Sir Ian Blair: Must Resign

Right. I’m sure I said somewhere that the man shot by police in the now-infamous Forest Gate raid, who was then charged with possessing child porn, would never be prosecuted for it. Well, whaddya know. CPS concludes there is insufficient evidence to proceed. Something tells me this won’t be on the front page of the Scum or the News of the Screws this weekend, unlike the charges, which the Met predictably leaked to the ‘bloids.

Let’s be clear: on the unsupported word of a man with an IQ of 69, the Metropolitan Police brought up 200 cops and stormed the house of an innocent man, shot him in the arm because “my hand slipped”, tore the place apart over several weeks of searching for a “chemical dirty bomb suicide vest”, having declared an aerial exclusion zone overhead presumably in case the CDBSV leapt up out of the foundations and – as stunned bobbies watched – mutated into a surface-to-air missile before hurtling skywards, attempted to seize his savings, alleged that the suspect was a paedophile, having tipped off the biggest-circulation newspaper in the country, and finally confessed that he was nothing of the sort.

This is after they managed to botch a surveillance operation so completely that they shot an innocent man dead in a tube train – and then briefed the press first that he was really a terrorist (a lie), then that he was an illegal immigrant (technically true, but irrelevant), then that he was a rapist, which was a direct lie, and also that he was a cocaine dealer, also a lie.

Is there any reason to think Sir Ian Blair should not be sacked at once? For some reason, despite all this, he is still seen as a trustworthy political eminence by the Government. And this is the worst of it. The senior police officers are increasingly becoming a political force in their own right, usually but not always aligned with the Government’s “security agenda.” ACPO, for example, is behaving with a shocking degree of quasi-legislative arrogance. Very serious changes are being made to the political culture on which no votes are taken. For some reason, the pundits who were outraged that General Dannatt saw fit to speak publicly about his concerns seem unconcerned at ACPO monitoring all vehicle movements on the motorway system by executive (or should that be extra-executive?) whim.

It’s even more worrying, by the way, that the CPS spokesman’s explanation of Kahar’s exoneration does not sound very satisfying. I have in the past blogged on the worryingly flaky evidence used in Internet child-porn cases and the painfully slow realisation of same. I still think it’s a suspiciously convenient charge in this particular case. But what is this supposed to mean?

Of the total, 23 had been “embedded” images – which could have been inadvertently downloaded on the back of other computer files – and 21, on the external hard-drive and a Nokia 3G mobile, had been “deleted”.

The spokesman said: “To transfer to the phone, the suspect would have to have specialist knowledge.

“There was no evidence that Mr Kahar had possession of, or access to, equipment or the technical knowledge to do so.”

What, a USB cable? Bluetooth? As it was a UMTS device, it wouldn’t have been impractical to send images or video to it as an e-mail attachment. This is dangerously clueless for the supposed experts, although there is a strong possibility that the spokesman is talking rubbish.