After two years of investigation, Superintendent Ali Dizaei of Britain’s Metropolitan police has been acquitted at the Old Bailey of two minor charges of falsely claiming £200 pounds worth of travel expenses, and lying about where his car was when it was vandalized.
Yes, maybe it is the right thing to investigate alleged bent coppers, up to a reasonably sensible cut-off point, but so far this case has cost the British taxpayer up to £7 million pounds, has involved MI5 style surveillance involving legions of personnel, and has subjected Henley-on-Thames’s very own Mr Dizaei to levels of public humiliation which will almost certainly see him win massive compensation against the Met, should he file a claim against them. It seems reason has long since flown out of the police cell window.
And despite being found innocent, Mr Dizaei faces further disciplinary charges from his bosses, while still remaining suspended on a £52,000-a-year salary.
If I was a betting man I would say he’ll win a full £1 million settlement fee, if he does sue the Metropolitan police for harassment. So I don’t think we taxpayers will see much change out of the thick end of £10 million quid before this outrageous shambles is fully played out. But hell, what price the integrity of Britain’s premier police force?
Who needs the state’s policemen, anyway, to be out on the street apprehending criminals, when they could be up each others’ trouser legs hounding out offensive tattoos, hounding out speeding motorists from behind their desks, or hounding out innocent superintendents falsely accused of expense account fiddling. Money is no object, apparently, except of course when it comes to actually protecting the public against the appalling rising squalor of modern British life.
Race rears its ugly head again.
Ali Dizaei is (or was, until recently) national vice chairman of the Black Police Association.
Ali is. in fact, an Iranian — and looks about as ‘black’ as a snowman.
Many “Iranians” in fact view themselves as “Aryans”, if not “Ur-Aryans” — and note the similarity between the two words. The Iranians actually have a party called ‘Sumka’ – the National Socialist Iranian Workers Party, which is dedicated to the preservation of the “Superior Iranian cultural heritage and Civilization”. Or at least there’s a web site to that effect. (http://www.sumka.org/we_are_e.htm)
So why isn’t Ali vice chairman of the “Aryan Police Association”?
That would certainly heighten ‘race awareness’ in the United Kingdom.
I think the problem with your last suggestion, Charles, may be that Iranian police have been very heavy-handed of late in delivering young Tehranis from the evil influence of Barbie and Ken. They also exhibit a distressing tendency to wear long beards and point Kalashnikov’s at innocent western journalists. Just too anti-western, I’m afraid. But probably perfect for the BPA.
In following the tattoo link, I found the following idiocy. An applicant for the police force was rejected because “any tattoos that could imply racism, sexism or religious prejudice would not be appropriate for a police officer.” Fair enough, I suppose, although the stink of political correctness fills my nostrils.
However, I defy anyone to tell me how “one of a skeleton waving a Union Jack, one of a dog and one of a mouse sitting on a toadstool smoking a hubble bubble pipe” imply racism, sexism, or religious prejudice.
Under their own standards, the cops had no basis for rejecting this guy. Idiots.
Guessedworker, you clearly need a dose of politically correct re-education. You speak of the Iranian police’s “distressing tendency to wear long beards”. This is a judgmental approach to policing which would certainly exclude you from the Met. Remember that Muslim policewomen in the UK may now, more or less, wear burqas while on duty — must be spot on clothing to win the confidence of the British public in the bobby on the beat. Not to mention those chi-chi Sikh policemen’s turbans ….
On a more serious note, here’s a quotation from the Police Federation Magazine, June 2002. Nothing we don’t know but worth repeating all the same:
“Political correctness has the senior management of the police service in a stranglehold, and it is strangling the life out of effective policing. They found that senior officers are obsessed with meeting Government targets. They have no time for quality policing of the kind that would allow beat officers to re-engage with the public. The report says that the pursuit of targets has replaced leadership. We are too busy tackling performance indicators instead of tackling crime. We are too busy chasing targets instead of chasing criminals.”
Pity Ali Dizaei was aquitted. Frankly, in cases like this, suspicion is often almost enough evidence in itself. The man is obviously a racist, Brit-hating scoundrel and is — quite naturally — detested by the police as a whole for the slurs and slears he has been heaping on his white colleagues since the day he took office.
I wonder how they rigged the jury ….
R.C. Dean writes:
“In following the tattoo link, I found the following idiocy. An applicant for the police force was rejected because “any tattoos that could imply racism, sexism or religious prejudice would not be appropriate for a police officer.” Fair enough, I suppose, although the stink of political correctness fills my nostrils.”
