You will recall in an earlier article I noted Cheshire Police Chief Constable, Peter Fahy, comments on the murder of Garry Newlove:
"I personally think we cannot have a society where law abiding people like Garry Newlove cannot go out and challenge people that are damaging their property, otherwise we'll just have the yobs ruling the streets.
People should go out and certainly confront, that's my own personal view."
The fact that Mr Newlove "confronted/challenged" the yobs, and was murdered by them, seems to have escaped the Chief Constable.
However, aside from that remarkably obvious point, the Chief Constable needs to address another issue; namely, if you do decide to "confront" some yobs and manage not to get your head stoved in by them, then you have to deal with Nanny's police.
This is what Bill Marshall, 73, found to his cost recently when he confronted some yobs throwing stones at some ducks at Chesterfield Canal in Worksop. He shouted at them to stop, but was on the receiving end of a barrage of abuse for his trouble and the gang continued to throw stones.
One yob reported the incident to police, claiming that the pensioner had hit him during the altercation. Mr Mashall denies this.
Nanny's police officers duly knocked on his door, and Mr Marshall was expecting them to investigate his complaints about the unruly gang.
Instead he was arrested and taken off to a police cell accused of attacking the youths on the canal bank.
Mr Marshall said:
"I was shocked when a police officer turned up on my doorstep. I had made a number of complaints about anti-social behaviour from these yobs so I expected it was a response to that.
I was quite happy to invite him in but then he said I was being arrested and taken to the station accused of assault. I thought it was a joke at first but then I realised he was perfectly serious.
The officer ordered me to take the laces out my shoes as I was being arrested for common assault. I didn't know what to think."
Mr Marshall was put into a cell, and had to wait two hours for a duty solicitor.
He was interviewed by officers over the alleged assault, before finally being released pending further inquiries.
Now, some weeks after the incident, police have formally dropped any charges against him and apologised.
As Mr Marshall said:
"I am a 73-year-old pensioner and they were a gang of youths. I wasn't going to try and take them on at my age.
It took 73 years for an idiot to put me in jail. All I did was try to stop these louts throwing rocks at the ducks on the canal.
I felt degraded spending time in that cell. I can't believe I ended up in jail at my age. I've never seen the inside of a cell before and I don't want to see it again. The police seemed to automatically assumed I was guilty instead of talking to me first."
Therefore, taking the above into account, who in their right mind would ever dream of "confronting" yobs in this country anymore?
Confront and get your head kicked in?
or
Confront and get arrested?
Nanny is clueless.
Police (hopefully) spend too much time with criminals and therefore suspect everyone is guilty of something.
ReplyDeleteIt seems to me that the police are under great pressure to produce "results" so boxes can be ticked, so that Nanny can say what a good job she is doing keeping crime levels down. The unwanted side effect of this, as with many of Nanny's agencies/commissions is that they target the easy target in order to tick the box.
A recent example that highlighted this issue was the CSA. It was set up to go after absent parents, however in order to say they were collecting huge amounts of cash, they targeted mostly fathers that were already paying for their kids through a court order/agreement. The CSA then reassessed the figures and raised it to such an extent that the responsible decent father was financially ruined...Kerching, there goes Nanny's till again!!
In this country we need to have the streets taken back by the police so that decent people can go out at night in safety. Even our own home secretary stated yesterday that she would not feel safe at night out in London on her own. Luckily this Stepford Minister has the protection of a permanant police team with her. I wonder if the relationship is a little more frosty between them since she screwed them over pay.
As a society we need to look again at victims rights, we need to look at duties that come with all rights and we need to move away from our current thinking that empowers children to the detriment of adults. We need to stop showing gobby children running rings around their parents on TV especially in the soaps as kids think this is normal acceptable behaviour.
We need to move away from the notion kids can do no wrong.
Rant over.
Makes you proud to be British doesn't it.
This story is a description of exactly what is happening to a friend of mine right now.
