Author Archives: markdowe1

Government, Policing, Scotland, Society

View of policing is ‘old-fashioned’

POLICE SCOTLAND

A POLICE watchdog has said the idea that policing is solely about law enforcement is “old-fashioned”.

HM Chief Inspector of Constabulary in Scotland Gill Imery said maintaining the view that the job of police officers was confined to catching criminals was a “stunted” belief.

She has spoken out amid concern over the expanding range of duties officers have beyond enforcing the law, such as administering naloxone to save overdosing drug addicts.

However, the comments come following an explosion in rape cases and an increase in violent offending, with prosecutors admitting there is “absolutely no sign” of a sustained fall in serious crime.

Speaking at a recent meeting of the Scottish Police Authority (SPA), Mrs Imery said: “It’s an old-fashioned and a stunted view of policing to think that it is limited to law enforcement.

“Police Scotland have done a huge amount to demonstrate a much wider responsibility of policing – a much wider desire to impact in a positive way on people’s life chances and life choices.”

Backing the use of naloxone by officers to treat overdosing addicts, Mrs Imery said: “I think it is hugely positive on the part of Police Scotland to take that step to prevent harm and ultimately loss of life, which I think is absolutely integral to the purpose of police constables.”

In July it emerged that police administered an anti-overdose treatment to one person a week on average during the first three months of carrying the therapy. Officers in Falkirk, Dundee and Glasgow East had been equipped with naloxone since March 1 as part of a six-month pilot project.

The move came amid a rise in drug deaths to record levels, with Scotland having the worst drug-related facilities in the EU.

Police Scotland said earlier this year that drug related crime is to be considered a public health problem as the force vowed to “drive national improvements in health and wellbeing”.

It announced a partnership with government health quango Public Health Scotland (PHS) in a bid to prevent offending by working with the NHS and others to tackle poor health, “health inequality” and other issues.

Police in Scotland are also keen to adopt a “trauma-informed” approach – taking into account the welfare of suspects and criminals.

Some police officers have criticised this approach, with one officer saying the “hypothesis that reducing trauma prevents crime isn’t backed up by credible evidence” – and condemned the strategy as “motherhood and apple pie”.

Last month, figures showed the number of rapes reported to police had risen by nearly 35 per cent in a year, as sex crime soared to the highest level for six years.

Violent offending overall shot up by nearly 13 per cent in the past year, according to Police Scotland.

Prosecutors have admitted there is “absolutely no sign” of a sustained fall in serious crime. The Scottish Government claims Scotland is becoming safer.

David Hamilton, chairman of the Scottish Police Federation, representing rank and file officers, said: “I don’t think anyone disagrees with Gill Imery that policing is and should be about more than just law enforcement, but it remains our primary function.

“As the service of last resort, we are increasingly having to pick up where others have failed, and the danger is that we commit or overstretch ourselves filling those gaps.

“Officers are concerned that we are already having to fulfil additional roles such as educators, paramedics, social workers and mental health nurses.”

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. Half of police officers in Scotland want to be issued with a firearm whilst on duty

MORE than half of Scotland’s police officers want to be issued with a handgun as part of their safety equipment, a survey has indicated.

In the past three months, 22 per cent of officers have been the victim of assault while on duty, prompting calls for extra measures to ensure their protection.

A survey carried out by the Scottish Police Federation has found that 53 per cent of Police Scotland rank and file would like access to a handgun.

A further 7 per cent of officers said they would like to be trained to use the weapon in case it was necessary.

Of the nearly 1,700 questioned, 47 per cent said they did not want to carry handguns and 37 per cent indicated they would not like to be trained in their use.

However, 84 per cent said they would be happy to carry Tasers.

Scottish Police Federation chairman David Hamilton said: “This demonstrates not just the frequency of attacks but the gravity of them, too.

“Officers consider knives to be the greatest risk to them and firearms are the appropriate last defence to being attacked by such lethal weapons.”

