A site raising awareness about Criminal Justice Issues

Click here to read the 'What the Dickens' report

Top Cops Pay & Crime Scandal

As Christmas 2009 approaches and the Labour Government proposes slashing operational police overtime by £70million over the next six months, and plans to cut police support staff to the tune of £75million, you might find yourself asking “What the dickens is Alan Johnson playing at?”

Stronger expressions leap to mind when senior police pay scales, expenses and benefits are revealed, showing who gets paid what and what they get bonuses for. It is then that the real scandal emerges and more obvious and suitable targets for reduction jump off the page. In these desperate times for the private sector, hard-pressed taxpayers can only gasp at the lavish secret perks paid to senior police officers.

In our latest report, on our police & criminal justice site http://thinbluelineuk.blogspot.com we will show how the crime reductions that form the basis of such payments to Chief Officers are dishonest and have been engineered by the upper echelons of policing with Government supervision and encouragement.

Click here to view the report.

Police forces are using a series of tricks to manipulate crime figures to give a false picture of their performance, a former senior detective has revealed in the press within the last week (December 2009).

So what has all this subterfuge and secret senior officer activity to do with cutting police overtime?

This report presents alarming evidence supporting a widespread belief that the manipulation of crime statistics forms part of a conspiracy to deceive the public into believing that crime is decreasing. The orchestrators of this deceit are the Government and Home Office, aided and abetted by senior police officers, who are obscenely rewarded for their part in the plot.

Front line police officers are unable to untangle this web of deceit, despite protestations by many with an informed and accurate perspective at the public facing coal face. Distortion of the figures has led to misallocation of financial and human resources, resulting in the public being deprived of the policing it deserves. The gravy train of police funds has been milked and the “con” disguised through years of bureaucracy, performance targeting and distraction techniques, making the task of basic policing more difficult to deliver.

There is plenty of evidence that there are senior officers who are paid grossly disproportionate salaries and bonuses for perpetuating the deceitful illusion of crime reduction. The honour and distinction of achieving a high rank in public service has been replaced with greed, with a convenient blindness to the immorality of their actions. A full, transparent 43 force public enquiry is needed to force the disclosure of these illicit payments and inducements. Among the most disturbing are the revelations of Heather Brooke in the Guardian, about the expenses of Sir Hugh Orde, the president of the Association of Chief Police Officers. The rot is clearly embedded within the “root and branch” culture of the highest ranking police officers, when the man who is charged with the responsibility of overseeing the Chief Officers in England & Wales sets such an example. Bringing together senior officer police pay, perks & bonuses , examining them in light of the exposure of crime statistics as an orchestrated conspiracy to deceive, opens a can of worms threatening  to eclipse MP expenses.ACPO, its finances and function will be analysed in detail in a later report.

“Bringing together senior officer police pay, perks & bonuses , examining them in light of the exposure of crime statistics as an orchestrated conspiracy to deceive, opens a can of worms threatening  to eclipse MP expenses.”

If “cooking the books” of policing and crime statistics had no consequences, it would command no attention. The consequences however, are dire and plain for all to see. The victims in all of this are the tax payer, who is deprived of the police service his contributions are intended to provide, and the front line police officer who is forced into silent acceptance of a job that has become enmeshed with bureaucracy, risk averse policing and fiddled crime figures. Who could blame officers that have no faith or respect for senior officers and politicians who orchestrate a criminal deception of the highest magnitude for personal gain, and then expect the staff on the ground to do their dirty work with no resistance?

Alan Johnsons’ proposal for cutting frontline police overtime is not in the best public interest. A more appropriate target for savings surely lies within the senior officer pay structure. Our report shows that there is plenty of "fat" that should be cut from that source before even considering such an essential as operational police overtime.

We support the proposal that crime statistics should be properly independent. This would remove responsibility for compiling and publishing crime figures from the Home Office, who clearly cannot be trusted to be truthful with the electorate and not to apply their political spin. The responsibility should be placed with the Office for National Statistics which is totally independent. The pre-release access that Ministers and political advisers get to crime statistics should be abolished – so the public would be the first to get an honest account of the facts.

Politicians and Senior Police Officers may talk about resuscitating public trust. The party and individuals that demonstrate the transparency and complete honesty of their future reform intentions and follow it up with decisive action that is genuinely in the public interest, will have the best chance of achieving it.

Click here to view the report