SOCA GOES OFF-SIDE...
I see that Britain's answer to the FBI - the Serious Organised Crime Aagency (SOCA) - has abandoned it's hunt for UK crime barons. Yes, in just one example of how the force of law and order is turning into a sad burlesque, we read that Soca, which publishes its annual report this week, has identified 130 crime barons it believed were controlling the drugs trade, human-trafficking and racketeering in Britain. But none of those key figures has been prosecuted and the hitlist has been shelved after investigations revealed that many of the names on it were of minor importance.
It is understood that Soca is paralysed by a top-heavy management structure that has created rival fiefdoms. In addition to a chairman, director-general and ten-member board of directors, there are 31 deputy directors. The agency’s creaking computer systems,including intelligence databases, can only support limited numbers of users and many cannot share information with each other. 148 former police officers — many of whom were cherry-picked to join the unit — have retired or returned to policing, complaining of a lack of enforcement activity. A source said: “The experienced police officers are leaving in droves owing to management inefficiencies and incompetence and we are being left with a lot of very clever analysts and the like who wouldn’t know a Mr Big if he pulled out a gun and pointed it at their heads.”
There IS a problem with the British police. I believe it lies with the rise through the ranks of a bureaucratic management class which follows a quasi-political agenda in order to win patronage from the political elite. It is this tier of politically correct liberal-mined bureaucrats which has de-motivated Britain's many excellent and hard-working police officers who merely seek to do their job and track down criminals. As I have written before, I believe that many of our most senior Police Constables have forgotten what the purpose of the police force actually is.
David Vance
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David -
No-one can doubt your conclusion and only the hoplessly dim could still believe that the Police are still the Police in the traditional sense.
But is 'SOCA' part of the Police? It's a sinister and unBritish organisation, completely out of keeping with policing as Britons have known it until the last few decades. Its officers don't swear allegiance to to the Crown. It describes itself as: an Executive Non-Departmental Public Body sponsored by, but operationally independent from, the Home Office.
http://www.soca.gov.uk/aboutUs/index.html
All in all, I'm thankful it's inefficient and morale is low. I have no doubt that if SOCA worked well it would be to the detriment eventually of Britons.
But it can boast one success. Earlier this year SOCA won the EU tender to provide law enforcement services to Albania.
It's a sinister and unBritish organisation, completely out of keeping with policing as Britons have known it until the last few decades.
Why was it that the UK never developed a UK wide police force anyway ? Isnt there 3 different legal systems in place as well
Kloot -
There are three different legal systems now in the UK: England and Wales have the same legal system, Scotland has its own legal system and, of course, The EU is now supreme over all.
We have county constabularies because the police forces were set up to be controlled locally, through local institutions and to be accountable locally. It was only through the 20th Century, with two world wars and the astonishing growth of government, that many state organisations came under central direction and control.
Prior to the 1964 Police Act we even had city forces seperate from county constabularies. The 1964 was, in a way, a power grab by the Home Office and local accountability was lost. Since then more and more powers have been grabbed by the Home Office. So we do have local constabularies still, but central, Stalinised control.
Of course, the government tried to do away with local forces to form regional Euro police forces, as they've done with other emergency services, regional assemblies and the like. The resistence of the police itself has temporarily stopped that, but the process of abolishing the UK and England goes on.
Pete,
Interesting comment. I presume the centralisation of police control then means less efficiency, less of an understanding of local problems and less of an ability to solve these problems using local means.
Kloot -
'Efficiency' was used throughout the 20th Century by the Home Office to centralise control. This argument was consistently defeated so the 1960 Royal Commission on policing (controlled by the Home Office) nailed the police for corruption. The result was the 1964 Act.
However what we have now is a wonderful example of the central state imposing targets without any local understanding at all. The NHS is the same. Down come the tablets from on high with their targets for so many arrests to be made, so many operations to be carried out, so much iron ore to be mined etc. So a student is arrested for calling a police horse gay, drivers are nabbed for exceeding an arbitrary speed limit which has no relation to safety and patients are tipped out of bed to make way for the next poor MRSA-ridden sod.
So now in 2008, after 16 years of misrule, 29 years of centralisation and a century of grim government expansion, we have no local control, no local understanding, no local accountability, no initiative, no responsibility and cold, faceless, Stalinised state structures.