A spokesperson for Gun Control Network said that unless there was a change in (policing) culture society would become too much like America where guns are drawn for any reason – and that is not the way policing has been conducted in the UK. Insisting that it certainly wouldn’t protect the public any more, the Network says that the implications are much wider than what it means to an individual officer on duty.

In 2018, the Police Investigations and Review Commissioner (Pirc) condemned an action by Police Scotland which saw officers point guns at 11 people during an “unwarranted” operation.

The force later apologised to eight people – including two women who were strip-searched. In 2016, shoppers in Dingwall, Ross-shire, spoke of their shock when they saw four officers armed with handguns sitting down to breakfast in a café.

The force’s Assistant Chief Constable Mark Williams said: “There are no plans to move away from being an unarmed service which has an armed capability.

“Being assaulted should never be part of the job and tackling the concerning trend of increasing assaults on officers and staff is a priority. The Chief Constable has underlined his commitment to achieving this goal by providing people with the tools they need to do their jobs.

“Recently, we have improved our infrastructure to support an enhanced roll-out of Taser and work is under way to uplift the number of Taser-trained officers by 1,500 over the next three years.”

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Arts, Books, Psychology

Book Review: ‘The Truth About Lies’

LITERARY REVIEW

“Tell me lies, tell me sweet little lies,” are lyrics sang by Fleetwood Mac in 1987. And my, have people delivered. Donald Trump is said to have told a staggering 30,573 lies while in office. Boris Johnson, as we know, can be wholly economical with the truth. Being serially lied to can seriously damage relationships and friendships are often irreparable when the truth emerges.

Aja Raden, an American writer, however, sees lies as a completely normal part of life, something to be understood rather than condemned.

She says that human beings have evolved to tell lies, and that our children only start operating in the real world when they have mastered the ability to tell untruths. There’s no one who doesn’t lie occasionally.

The nub of her argument is that for someone to lie successfully, there needs to be someone else who swallows that lie hook, line and sinker. Think of the last piece of really juicy gossip you were told. It is unlikely you checked whether it was true or not before you started disseminating it yourself. You’ll understand the ripple effect this has and the damage that untruths can leave in its wake.

Over nine hugely entertaining chapters, Raden describes in detail outrageous stories of several classic cons, illustrating the mechanisms by which they all work. She uses both contemporary and historical examples.

At its core, is the question, ‘Why do people believe what they believe?’

We blindly trust certain facts: things we’re taught, things we can observe, and those things which we can work out for ourselves. Once we “know” these things, we never really question them again. It’s called an honesty bias.

Raden writes: “Without this tendency to trust, to assume, to simply believe, every human on earth would be born starting from scratch, unable to benefit from the knowledge of the collective.”

Yet it’s the “honesty bias” that allows us to be fooled by conmen, serially lying friends and unscrupulous U.S. presidents. Our strength, as so often is written, is also our weakness.

The author begins with what she calls the Big Lie, in which the untruth is so enormous that to disbelieve it actually threatens our sense of collective reality.

She cites the example of Gregor MacGregor, a broke Scottish aristocrat of the early 19th century who joined the Royal Navy in search of fame and fortune.

He became a mercenary in central America, where he claimed to have chanced upon the magical kingdom of Poyais, a land of plenty brimming with untapped natural resources.

Returning to London he sold shares in Poyais to the great and good, and persuaded seven boatloads of men, women and children to relocate there to make their fortunes.

When they arrived, they soon discovered Poyais did not exist, that there was just the Mosquito Coast of central America, short on untapped resources but swarming with mosquitoes.

Most of them perished through disease, but when a few survivors of the trip returned to tell their stories, MacGregor absconded to Paris, where he told the same Big Lie again – and sold more shares in something that did not exist.

Next up in the narration is the Shell Game, the street hustle whereby you must guess which of three shells on a table has a ball underneath it.

The ball has meanwhile been removed by sleight of hand so the answer is “none of them”, but by then you have already lost your stake you put down on the one you thought it might be. Raden explains that we don’t “see” everything we think we see; our brains will fill in the gaps.

