STARRISH MARK

Interesting prime time debate here on the Today programme focusing on the shooting of Mark Duggan by the police in London last year. Showing that renowned impartiality we had Duggan’s aunt demanding to get to “the truth” and then we had a lawyer  demanding to get “to the truth”.  The suggestion was Duggan was “executed” on the streets of our Capital city but the Police seek to hide the details of the operation.

POLICE TO BLAME..

Did you read this BBC report on a new study by the London School of Economics and the Guardian newspaper (Naturally) which places “anti-police anger” as a key factor in the summer riots.

Of those interviewed, 85% cited anger at policing practices as a key factor in why the violence happened.

I see. Or, to put it another way, the police are to blame. How dare they try to uphold the rule of law. It’s a recurring BBC trope, all this “anger” felt by a certain type of person. And so much easier to deal with than accepting the opportunistic thuggery of a significant number of inner city inhabitants.

HELPING THE LOOTERS?

Wonder what you make of this?

Cllr Brian Silvester, a Conserative councillor in Cheshire East, is calling on the BBC to hand over unbroadcast footage of the recent riots to the Police if it can be used to identify the culprits responsible for the looting and destruction and lead to their prosecution. 

On the Media Show on Radio 4 the BBC’s Head of News Gathering, Fran Unsworth (about 17.30 minutes in), that if the Police wanted the footage the Police would have to apply for a court order to get it. She said:


“No. We don’t do that without a court order. It is a matter of principle for us.” She added that she didn’t want to “compromise our standards”. She said if the police “come up with a court order we will probably hand them over.”

IS IT COS I IS BLACK?

Familiar BBC meme – the Police are racist. This morning the BBC has covered concerns raised over routine DNA tests which seem to suggest that some groups featured disproportionately on the database – with young black men “very highly over-represented.” I guess that means one of two things – either our Police are indeed racist or young black men commit more crime than the population average. I notice that the BBC don’t pursue the latter possibility. Why?

NOT A FAIR COP

Has anyone been watching the BBC1 drama Criminal Justice (running every night this week)? Critics are mostly raving about it, because the cast – led by the marvellous Maxine Peake – are first rate. There’s no doubt, too, that ex-barrister Peter Moffat, the writer, has considerable story-telling skills. But one aspect of it stinks to high heaven. As in almost every BBC drama that I can think of (apart, perhaps, from Waking the Dead), the coppers in it are portrayed as both idiotic and corrupt. Andrew Billen, in the Times, put it very well:

Are we expected to believe that policemen still remark in a solictor’s hearing that she has “nice tits” or that a senior officer encourages a suspect to make a confession after her lawyer has left or that he instructs a PC to lie about where they both were for a crucial hour?Even Moffat did not seem happy with having his wicked DI Chris Sexton baldly deny that rape within marriage is possible, a fallacy beaten out of coppers’ heads by any number of consciousness-raising workshops in the past decade.

I am not as sure as Billen that there aren’t cops who still think like this, and I also hate the way the police have become agents of political correctness gone mad. But one thing is certain: in the BBC’s world, cops are mostly incorrigibly bad, even when it makes their otherwise powerful dramas look idiotic and far-fetched.

POLICE NO LONGER RACIST?

Yet another day and another attack on our police, this time by the Orwellian entitled Justice Secretary Jack Straw, and gleefully reported by the BBC. This report starts by the spineless Straw suggesting that the Met is “no longer” institutionally racist (back-handed compliment there, lads) before he helpfully adds that there may still be “pockets of racism” within the force. It’s a perpetual motif of BBC reporting, this denigration of the British police. The idea being reinforced time after time is that racism is endemic and only the brave advocates of left-wingism can save us from it. The BBC sees this as an article of faith and never misses the chance to further propagate it.

INSTITUTIONAL RACISM. The

BBC loves to repeat ad nauseum the left wing narrative that the British Police are institutionally racist and so this latest nonsense from “diversity advisers” in Kent gives them a platform from which they can speculate just how racist our Police really are. Note that the BBC provides the story containing the initial allegations from which the professional whingers in the National Black Police Association then launched the assault on their own colleagues. The menace of the BBC is that it both undermines the morale of the Police whilst wasting their time fighting off the foot soldiers of the diversity legions.