Police

Chief Constable Simon Bailey, who heads Operation Hydrant, the police investigation of ‘non-recent’ child abuse cases, now says that paedophiles who view images of child abuse should not be prosecuted, because police cannot cope with the numbers involved. Mr Bailey is wedded to the doctrine that someone who says he is an abuse victim must automatically be believed. The result, said Sir Richard Henriques in his scathing report on Operation Midland, is that the criminal justice system totters: ‘Chief Constable Bailey’s argument ignores the consequences of false terminology.’ Another consequence is that the child abuse statistics, unchecked, explode. Mr Bailey will not admit his error and so, in order to

Life in Britain has become much cruder, meaner and more spiteful practically everywhere. It can be seen in people’s behaviour on the street; in those abominable neighbours from hell; in companies piling up the profits with no care whatsoever for the degree to which they are sweating their workers on terms that, until quite recently, would have been unimaginable. The incivility of one to another can be seen most sharply and poignantly in the degree of cruelty to children which, at the beginning of my working life, would have had every alarm bell ringing wildly. Children have to be almost on the point of being murdered before they are taken

My colleagues at the commercial and chancery bar are all at their chalets in Gstaad, funded by the endless fees from Jarndyce and Jarndyce, and the family bar are out en famille in Mustique, awaiting the festive fallout — there’s something about turkey, port and the Queen’s Speech that pulls marriages apart like a pound-shop cracker, and divorce doesn’t come cheap. But for we poor criminal hacks, it’s business as usual: crime never sleeps, and never less so than when Santa Claus is coming to town. As a junior barrister I made out like a bandit. Booze flows, blood follows; office parties are a magnet to drug dealers keen to

New York  Antonio Cromartie is one of the numerous professional and amateur athletes in America who now refuse to stand during the playing of the national anthem. Cromartie plays for the Indianapolis Colts and makes over three million greenbacks per annum. He refuses to stand as a protest at white America’s oppression of black America. (The refusal to stand was started by another black football player, who makes even more money and who was adopted and lovingly brought up by a white couple.) Cromartie, you see, is the father of 12 children by eight women. He has been chased around by various agencies because he has not been rigorous in

New York   This is a good time to be in Manhattan, the weather’s perfect, the park and foliage still green, and daylight savings time keeps the days long. New York used to be able to build these beautiful cities within a city, like the Rockefeller Center, but that’s all in the past. The developers have got to the politicians and now have free rein. The city had an opportunity after 9/11 to make a 21st century Rockefeller Center downtown, but a shark by the name of Silverstein preferred profit to architectural achievement, as did another horror, Aby Rosen, who is busy turning uptown ugly. I’ve been walking up and

Britain is in the grip of an epidemic, apparently. An epidemic of hate. Barely a day passes without some policeman or journalist telling us about the wave of criminal bigotry that is sweeping through the country. It’s been bad for years, they say, but has become worse since the EU referendum. Police forces tell us that hate crime has ‘soared’ in recent weeks; there’s been an ‘explosion of blatant hate’, according to some newspapers. Twenty-first-century Britain, it seems, is a pretty rancid, rage-fuelled place. Brendan O’Neill and Kevin O’Sullivan discuss the real hate crime scandal: If you feel this doesn’t tally with your experience of life in Blighty in 2016,

 Washington, DC Considering how heavily its citizens are armed with pistols, hunting rifles, shotguns, military semi-automatics, crossbows and nunchucks, considering how ethnically diverse and historically divided the place is, and considering that it is home to a third of a billion more or less rootless people, it is surprising Americans don’t kill each other more. The United States is well policed, even if it has been hard to say so lately. In the space of a couple of days in July, black men were shot dead by policemen in two separate incidents in Louisiana and Minnesota. Video flew round the internet. A protest rally called in Texas became the site

Sir Cliff Richard will not be charged with historic sex offences, say the police and Crown Prosecution Service. There is ‘insufficient evidence’. You, reader — yes, you: I cannot reveal your name because I’m making this up, but let’s call you Alan, and let’s suppose my reader-ship know very well who you are… you, Alan, respectable, hitherto-well-regarded Alan, are not going to be charged with smuggling into Britain a stash of sadomasochistic scatological pornography as a young man in 1983 because there is ‘insufficient evidence’. How do you feel about that announcement, Alan? How do you feel after more than two years of sniggering and media speculation and an £800,000

Much fuss is made about financial inequality, but what about inequality of crime? It’s a question that has never been properly answered. Last year, The Spectator put out an appeal for help with social questions that weren’t being addressed by politicians or academia. One was whether the much-lauded fall in crime has been concentrated in richer neighbourhoods. Strangely, the Home Office seems never to have looked into it. It’s an area I know something about, having previously worked on profiling areas across the country based on their inhabitants’ wealth, health, and various other factors for a number of demographic studies. So The Spectator commissioned me to carry out the study. The

As my daughter was preparing for her AS level exam on 1984 this week, George Orwell’s dystopian classic loomed back into a news headline: ‘We are not the Thought Police, Chief Constable Tells Government’. Leicestershire chief constable Simon Cole, who’s in charge of the anti-radicalisation Prevent programme, told the press that the Government’s new counter-extremist and safeguarding bill risked asking the police to dictate “what people can and cannot say”. The top cop was adamant that “We absolutely don’t want to be the thought police.” Well, (to borrow from another literary classic, Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop): Up to a point, Lord Copper. The police may feel uncomfortable about being tasked with