ReplyDeleteHe went out and confronted a gang of little thugs that had just assaulted his daughter.
Later that night, eight armed police entered his home and searched it for the non-existent handgun they claimed he'd threatened them with. Ever had your house searched by the police? I have, and it's not pleasant.
They released him from custody at 2 am (like they released the old man in this story at 1.30am)to make his own way home.
There have been no consequences for the thugs - but they have returned to my friend's house a couple of times to inflict a little vandalism on him.
I think every town (and country district) in this country ought to have it's own Vigilance Committee.
The police are taking the piss.
ReplyDeleteThey've realised it's been turned into a game, so they are just enjoying the ride and trying to have fun.
Some of you may remember me telling my story of rescuing a copper from what looked like certain death at the hands (and feet) of a drunken teenage yob.
ReplyDeleteYou may also remember that, rather than receiving any sort of thanks (except from the copper himself; once he was out of hospital) I was warned that I would be prosecuted for assault on the yob concerned, even though he - himself - had been charged with assault on the copper.
The words 'gobsmacked' and 'f...ing furious' just about cover my reaction.
This all took place some six or seven years ago: it seems that the law - at whatever level - has learned nothing in the meantime about how to make our streets safer. Surely, even some prat of a Chief Constable cannot convince himself that - except in extremis -anybody with any common sense would put themselves in danger, knowing what plod's reaction to their efforts is going to be.
There is so much to be said in response to this and the previous post that one hardly knows where to begin.
ReplyDeleteI've never actually been to the UK, so all of my impressions of life there are drawn from the accounts of others, which I realize can't possibly give me a very comprehensive picture of what it is to live there. As an American, I am all too familiar with the sort of European who imagines life here to consist of an endless round of gunfights, drug deals, and racist attacks, punctuated by more peaceful interludes of cruising around in enormous, carbon-spewing SUVs, and lying sprawled out in front of our flat screen televisions, watching Jerry Springer. That the reality is a tad more mundane is something many a would prefer not to know. But I digress.
Despite never having set foot in Britain, there would seem to be an abundance of evidence of the havoc that the welfare state has wrought on the social codes of the culture. And it's these social codes, built up over centuries, rather than legislation passed in a matter of minutes, that allow for a civilized existence.
Let's face it, most people who don't commit crime refrain from doing so, not because they fear punishment, or because they've been undergoing effective therapy, or because at long last they're "understood" by some teacher or bureaucrat, but because they believe it's fucking-well wrong to harass, or assault, or steal from anyone at all, stranger or acquaintance, and because they'd therefore never consider doing so.
You either learn this as a kid, or you don't. If you don't learn this as a kid, society has every right to encourage you to learn it, or at least accept it, at a later stage of life, and you should be reminded every day that you're in for a damn hard ride if you think you're going to get away with a life of crime. For some kids at the age of 20, a little time in jail has a certain "gangsta" allure, but you don't find too many 40 year olds who feel the same way, and unfortunately, by the time they figure out what fools they've been, it's too late to start over and make much out of life. The gist of it is, you either learn to behave in fairly civilized way at a young age, or don't expect much mercy from the rest of us.
I have mentioned this anecdote before here on KNB, and, I must add, to some sarcastic acclaim,. Nevertheless, I will repeat it. When I was in college, I had a friend who'd gotten into some mischief (vandalism, primarly) in high school. When his father came to bail him out, he said not one word to his son at the jail or on the ride home, during which my friend tried desperately to explain "his side of the story."
The moment they set foot in the house, the father seized his son by the belt and the collar, and threw him across the living room. After the boy had landed, his father told him never to do anything like this again, never to call him from a jail again, and to go get some sleep. That was the end of the conversation.
