Police

Does prison work? I’m very pleased that John McTernan – who is one of the brightest and sanest of Labour buttons – is now ensconsed at the Daily Telegraph. Unfortunately he’s not inoculated against daftness: Suddenly it’s become fashionable to see ending short term sentences as common sense. Alex Massie is the latest victim of this strange policy meme. He praises “the presumption that prison sentences of fewer than three months are generally to be avoided on the reasonable grounds that they don’t do much good for or to anyone”. This is quite an odd argument. You need to be a fairly bad person to get a prison sentence –

Meanwhile, in other police news, Coppers in Birmingham are being armed with Tasers as a matter of course. Until recently, only firearms officers were so equipped. Sadly, this means that it’s only a matter of time before someone is killed by one of these things. That’s what happens when you start flinging 50,000 volt charges about. This isn’t a question of if but of when. It will happen. What’s more, I strongly suspect that handing more weapons  – even of the supposedly non-lethal type – actually makes everyone less safe. When the police are encouraged to think of themselves as paramilitaries then we shouldn’t be surprised when they start acting

Let’s suppose you were heading off on holiday and then let’s suppose that snow had closed the airport and your plans were ruined. You might be vexed and then you might post a message on Twitter that hinted at your frustration. Suppose this Tweet read something like, oh, I don’t know, this: “Crap! Robin Hood Airport is closed. You’ve got a week… otherwise I’m blowing the airport sky high!” Would you then be surprised to be arrested under the Terrorism Act? I think you might be. Well today poor Paul Chambers was found guilty under Section 127 of the Communications Act 2003 for sending an “indecent, obscene or menacing” message.

Adam Boutlon’s interview with Chris Grayling this afternoon felt like a pressure valve being released.  Grayling’s recent low profile had already become a rolling story, and his absence from the speaking line-up at his party’s manifesto launch was bound to fuel more murmuring and speculation – so the Tories clearly decided to wheel him out in front of the cameras to calm things down a bit.  As it happened, Boulton was on combative form – arguing that elected police commissioners would just add “another layer of bureaucracy” to society – but Grayling sounded quite reasonable in response. Here’s the video, so you can judge for yourselves:

Remember the outcry after the discovery that Paul Clarke could face five years in prison for the “crime” of finding a sawn-off shotgun in his garden and handing it in to his local police station? No, me neither. Well, blog-land has not been happy about this but, as a reader points out, our friends at newspapers and the BBC have completely ignored it: This story is getting zero coverage. I’ve seen more coverage from American websites than I have from UK sources. I’ve done a search at the Times, the Guardian and the BBC News website and – unless I’m doing something very wrong – none of them seem to

You might think that this story can’t be true or that’s been made-up to provoke everyone’s inner Littlejohn. But no, not so. It is true and, alas, an enraging, dispiriting business. A former soldier who handed a discarded shotgun in to police faces at least five years imprisonment for “doing his duty”. Paul Clarke, 27, was found guilty of possessing a firearm at Guildford Crown Court on Tuesday – after finding the gun and handing it personally to police officers on March 20 this year. The jury took 20 minutes to make its conviction, and Mr Clarke now faces a minimum of five year’s imprisonment for handing in the weapon.