Charing Cross station case shows old problems were allowed to fester on social media thanks to culture of fear
Case by case, the idea that the police’s problems with women is the result of a few bad apples rather than a misogynistic culture gets harder to maintain.
The revelations about the hate-filled messages among officers sent via WhatsApp and Facebook at Charing Cross station in central London are exceptionally sickening in their nature.
Continue reading...PM hopes to move on from parties scandal with plans to make it easier to scrap EU laws and tackle cost of living crisis
Boris Johnson will attempt to seize back control of the government agenda this week with a policy blitz, a Brexit bill and flying visit to Ukraine, as Westminster remains in the grip of paralysis over the Sue Gray and police inquiries into No 10 parties.
Amid frustration in No 10 at the uncertainty surrounding the report on rule-breaking parties in Downing Street, sources said Johnson was determined to deflect public outrage with a schedule of high-profile announcements and photo opportunities that he also hopes will show MPs he remains focused.
Continue reading...Move follows anger after Met police asked civil servant to hold back details in her ‘partygate’ report
A heavily redacted report into Downing Street parties by the senior civil servant Sue Gray will be published imminently, the Guardian understands, after Scotland Yard provoked fury and confusion by revealing it had demanded key details of the worst offending be removed.
MPs labelled the Metropolitan police a broken organisation after the force admitted it had asked Gray to make “minimal reference” in her inquiry report to matters its officers were now investigating. The Met, battered by criticism, insisted it needed to protect the integrity of its investigation.
Continue reading...Force says it has asked for report to make minimal reference to Downing Street events it is investigating
The publication of the Sue Gray report could be delayed significantly after Scotland Yard revealed it had asked for references to matters it is now investigating to be removed.
Key parts of the long-awaited report on allegations of parties in No 10 that may have broken Covid rules could be pared back after the move.
Continue reading...Analysis: Cressida Dick has had ringside seat for some of Met’s past painful encounters with politicians
The 48 hours before Cressida Dick’s bombshell announcement of a criminal investigation into “partygate” was intense, busy and momentous for the leadership of the Metropolitan police.
It was only on Sunday that the Met decided it had enough evidence to merit a criminal investigation into claims of parties in Downing Street and Whitehall, attended by those who made the onerous lockdown rules.
Continue reading...A roundup of the coverage of the struggle for human rights and freedoms, from Cambodia to Costa Rica
Continue reading...Police Scotland said no criminality had been found after photograph of writer’s address was put online
Police will take no action against trans rights activists who posted a photograph of JK Rowling’s home online.
The author had contacted police in Scotland in November after the tweet, which showed her Edinburgh house and revealed the address. The image showed activists standing outside the property with placards carrying slogans such as “trans liberation now”.
Continue reading...Academics and clinicians say bill ‘will have a profound negative impact on young people’s mental health’
Hundreds of clinical psychiatrists and psychologists have warned that the police and crime bill reaching its final stages in parliament “will have a profound negative impact on young people’s mental health”.
“We cannot think of better measures to disempower and socially isolate young people,” they say in an open letter signed by more than 350 academics and clinicians and published online.
Continue reading...EU police body accused of unlawfully holding information and aspiring to become an NSA-style mass surveillance agency
The EU’s police agency, Europol, will be forced to delete much of a vast store of personal data that it has been found to have amassed unlawfully by the bloc’s data protection watchdog. The unprecedented finding from the European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS) targets what privacy experts are calling a “big data ark” containing billions of points of information. Sensitive data in the ark has been drawn from crime reports, hacked from encrypted phone services and sampled from asylum seekers never involved in any crime.
According to internal documents seen by the Guardian, Europol’s cache contains at least 4 petabytes – equivalent to 3m CD-Roms or a fifth of the entire contents of the US Library of Congress. Data protection advocates say the volume of information held on Europol’s systems amounts to mass surveillance and is a step on its road to becoming a European counterpart to the US National Security Agency (NSA), the organisation whose clandestine online spying was revealed by whistleblower Edward Snowden.
Continue reading...A roundup of the coverage of the struggle for human rights and freedoms, from Mexico to Hong Kong
Continue reading...Darren Collins, 56, downloaded thousands of images from police databases
A police worker who illegally downloaded and took home thousands of images, including those showing murder victims and postmortems, has been jailed for three years.