Well, it may be a simplistic, even, in this age, a sentimental approach to a difficult problem. But in my friend's case (admittedly, he was probably never a really bad kid) it happened to work. If there were someone around the house to enforce a similarly "uncompromising" moral code with these yobs before they'd reach the age of 15, it would probably work with them as well. Unfortunately, the welfare state, both in the UK and the US, has seen to it that there won't be a father there, and if there is an adult male there, it is likely the mom's boyfriend, and he's probably more fucked up and worthless than are the kids.
Thus, I actually see no solution. And I'm not entirely convinced that civilization, if such a thing exists, can survive mass-single parenting, particularly of boys, in the long run. Once these kids reach the age of 18 or so, they're pretty much what they're going to be for the rest of their lives. What a pity.
Further to Black Sea’s comment:
ReplyDeleteWhat’s important to realise is that when an opportunity is offered to voice an opinion (whether on the internet or any other medium), the subsequent picture tends to be skewed fairly consistently towards the more extreme end of the scale.
Present web site and company excepted of course!
But it’s like when a doctor asks a patient how much alcohol he drinks per week - they multiply by three to get the real figure. Or when asking how much sex he has per month, they divide by four.
It’s the same with blogs on the internet. While comments will reflect the problems and concerns of the time - in terms of degree, it’s necessary to take what’s said with a large pinch of salt if you want to map across to typical day-to-day life.
I’ve been to the USA many times and apart from being almost mugged once on 11th Avenue, New York, I’ve never had any trouble elsewhere. Reality bears little resemblance to the movies. It’s broadly the same in the UK (I do enjoy your “carbon-spewing SUVs” though).
Confront and get your head kicked in?
ReplyDeleteor
Confront and get arrested?
The ultimate end of Nanny's gun control agenda.
The criminal is the victim and the victim is the criminal.
Only the criminals have guns and they are well aware that no one else is armed.
Jamaica banned guns in 1973 and the end result?
Jamaica now has the 3rd highest murder rate in the world.
Bat-shat quack-think.
English people used to be allowed to possess weapons to "defend hearth and home". This right originated in Anglo-Saxon law. In fact the term outlaw meant that because you had broken the law you were not entitled to its protection. Once declared "outlaw" criminals were fair game if law abiding citizens bumped them off in the act of committing a crime. This all changed when a particular king, one of the early Edwards I believe, undertook to establish a "King's Peace" across the land on the understanding that citizens no longer needed to possess weapons because the king and his officers undertook to maintain law and order on their behalf. It was a contract of trust.
ReplyDeleteThe contract has now been broken because the police, as officers of the Crown, no longer maintain the Queen's Peace - most of them don't even know what it is. We had/have perfectly good laws in this country, common sense and common law, which have been ignored, forgotten or not properly enforced by the officers of the Crown. Instead new laws have been introduced by a government obsessed that petty legislation is the answer to every problem.
These are nitty gritty laws, convoluted, full of loopholes and badly conceived clauses dreamed up by young and inexperienced politicians who think that in five minutes they can produce something better than laws that have served the common good for hundreds of years.
Many of the laws are about Political Correctness or introduced in response to alarmist hysteria by vocal minority pressure groups. Concerns that we drink too much, smoke too much, are too fat, are exposed to too much pornography, pay for sex, drive too fast, do things when we are driving that we shouldn't, speak our minds too openly or, heaven forbid, stand up for our fellow citizens when they are being subjected to real crime.
The laws attack freedoms that not everyone enjoys, so Nanny can introduce them stealthily, but they erode a much greater freedom for all of us. That is because once started there is no end to them. The boundaries between the state and the individual are being broken down "for our own good" and to protect us from ourselves. So it always is with totalitarianism and dictators. The edge is thin but the wedge is very large indeed.
These "stupid" laws are being enforced by politicised police forces which have lost sight of the real reason that they were established in the first place. To maintain the Queen's Peace, to bring law and order to our streets and public places so that we do not need to possess weapons to protect ourselves, our hearths and our homes. This situation disgusts me and it would horrify our English ancestors.