My attention was caught by the Daily Mail report below.
In fact, the practice of not arresting or charging those caught with various “illegal” drugs has been going on for years in the UK. The Thames Valley force may have extended it to a previously unheard-of extent but the rot (if that is what it is) set in decades ago, when some police chiefs decided that the terribly-valuable time of their officers was wasted in arresting persons found in possession of small amounts of cannabis. Subject to correction, I believe that it was London Metropolitan Police officer Brian Paddick [see Notes, below] who, as Borough Commander of the bandit country which included Brixton, first introduced the policy.
Let’s pause right there. A police officer —fairly senior, so be it— decides, arbitrarily, that he is not going to enforce a law, or not always going to do so. There are arguments to be made in favour of decriminalizing some (or all) now-generally-illegal drugs, but that is a decision for the legislature, Parliament, to make, not a police officer.
Now there has always been a measure of “police discretion”, as when (forgive any possible anachronism around a policeman actually patrolling an area and so actually being in a position to catch someone doing something forbidden) a policeman finds a child “scrumping” (technically, stealing) apples or pears from an orchard or garden, that policeman then deciding to deliver a stern on-the-spot warning rather than arresting the child. Likewise, the motorist getting a ticking-off from a traffic cop rather than a speeding ticket for travelling a few miles per hour over the set limit. However, the examples given are minor crimes by any estimation. Possessing forbidden drugs may be considered minor by some, but not by most, even today. That becomes even more so when the drugs are “harder” than marijuana.
There is the other point that a distinction can be made between a policeman deciding to exercize discretion in a particular case, and a policeman (at higher level) deciding not to enforce certain laws as a matter of his own decision and in the geographic area under his command.
This is of course a grey area, but it is troubling when a police force decides, on its own initiative, to abrogate the plain words of valid legislation. True, there are many laws still on the statute books which are no longer applied, crimes which are no longer prosecuted, but they are mostly those which have fallen into desuetude by reason of effluxion of time: one good example of a crime which has not been prosecuted for several hundred years (if ever) is that of “entering the precincts of Parliament while dressed in a suit of armour”. For other bizarre examples, see the links in the Notes, below.
Those old crimes, still technically criminal but never prosecuted, are an amusement. What, however, about things which are not crimes at all, but which the police, under the influence of political correctness or pressure (usually from the Jewish lobby) have decided to treat as crimes or quasi-crimes? Another grey area? I have blogged previously about how Jew-Zionists made malicious complaint against me to Essex Police (about 2 years ago, in late 2016/early 2017):
https://ianrmillard.wordpress.com/2017/07/13/when-i-was-a-victim-of-a-malicious-zionist-complaint/
In that case, the police were notionally acting in pursuance of a wrongheaded, badly-drafted but technically valid and quite recent law: Communications Act 2003, s.127, but were trying to stretch its ambit so that views expressed which were dissenting, dissident, controversial and (according to some Jews, at least) “offensive”, became “grossly offensive” and so could in principle be caught by the Act.
In “my case”, the prosecution never happened because (it now appears) the Crown Prosecution Service [CPS] (and at a high level, in Whitehall…) took the commonsense view that a successful prosecution was both unlikely to succeed and not in the public interest. Leaks from the police, however, now make plain that some of their officers were completely in the pocket of an aggressive Jewish-Zionist cabal (the “Campaign Against Antisemitism” or “CAA”); one police officer in particular seems to have acted effectively as an advocate on behalf of the CAA to the CPS, advocating for me and others (persons unknown to me) to be prosecuted. He lost his professional objectivity completely, it seems; thankfully (for me and for the rule of law) he was over-ruled. Bitter herbs for him, perhaps.
The “Campaign Against Antisemitism” or “CAA” is now itself the subject of various police investigations around misuse of its charitable status; also, as some readers will be aware, one of its leading members, Stephen Silverman, was said (it was admitted) in open court (and by the CAA’s own lawyer) to have been an anonymous (pseudonymous) and sadistic Internet troll who stalked various women online.
More recently, in Summer 2018, I was harassed by a police constable based at Barnet, North London (which is effectively occupied territory), at the behest of a Jewish woman who had been firmly put in her place by Andrew Torba, CEO of the online GAB platform. That Jewish individual had demanded that Torba remove various accounts from his GAB platform (which is based in USA and Caribbean) and she had had the gall to threaten Torba online and publicly with “Scotland Yard”! Torba posted all the conversation on GAB and told her in very blunt terms to, er, “get lost”! Many GAB and Twitter account-holders also told her to “get lost”!
I was accused of having reposted one reply to that woman from Torba (which repost would in fact not be a crime in the UK anyway), but that did not stop PC…well, let’s just call him Plod…from sending me an (undated!) “Warning Notice” re. “harassment”, which under English law has to consist of at least two incidents, both of which have to be unlawful, whereas here was one (alleged) incident and that entirely lawful even on its face!
It was clear to me that the Jewish Zionist woman complainant, smarting from the whipping given to her online by Andrew Torba, had decided to make an entirely malicious complaint against me. I should add that she is or was a member or supporter of the “Campaign Against Antisemitism” and at one time used to tweet prolifically and negatively about me. The point is that the police should have realized that her complaint was both malicious and had no basis at all in law. They did not. They chose not to. Very alarming…
It is worrying when the police not only do not know the law they purport to be applying, but actually try to continue to insist that what is not the law actually is! Plod not only telephoned me at least once, but emailed me intimidatingly (as he thought) and, as said, sent a semi-literate, undated and completely ineffective (legally ineffective) “Warning Notice” to me.
What made that incident worse was the feeling that the police in Barnet were running wild and were not acting properly under law. I heard (though this was never confirmed) that “the said Jewish woman” is the ex-wife of one of the “Shomrim” faux-police or private Jewish police, who are based, it has been said online (correctly or not), at the building(s) of the Barnet Police! A private tribal militia operating out of London police stations? It would have been thought incredible only a few years ago.
I could have taken the above-mentioned matter further via official complaint against PC Plod, who, in my view, came close to committing “misconduct in a public office”, but contented myself with writing a detailed letter both to the Borough Commander in Barnet and to the Metropolitan Police Commissioner. Even then, after some time, Plod harassed me via email once more! Only when I provided a face-saving way for him to get lost, did he.
I perceive a degree of drift here: the police deciding not to apply some laws on a blanket basis, in other cases as good as making up the law as they go along. Taken further, those tendencies could together collapse the rule of law in the UK entirely.
Notes
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Paddick,_Baron_Paddick
https://researchbriefings.parliament.uk/ResearchBriefing/Summary/SN06411
Update, 24 January 2019
Update, 20 May 2019
I saw a couple of Peter Hitchens articles…
and this: it seems that the police now see fit to interfere in actual elections!
Ian Robert Millard 