attacks on women who refuse to

Camilla Swift

Shoot first, ask questions later – police back off new gun monitoring plans

A few weeks ago, I wrote about a new Crimestoppers telephone hotline that the Association of Chief Police Officers (Acpo) decided would be a good idea, that was going to be dedicated specifically to ‘concerns about legally held firearms’. What ‘concerns’, exactly? Well, mainly that shooters could be ‘vulnerable to criminal or terrorist groups’ which is why the new phone line was designed to help the police ‘gather intelligence’, by urging members of the public to report any signs of ‘radicalism, extremism and vulnerability to terrorism’ among gun owners. But after a dedicated campaign from the Countryside Alliance, the decision has been made to abandon the plans. The organisation had

How did Britain ever have unarmed criminals?

The release of Harry Roberts, the man responsible for shooting dead three policemen in 1966, has sparked a vigorous debate about whether he should have stayed in prison until he died. The idea that ‘life should mean life’ for anyone who kills a policeman is a police-pleasing policy that the Home Secretary promised she would implement in a speech to the Police Federation last year. But a more interesting aspect  of the Roberts story is what it shows about the changing nature of Britain’s career criminals, and the values — if that is the right word for them — that they share. Until quite recently, criminals in this country did

What Shami regards as right isn’t necessarily what is right

Shami Chakrabarti, director of the civil rights group Liberty and omnipresent media personality, is on the cover of her book. She’s wearing a blindfold bearing the legend ‘On Liberty’, which seems to cast her in the role of Justice — blind, and all that. The title is the same as John Stuart Mill’s famous essay on the subject, which is, I’d say, unwise, as inviting comparisons. I did indeed go out to get JSM’s essay to read alongside Shami, and it wasn’t just the prose that left her standing. This book is an account of her time at Liberty since she started there, the day before 9/11, with a bit

Spectator letters: In defence of the GMC and Ukip members, and how Rachmaninov spelled Rachmaninov

Nothing to fear Sir: So long as we are not breaking any law, we have nothing to fear from the police being able to access our mobiles (‘Licence to snoop’, 11 October). They, however, would be committing a crime if they released any information so gleaned to anyone except to the judiciary if we are being accused of a crime. In these difficult times it is reassuring that the police should have every means at their disposal in pursuing those who would do us harm or commit criminal activity. Adrian Snow South Cerney, Cirencester In defence of KP Sir: Peter Oborne is right that some of Kevin Pietersen’s most brilliant

Of course marijuana isn’t ‘safe’ – but should it be illegal?

Sometimes I read things that really get on my wick, and last week was one of those times. A new, ‘definitive’ 20-year study has ‘demolished the argument that the drug [cannabis] is safe’, according to the Daily Mail. Has it, though? There are various things wrong with that claim. One, no study is ‘definitive’; two, the research was not a ’20-year study’, but a review of other studies carried out over the last 20 years. There are lots other things wrong with the coverage, too, including the startlingly ridiculous claim that cannabis is ‘as addictive as heroin’. Even according to the research itself, less than one-tenth of people who try

Every 73 seconds, police use snooping powers to access our personal records. Who’ll rein them in?

At its peak, the Stasi employed one agent for every 165 East Germans. Spying was a labour-intensive business then — you needed to monitor telephone calls, steam open mail, plant a bug, follow suspects on shopping trips and then write reports for the KGB. The advantage was that, human nature being what it is, the Stasi would probably succeed in gathering dirt on all but the most saintly. The drawback: trying to gather files on so many millions could almost bankrupt a government. How much easier it is nowadays. By interrogating someone’s mobile phone, the police can gather more information than the Stasi could dream of compiling. The modern smartphone

Podcast: police phone hacking, Lib Dem tactics and vicious dogs

In this week’s issue, Fraser Nelson and Nick Cohen examine how police are using the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (Ripa) to run wild in the public’s mobile phone records. Like many curtailments of British liberties, this started off in the name of fighting terrorism. It has now emerged that police forces used these anti-terror powers to obtain phone records from a number of journalists to work out who they were speaking to. Camilla Swift speaks to Fraser and Lord Falconer, the former Lord Chancellor, who was involved in enacting the original Ripa legislation. Have the police gone too far? And can we really trust them to use this legislation responsibly?

‘Escalate’: an exciting new way to say ‘pass the buck’

Shaun Wright, the police and crime commissioner for South Yorkshire, spoke to Sky television last week about how little he knew of sexual exploitation of young people in the area. ‘This report demonstrates that lots of information was not escalated up to political level or indeed senior management level,’ he said. ‘For that I am hugely shocked and hugely sorry.’ He did not apologise for having used the word escalated, no doubt because he thinks it is a fine and proper thing for a man in his position to use the word escalate. Mr Wright uses escalate in a different sense from the escalation reported in the papers last week

Rod Liddle

It’s not just Ashya King’s parents who the authorities despise

My first act upon returning from my holiday was to sign the online petition to have the supremely irritating children’s cartoon figure Peppa Pig banned from television. I have always found the creature half-witted, arrogant and sinister, and the tune which accompanies her exploits is both grating and didactic. Further, even allowing for the usual anthropomorphic licence employed by cartoonists, this Peppa does not remotely resemble a proper pig, and her snout is worryingly two-dimensional. She gave me hours of misery when my daughter was a toddler, although not quite so much as Balamory — a programme which made me feel physically unwell. The Ban Peppa petition was got up

