Comments on: Bicycle skid marks

By: Clovis Sangrail

Clovis Sangrail — Thu, 20 Dec 2012 18:52:16 +0000

It makes me quite nostalgic-I feel like a child of the sixties, complaining about police corruption and brutality. They are just the unwitting tools of the establishment! Next thing you know, they'll be oppressing ~~the workers~~ MPs by invading the House of Commons. I am so confused.

By: Steven

Steven — Thu, 20 Dec 2012 14:20:03 +0000

I see the Thin Blue Line exists on the other side of the Pond. What’s a little perjury and filing false reports and false arrest and manufacturing evidence and wrongful conviction among friends anyways?

By: RAB

RAB — Thu, 20 Dec 2012 13:37:20 +0000

CCTV has never bothered me, just as long as I am allowed to film the bastards right back, but they don’t like it up ‘em do they?

The “Member of the Public” email is obviously a phoney…

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/law-and-order/9756925/Plebgate-revealed-the-email-accusing-Andrew-Mitchell-of-swearing.html

Completely blew it by over egging the pudding here…

As we were waiting at the main gates of Downing Street, with several other tourists, he point [sic] to a man on a push bike coming up Downing Street. My nephew wanted to take a photograph of him as he mistakingly [sic] thought that this man was BORIS JOHNSON, but I corrected him, having a keen interest in politics and the Conservative Party, knew it was ANDREW MITCHELL – Member of Parliament for Sutton Coldfield.

Quite apart from Boris Johnson and Andrew Mitchell not looking even slightly alike, I have a keen interest in Politics too, but I wouldn’t know Andrew Mitchell from a hole in the ground, nor his constituency without googling him up.

By: Brian Micklethwait

Brian Micklethwait — Thu, 20 Dec 2012 12:53:53 +0000

The orthodoxy here at Samizdata is that CCTV everywhere is a bad thing, but I note that it is CCTV footage that is making the case against the police in this case. Total surveillance is – or at least can be – total surveillance of Them as well us of Us.

By: nemesis

nemesis — Wed, 19 Dec 2012 20:25:13 +0000

Rab – Would that be the same Leverson who (according to the BBC)
‘During a speech at the University of Melbourne, he insisted there was an important difference between mainstream journalists with “a powerful reputation for accuracy” and bloggers and tweeters who were “no more than electronic versions of pub gossip’.
He must mean those MSM journalists who took the initial reports at face value and keen to have a pop at a Tory toff.

By: Clovis Sangrail

Clovis Sangrail — Wed, 19 Dec 2012 20:18:19 +0000

I used to think (thanks to very positive childhood experience) that the British police were much as they have been painted: kind, public-spirited and scrupulously honest.

I fear that if that were ever true, it is no longer. They are politicized, discontented, totalitarian and deeply soft left (but I repeat myself) on most issues. The idea of systematically arming them is panic-inducing.

By: RAB

RAB — Wed, 19 Dec 2012 19:17:57 +0000

Could this be another Hillsborough? They just don’t learn do they? Neither the police or the politicians.

My opinion? A couple of Plods overstepped the mark in their officiousness, got the sharp end of an MP’s tongue, immediately worried that their cushy numbers as gatekeepers may be at stake, and ponied up “evidence” that didn’t actually exist. Then got one of their colleagues to back them up while pretending to be a member of the public passing by, when he wasn’t even there at all. Then they sent the “evidence” off in all directions via email, and one to the Sun newspaper.

If anyone believes that our Police are non political, then they are mad, and it just goes to show, post Leveson Inquiry, that you don’t need to bribe them to get information out of them, when in their own self interests the want it out there ASAP.

By: Michael Jennings (London)

Michael Jennings (London) — Wed, 19 Dec 2012 17:45:54 +0000

False testimony from a police office who has not there, if true, is not a “small incident” in any way. If it is true, the officer and the other officers who put him up to it will not go to jail though. They never do.