Owen Jones says Abolish the Met!
This reminds me that of course, we did abolish a British police force within the last 15 years, the one with the funny hats and head constables. We also merged the Scottish ones into a single force. The PSNI does actually seem to be an improvement over the RUC, although obviously much of this is down to generally less violence and social tension.
What say you? (Also, would anyone else love to know what Sid Fillery was up to in the early 1980s?)
Update: Extra resources – the Indy on the link between the Lawrence case and Southern Investigations.
Brown Moses on the Ellison report and the shredding of the Operation OTHONA files. Telling detail: out of the officers who took over the OTHONA archive from Roy Clark, half of them were employees of News International at some point (i.e. Hayman and Yates).
Placeholder – trying Safari to avoid WordPress JS error.
OK, that’s weird (but not in a bad way). (Both Safari and Firefox/OS X suppress the “Use Open ID” checkbox by default; Firefox also checks it by default, causing wackiness. In Firefox you can reveal the checkbox by switching off Javascript, which you can only do these days by going to about:config. I don’t know if the same is true for Safari.)
Anyway… just been reading the Ellison report, and my gob’s still smacked. The way that the name ‘Daniel Morgan’ kept floating up was bad enough; the fact that you’re reading about Bob Lambert’s undercover capers a few pages later makes it particularly surreal. But the detail that will stay with me is the story of the internal investigation into police corruption which was carried out in secret, never published a report and had all its files destroyed. Nothing to worry about there, then.
It is absolutely desperate, isn’t it? The bit that sticks in my mind is that if the Met was just racist, that would be a great improvement on being racist, crooked, arrogant, thuggish, politicised, secretive, and ambitious.
Ray Adams, Metman, NewsCorp security chief, patron of ONDigital hackers, benefiting from Scotland Yard secrecy: http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2012/apr/27/met-report-officer-news-corp?CMP=twt_gu
You mean: what was Sid Fillery up to apart from looking at paedo-porn in a backroom at Catford nick?
I mean, did he have any involvement in certain other cases up west?
There has been some follow-up to the revelations about Operation Othona.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/spotlight-falls-on-former-met-police-bosses-in-investigation-into-massshredding-of-internal-corruption-files-9213111.html