My ‘fare-dodging’ hell

At least every other time a ticket inspector boards a train or bus I’m on, I pretend I can’t find my ticket or Oyster card. I then miraculously find it at the very last second before my stop. Why? Pure revenge. I hate this nasty group of sadistic jobsworths and, having been stung by them myself, take great pleasure in distracting them for long enough to allow those who are fare dodging to get away without being spotted. The smugness of ticket inspectors becomes unbearable in the face of the chronically bad service on London transport. My blood boils when I spot a bank of uniformed inspectors, flanked by police officers, when disembarking

To understand the causes of child abuse we need to look at its perpetrators’ backgrounds

Day two of the Rotherham scandal—or rather the fallout from the latest report on it—and there’s a marked, obvious change in the coverage of it from the last time the subject surfaced. It may be the sheer scale of the thing —1,400 girls, and counting—and the horror of the cruelties perpetrated on the victims, but I don’t think that anyone is now trying to evade the reality of the thing: that the perpetrators were overwhelmingly men of Pakistani Muslim background and the victims white. But that, I think, is squarely down Alexis Jay’s report, which made the point not only that the rapists and abusers were from one ethnic and religious group and the

The biggest civil liberties outrage you’ve never heard of

Imagine you bought a ticket for the opera and then a copper told you how you may travel to the opera house. You absolutely may not drive there, he says, nor take public transport, nor walk. You must go on a licensed coach, crammed in with all the other opera-lovers, under the watchful eye of the boys in blue. Yes, that’s right, the police will escort you to the opera, monitor you through the performance, and then escort you home. You got a problem with that? I imagine you would. You might feel that your right to get from A to B however you please had been curtailed. Now you

Sloane Rangers vs Arabs – the battle for Chelsea

Perhaps you’re aware that it’s Ramadan right now, the month in which all good Muslims refrain from eating, drinking, smoking and sex during daylight. What you might not know is that Ramadan also marks the start of an annual turf war in London; a battle between the tribal Sloanes and the young Gulf Arabs to dominate Chelsea. The skirmish actually begins before Ramadan. The Gulf States heat up to an intolerable degree and their oil-rich young migrate over here in droves to escape both religious censure and the sun. They descend first of all on the department stores in what’s become known as the Harrods Hajj, to flash their cash

David Cameron’s plot to keep us in the EU (it’s working)

I write this before the results of the European elections, making the not very original guess that Ukip will do well. Few have noticed that the rise of Ukip coincides with a fall in the number of people saying they will vote to get Britain out of the EU. The change is quite big. The latest Ipsos Mori poll has 54 per cent wanting to stay in (and 37 per cent wanting to get out), compared with 41 per cent (with 49 per cent outers) in September 2011. If getting out becomes the strident property of a single party dedicated to the purpose, it becomes highly unlikely that the majority

Andrew Mitchell demands the police publish transcripts of ‘plebgate’ hearings

The plebgate scandal has flared back to life tonight with a letter from Andrew Mitchell to the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police Bernard Hogan-Howe. Mitchell alleges that one of the police officers on duty on the night of the incident boasted to a friend ‘I can topple the Tory government’. According to Michael Crick, Mitchell gathered this evidence at the recent Met disciplinary hearings that he was allowed to attend. Mitchell now wants the transcripts of these hearings published along with the evidence presented to them. The Met’s response tonight suggests that they won’t agree to this. Those close to Mitchell are getting increasingly frustrated at how long this whole

Keith Vaz fixes his fire on the Police Federation

The Police Federation is in the firing line this morning, and not before time. The federation sounds like something out of Rebus. The allegations of ‘endemic’ bullying and ‘cruel and gratuitous’ acts contained in Sir David Norrington’s report, and the subsequent parliamentary inquiries, date back over at least 8 years. With delicious irony, some of those allegations have been made against the federation’s equality and anti-bullying officers. The officers dispute the claims and say that the complaints were resolved on an informal basis some years ago; but you wouldn’t bet against further investigation in this atmosphere. The central finding of these reports is that the rank and file of the

Hurrah! A setback for the enemies of free speech

This has been a bad month for those who want to shut down free speech in Britain. First there was the wholesale failure of Fiyaz Mughal (whose ‘work’ I have written about before). Readers will recall that Mr Mughal – whose website, Tell Mama, claims to record and counter ‘Islamophobia and anti-Muslim hatred’ – used the immediate aftermath of the murder of Drummer Lee Rigby to claim hysterically that, ‘The scale of the backlash is astounding… there has been a massive spike in anti-Muslim prejudice’. He also used the opportunity to attack the UK government’s counter-terrorism policy. All this before Drummer Rigby – who some people may remember was killed

Gerry Adams’s arrest is astonishing

In one sense the arrest of Gerry Adams for questioning in relation to the murder of Jean McConville is not a surprise. On the other hand it is astonishing. I cannot think how many times over the years the connection between Adams and the McConville case – appalling even by the standards trawled during the Troubles – has been raised. Yet, as the years have gone on, the possibility that Adams would ever actually answer questions on the murder seemed ever more remote. Adams has always denied any involvement in this crime, and has offered the police his assistance in their inquiries. Adams presented himself at a police station yesterday