It’s really hard to judge this from the armchair. I’ve followed the discussion too — and although the police statement truly stinks of PC, let me put the following question:
Who were the other applicants for the job? If you had to choose between two applicants of equal ability in all respects except for the fact that one was tatooed, whom would you choose?
To ask that question is to answer it.
After all, tatooes correlate closely with criminality, and although not all tatooed persons have criminal records, almost all criminals have tatooes. So a certain amount of ‘prejudice’ against the tatooed community is quite justified.
But of course I’m also reasoning from the armchair ….
Who were the other applicants for the job? If you had to choose between two applicants of equal ability in all respects except for the fact that one was tatooed, whom would you choose?
As a proud tattoo-bearer myself, I might well choose the inked individual, noting that someone who has a tattoo might have a little of that got-to-hell individualism that I enjoy. Tatts are very common in the US amongst younger folks and college kids; I would tend to question their predictive power with respect to criminality.
For a cop, having tattoos might signal that he or she is acquainted with, or even comes from, the kind of social strata that, sadly, produces many criminals. I don’t want choirboys on my police force, so I would count that as a positive, especially if the copper would be going undercover.
1. Discrimination against tattoos per se is like other forms of too-broad discrimination–the resort of stupidity. The style and content of a tattoo, however, can tell you a great deal about the wearer and might, combined with other information, permit you to make useful judgments about him or her.
2. The courts have drawn conclusions from the evidence against Dizaei, and I’m certainly not in a position to say anything about his case. However the effort employed to try and prove a vast variety of distinct wrongdoings against him seems quite extraordinary. No wonder police time for dealing with undoubted crimes against ordinary members of the public is in such short supply.
Given the authoritarian culture in the police force. It would not surprise me if resisting some mild allegegations (true or otherwise) could precipitate a campaign of persecution. The nature of the work attracts conformist bullies. Bullies for conformity on the streets are even worse within “the job”, and the nature of bureaucratic management is that the bullies rise. (PC is merely one more arbitrary code for for them to apply.) Sorting out “trouble-makers” in the ranks–regardless of cost–has consistently been part of the management style. Time was if two police officers got married (something that was thought a sign of bad discipline), they’d more than likely find themselves on opposite shifts, at opposite ends of the county, until one of them resigned.
Charles,
I accept your blandishments. I will find myself a suitably marxian racial awareness course and try to remove this dark spot from my soul. Repeat after me: sweet reasonableness is everywhere in Lambeth, Weybridge is the face of evil …
On the matter of tatoos I was fascinated to read in the fascist Telegraph the other day that modern young ladies invariable sport these non-ephemera, though you have to be damned lucky to see some of them. The same article contained the truly fascinating observation that, in central London at least, the same ladies have taken topiary to new lengths. This is not something on which I can comment personally, of course. And I suppose I’ll only be accused of trolling again if I don’t get off the subject PDQ. Still, it is something to think about the next time a wpc detains you for d&d in Knightsbridge.
Guy Herbert writes:
The style and content of a tattoo, however, can tell you a great deal about the wearer and might, combined with other information, permit you to make useful judgments about him or her.
Well, it might tell you what they used to be like.
It may tell you they used to be in the Navy, got very drunk one night, had a very short crew-cut, and a tattoo. Now the hair can grow out, but the tattoo is permanent. I think a tattoo can only tell you about how a person was the day they had it done of their own free will, thereby, as Mr Rothbard might say, transgressing their future inalienable rights not to be tattooed later in their lives.
I would suspect many have tattoos they come to regret later in life, which no longer reflect their thinking, attitudes, or beliefs. I thank God I didn’t tatto “I love Joe Stalin” across my forehead, during my hard-line communist phase. I could take off my hammer-and-sickle T-shirts, but I suspect the old forehead job would’ve been a bit harder to relinquish! 🙂
Andy Duncan is right, of course, that people can change their minds. You can also change your taste. It’s a bit harder to change your character completely. Tattoos can say a lot of diffferent things just as clothes can, some of them about the context of their creation, some of them about the wearer’s more permanent character traits.
A compact, one-session professional tattoo says maybe impulsive, maybe experimentally inclined, maybe got drunk with silly friends. The currently modish large abstract decoration says something else. Elaborate tribute to military (or paramilitary) organisations something else. Crude prison or guardhouse work something else again.
Some of those traces of past character and taste are informative but innocuous; some of them be worrying. We all compile our models of other people from clues, and tattoos, being mostly voluntary and mostly permanent, are a better clue than most.
“A compact, one-session professional tattoo says maybe impulsive, maybe experimentally inclined,”
Or, maybe, lost a bet with his wife.
I’m just sayin’, is all.