19 April 2006

Dose of reality

I have had a number of interesting comments made on my blog and thought I would address them. Now as I have explained on the forum, one of the esteemed moderators made a comment how my leave from Iraq always coincided with the dates when the forum had one of their social events. When I replied to this comment between them the author of the comment had completely changed to another moderator and several of my friends on the forum made comments that I was infact working in Blackpool.

The fact that someone tried to trace my IP address for fun whilst I was in Baghdad just goes to show how sad they are and the fact that would think I made this all up. It really is a sad reflection on this country (UK) that people with this level of intelligence are the ones to up hold Law and Order.

The other comment was about PSD (Professional Standards Departments) and how that it is not the officers fault, well here’s the thing, you do not get forced to join the department, you CHOOSE to join the department.

The Politicians in deed need a kick up the ass, they need to realise that they create more problems than they solve with their drive for Political Correctness, has anyone noticed that the biggest advocates of Political Correctness in the UK are White Middle Class people who try and force their perception on to everyone, including the minority groups they pretend to care so deeply about. But the fact is the Senior Ranks of the Police Service should be ashamed of themselves, I doubt very much that they are put under pressure to find disrepute cases, they just go hunting for them so that they can try and stay in favour with the Administration in the hope of getting a QPM or a Knight Hood.

Now the esteemed Commissioner of the Met actually interfered in an investigation concerning a Police Officer who miss pronounced "Shi`ite". Now if this was any other type of PSD investigation would the Commissioner have intervened, in the end the Employment Tribunal found in favour of the officer under investigation and they were quite vocal in their Views of what the Commissioner had done.

The fact is Forces up and down the country use PSD to as a tool to prevent criticism of them or their forces. I may have been asleep during my GCSE History, but wasn’t the Second World War fought to stop this kind of behaviour, (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/london/4638331.stm). Even the most Senior ranking Asian Police officer in the country dismissed the complaint in shock that it had even reached his desk, but this wasn’t good enough for the Campaigning Commissioner.

The pendulum has swung in the opposite direction from the 70's, 80's and Early 90's of ignoring racisms and other forms of discrimination they have swung in the opposite direction, any one remember the McCarthy Era in the US were they had the reds under the bed. We are now faced with a situation were some senior officers see, racism, sexism, homophobia or any other of phobia were in some cases there isn’t. Now dont misunderstand me I think there is no place in the Police Force (Not supposed to use this word) or Society in general for this type of discrimination, but the current polices need to be re-looked at and replaced for more common sense policies, now if it was a ethnic minority officer who made a comment about a group of white people I doubt it would have even been investigated, in fact it wouldn’t surprise me if the officer making the com plaint was investigated for picking on the minority officer.

I have never in the 7 years of my service ever encountered any form of discrimination except from the force against me. I say this following two incidents.

  1. Until the McPherson enquiry the force I was in had never bothered with my welfare or progress, in fact following one incident were I dealt with a jumper, all the regular officers were contacted by Welfare to see if they wanted counselling, but for some reason they missed me out. But after the McPherson enquiry I was inundated with letters, reports and junk telling me how I was important to the force... ooops Service and how they were looking after my welfare. I sent a nice reply back that until the McPherson report they had never bothered with me and that they were treating me differently purely because of the colour of my skin which I felt was discrimination and if they continued I would make a formal criminal complaint. Guess what......... they stopped sending me stuff.
  2. Now no one can say I ever had a good working relationship with my old Area Officer, but I had a meeting with him one evening before my shift, he said that following the Area Officers Meeting, my name was put forward to take part in a recruitment campaign, now normally I would have jumped at the chance, however this happened around the same time as the previous incident, so I asked him, "Is it because of the amount of work I do or is it because I am listed as IC2 (Dark European), as I have no intention of being used as anyone’s token officer" Not surprisingly he couldn’t answer me and I was never used for the recruitment campaign, instead every other ethnic minority officer I knew was featured on a poster. They didn’t even have the guts to be honest with me.

For anyone spending any time in the Real World or General Discussion area of the forum will see how a distinct leftist slant that is prevailing across the police service. In an effort to show how squeaky clean they are on the forum people are manipulated to post in a particular way to show them in bad light or the moderators just edit someone’s post without consulting them, because of this I now saves copies of pages of controversial threads I take part in. Another method of censorship on there is if you are put on “Moderated Posts”, now what this means that if a moderator doesn’t like you they can put you on moderated posts which requires all your posts to be checked by a moderator before they are posted, they can then edit your posts to say what they want before posting it, then even if one moderator does past the persons post, there has been several cases of a particular moderator either deleting or editing posts already approved and what is the reply when this was challenged “If you don’t like it don’t come here” This is hardly the behaviour and standards one would expect from a police officer.

It has been stated that Freedom of Speech doesn’t exist on there, as the site belongs to the host and its his forum and his rules, all Police Officers are supposed to up hold the Human Rights Act and people Human Rights, so how can police officers only play lip service to it when on duty, but disregard it when someone makes a comment they don’t like.

There will be my regular update at the weekend, with some intresting news for my readers, but I would like to take this oppertunity to thank people for taking the time to read my blog and for those who have taken the extra time to post comments.

1 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

It doesn't just extend to moderation either. The forum owner is partial to completely blocking users from posting when he disagrees with the content of their posts. The owner in question blocked my user account and said he was doing so because my views on 'diversity and race issues were incompatible with his deeply held beliefs' - paraphrased. Something that struck me as extremely odd seeing I've always said I am all for equality of opportunity in the hiring , promotion and opportunities for any officer joining their respective police forces. Apparently because I refused to support and champion his opinion that affirmative action was an acceptable recruitment strategy, I was banned from the forum. I was particularly amused in a sense that he chose to do so on the day that the press was alive with news that the forces that had adopted an AA policy admitted they had made a mistake and acted illegally. Someone was behaving like a bear with a sore foot it seems and a bit of petty 'i'll get you my own way' mentality took over... thou of course that’s subjective, I cannot claim to know how certain peoples minds work, only hazard a guess.

Re: PSD

PSD should be there to investigate allegations of corruption, bribe taking, people misusing police powers for personal gain, lying in statements and the deliberate fabrication or contamination of evidence… things like that. Not hounding officers for opinions they might hold on society wide or localised political issues they choose to comment on off duty. Thankfully the majority of PSD officers have common sense and get it right.

Unfortunately there are a few ‘strange’ Walter Mitty types out there, some who run or moderate various police forums, who see themselves as sort of ‘freelance’ professional standards agents gathering information on their fellow officers and looking to sting them for anything they can. Such people would have been better suited to the secret police forces of Stalin’s supreme soviet or Hitler’s Germany than to the rank and file of the police service in the 21st Century.

14:34  

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