This is how so much stage magic works, persuading you that you are seeing what you haven’t seen, and that you haven’t seen what you might well have seen but not processed.

In later chapters, she looks at the Guru Con, at the way Rasputin befuddled the House of Romanov in pre-revolutionary Russia, the pyramid schemes of Bernie Madoff and bitcoin; and the selling of snake oil as a patent medicine in the Wild West (which went on long after supplies of genuine snake oil had run out).

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Afghanistan, Britain, Government, Politics, Society, United States

We must do deals with the Taliban

AFGHANISTAN

THE retreat from Afghanistan is over, the humiliation complete. The question facing Western leaders now is something that would have been inconceivable just a few months ago: Can we do deals with the Taliban?

Many will still find it unimaginable that the West could even consider negotiating with the heirs of the barbarians who facilitated the 9/11 atrocity.

Because of the Taliban’s record of supporting al-Qaeda’s terrorism in the past – and, in the last few days, their brutal repression out of sight of the Western media – it seems utterly immoral to have anything to do with the new government in Afghanistan.

Yet, unpopular though it may be in the traumatic aftermath of the West’s debacle, we must try to rescue what we can from the disaster.

We have to negotiate with them to try to save the lives of those poor souls we left behind, as well as doing all we can to prevent the country from again becoming a haven and training ground for terrorists’ intent on attacking the West. Of course, after our humiliating retreat, our leverage is very weak. Threats of sanctions and other financial strangleholds could simply encourage the Taliban to deal with the Chinese and Russians who would happily take advantage of any new influence they could secure. And the fact is the Taliban might not want to deal with us at all.

Yet there are incentives for the new regime in Kabul to be less brutally blinkered in its approach to dealing with the West than its predecessors 20 years ago.

One of the things that led to a flow of popular support from the corrupt former government to the Taliban was the economic plight of so many Afghans.

Drought has left millions dependent on international food aid. Keeping that aid flowing from the West and the prospect of getting Afghanistan’s money held in foreign banks gives the Taliban an incentive to restrain hardliners wanting to confront the world.

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WE also have an enemy in common. The Taliban loathe the even more hard-line Islamic State – or Isis-K – group. Taliban fighters executed the local Isis-K leader when they captured him in Bagram prison, and they are only too aware that the attack on Kabul airport was aimed at destabilising the Taliban as well as murdering the US soldiers and departing Afghans there. Certainly, there are hideous dogmas shared by both the Taliban and Isis-K, but the new Taliban leaders seem anxious to avoid the mistakes of their predecessors in 2001. Whereas Isis-K wants to re-use Afghanistan as a base to attack the West, the Taliban want to avoid provoking another Western intervention.

The Taliban are well aware of what has changed since 2001. More than half the population has been born since then. The younger generation grew up loathing the corrupt Ghani regime and did not want to fight for it. These young people have also been socialised by mobile phones and social media rather than in rigid Islamic madrassas.

Keeping hordes of discontented, jobless young people from becoming a problem is a priority. Letting some of these unhappy people emigrate is one way to keep a lid on things while appeasing Western concerns.

Kabul is already mindful of a massive refugee crisis on its borders, particularly with Pakistan – a country that helped foster the Taliban – which has said that the West must engage with the new Afghan government to ensure it “remains moderate.”

The fact is that the West must engage. We should make best use of the few carrots we have – like aid money and diplomatic recognition – to reduce the terrorist threat.

Since our diplomats have long dealt with fundamentalist regimes like Saudi Arabia, the Foreign Office should be able to adapt to the Taliban’s new norms. It is depressing to admit defeat but swallowing our pride could still rescue something from the horror.

. Appendage

– A Boeing C-17A Globemaster III left Kabul (KBL) for the final time on Monday for Qatar. Shortly after taking off, an orbiting KC-135R tanker refuelled the aircraft.
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