18 August (Part 1) - £1·7 million won’t go far
If you are anything like me you may have laughed at the Metropolitan Police’s plan to spend £1·7 million on a Twitter Squad to police social media. We can all think of examples of senior police officers being total idiots and perhaps they have learned nothing and are going down the same path again. A sense of proportion certainly appears to be totally lacking among our politicised police force.
During the
Independence Referendum the Scottish Police promised to investigate every single offensive comment made via
the internet and were widely ridiculed. Meanwhile really
offensive behaviour on Scottish streets was not prosecuted. Nearer to home,
Bexley’s police are only too keen to threaten bloggers who “criticise
councillors” or highlight the fact that
a Councillor no longer lives in the borough.
But not all idiots are senior police officers, you can’t have people like
John Nimmo threatening to kill an MP and sending her a picture of a large
knife. Lock them up and throw away the key would be the correct response. But you don’t need a Twitter Squad poring over
random puerile comments to find people like Nimmo.
I doubt £1·7 million will go very far.
Bexley Council’s obscene blog has
probably cost something like that.
I forget how much Chief Superintendent Victor Olisa told me it cost to
forensically examine Councillor Craske’s computer some 16 months after the
Borough Commander suspected that it was the source of
homophobic obscenities,
but it was a long way into five figures.
Since then Bexley Police’s admission that the case against Councillor Craske was
“crippled by political interference” has been under further expensive
investigation. It spent six months in Marlowe House, Sidcup where Sergeant
Michelle Gower of the Directorate of Professional Standards decided that no one
in Bexleyheath had done anything wrong and a further year at the Independent
Police Complaints Commission who decided that the DPS report was a whitewash.
A further two and a half years at the DPS’s main office has involved too many
police officers to count. From Commissioner down to Police Constable. Every month
or so they write to me to tell me how they are getting along. Twice recently I
have been advised that new lines of enquiry have been opened up. It sounds good
but I have my suspicions that they are just ruses to introduce further delay.
Occasionally the DPS lets slip, inadvertently perhaps, how poorly their initial
investigation was conducted. Only last week I was asked for the date of my
meeting with CS Dave Stringer and who was at the meeting. You would think
someone would have obtained such basic information years ago, and why did they
have to ask me? Didn’t Bexley police make a diary entry?
It has all cost a massive amount of public money and it is all the fault of Bexley
Council. After I stumbled across their obscene blog Elwyn Bryant told Council
Leader Teresa O’Neill about it on the morning of 9th June 2011. I let Chief
Executive Will Tuckley know about it at the same time.
By the time they took their morning coffee the obscene blog had gone. You can’t
tell me that Teresa O’Neill didn’t have a very good idea of who had done it to
have been able to get it deleted so quickly. If
she had been totally honest during the following police investigation it would have
saved hundreds of thousands of pounds of taxpayers’ money. On the other hand there is no evidence
that Bexley Police took the case sufficiently seriously to even interview her.