Yes, Defund The Police!
One of the most insane ideas pushed by the now thoroughly discredited Black Lives Matter movement was defunding the police. Or was it?
Their suggestion of defunding the police revolved around what they call the over-policing of black neighbourhoods in particular. One of their more insane suggestions, one supported by Keith Ellison, the imbecile Attorney General of Minnesota, was that if a woman is raped at knifepoint in her own bed by an intruder at dead of night, she should call a therapist or a counsellor rather than the police, as in the cartoon below.
Nevertheless, the suggestion that the police should keep their noses out of people’s business and that they should not be funded to trample all over us has some merit. In the imbecile stakes, the British police are way ahead of their American cousins; the latest absurdity in which they are engaged is arresting men for catcalling.
Few women actually report men for catcalling, so Surrey Police decided to entrap some. To do this, they sent out two attractive female officers in plain clothes to run in the local park or thereabouts. On August 13, The Guardian reported that the pilot scheme had resulted in “18 arrests for offences such as harassment, sexual assault and theft”. Two days later, the BBC reported that there had been no arrests specifically for catcalling. Take your choice.
The use of policewomen as “bait” isn’t new and isn’t necessarily a bad thing. For example, in 1979, police in the West Country used undercover policewomen and policemen in drag to stake out the Clifton Rapist, a dangerous sexual predator who had attacked several women. Dangerous was the operative word; Ronald Evans was a convicted murderer on parole. There is though a world of difference between taking someone like him off the streets and playing puerile games with local wide boys.
The police have engaged in many similar dubious activities over the years but the greatest concern has been caused by the recording of non-crime hate incidents and now the mass arrests of people for making offensive but innocuous comments on social media. These are not all related to the manufactured migrant crisis. The latest such incident to attract widespread attention by the mainstream media is the arrest of retired firefighter Robert Moss. He was arrested at 7am during which the police seized two phones, a computer and an iPad. They seize these devices routinely now out of malice.
Mr Moss had been commenting on a private Facebook group about his previous line of work. The Free Speech Union has taken up his case.
When the police abuse their powers like this, when they make spurious arrests, when they target innocent people for political reasons or simply out of malice, they need to have their funding pulled. More specifically, when they are sued for false arrest, false imprisonment and such, their legal expenses need to be paid out of Police Federation funds rather than the public purse, and in rare cases, out of their own pockets. No government official, bureaucrat or civil servant should be immune from tort for clear acts of malice.
Will this ever happen? Probably not, but at the very least, a careful eye should be kept on police funding, and where possible, chief constables should be held to account.