Darren Collins, a digital forensic specialist from Stafford, admitted misconduct in a public office last month after being sacked by Staffordshire police for gross misconduct.
Continue reading...He experienced horrendous abuse in foster care, then suffered terribly years later when the case came to court. Now a police officer, he is determined to change how the system treats survivors
Jon Needham looks like a copper. Tall, broad and imposing, he works in a lifetime offender management unit, where he deals with serious and organised criminals. So when he speaks, his gentleness comes as a surprise. “I joined the police because I was passionate about helping people,” he says. “It sounds like a cliche to say you want to make a real difference, but I genuinely mean it.”
Needham gets paid for working with “nominals” – people who are on the police database (“That’s what the police call them, I call them people,” he says). But he is also transforming how his colleagues deal with victims of rape and sexual assault.
Continue reading...One of the city’s most wanted, Peter Wainaina was given a second chance and used it to turn his life around and help others find different path out of poverty
At the entrance of Kibagare, a slum in Nairobi’s outskirts, boots of dead gangsters dangle from electricity wires that hover over ramshackle homes of wood and iron sheets.
With little state protection from crime, angry local people will often take the law into their own hands and beat an offender who is caught in the act, sometimes to death.
Continue reading...Shoddy investigation into serial killer also result of underfunding, says producer of BBC drama about murders
Three victims of the serial killer Stephen Port might still be alive today were it not for a shoddy police investigation that was the result of “ineptitude, poor systems and underfunding”, the producer of a new drama about the crimes has said.
Jeff Pope is senior producer of Four Lives, a dramatisation for BBC One of the murders of four young gay men: Anthony Walgate, 23; Gabriel Kovari, 22; Daniel Whitworth, 21; and Jack Taylor, 21.
Continue reading...Officers were called after man with a gun was seen entering a bank and bookmakers in west London
A man has been shot dead by police after officers stopped a car near Kensington Gardens in London.
Officers were called to reports of a man with a firearm seen entering a bank and a bookmakers in Marloes Road, Kensington, at 3.04pm, the Metropolitan police said.
Continue reading...Force cites policy of not investigating past alleged breaches of Covid rules and lack of evidence
The Metropolitan police has said it will not investigate the Downing Street Christmas party widely reported to have been held last year.
In a much awaited statement, the force said it had a policy of not retrospectively investigating alleged breaches of coronavirus laws.
Continue reading...The asylum seekers on the Poland-Belarus border are not aggressors: they are desperate pawns in a disgusting political struggle
One thought is a constant in my head: “I have kids at home, I cannot go to jail, I cannot go to jail.” The politics are beyond my reach or that of the victims on the Poland-Belarus border. It involves outgoing German chancellor, Angela Merkel, getting through to Alexander Lukashenko, president of Belarus. It’s ironic that this border has more than 50 media crews gathered, yet Poland is the only place in the EU where journalists cannot freely report.
Meanwhile, the harsh north European winter is closing in and my fingers are freezing in the dark snowy nights.
Continue reading...Lamara Bell was found in critical condition next to dead partner and later died
Police Scotland has paid £1m in compensation to the family of a woman who died after being left for three days in a crashed car on the M9 motorway.
The force has settled a compensation action taken by the family of Lamara Bell, 25, after they sued over its failure to respond to a call from a farmer who had spotted a crashed car lying off the hard shoulder in 2015.
Continue reading...Dame Elish Angiolini to examine policing failures that allowed Wayne Couzens to attack 33-year-old
The Home Office inquiry into the rape and murder of Sarah Everard by a police officer will be chaired by Dame Elish Angiolini, formerly Scotland’s top prosecutor, the department has said.
It will examine whether chances to identify her murderer, Wayne Couzens, as a danger to women before he attacked Everard in March 2021 were missed.
Continue reading...Saleh Ibrahim Mabrouk was ‘prime mover’ in 25-year-old’s death outside Libyan embassy in London, says judge
A former minister in Muammar Gaddafi’s government was jointly liable for the shooting of PC Yvonne Fletcher outside the Libyan embassy in London in 1984, a high court judge has ruled.
Reaching his decision on the lower civil standard – which requires proof on the balance of probabilities rather than beyond reasonable doubt – Mr Justice Martin Spencer said on Tuesday that although Saleh Ibrahim Mabrouk did not fire the shots himself, he was a “prime mover” in the killing of 25-year-old Fletcher.
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