Sources at Derry Street inform me that this will be a priority in 2018 and the year will see dozens of incompetent or corrupt cops locked up. Just read between the lines of their main story today Sunday. And I hear that the Times and Sunday Times are equally incandescent. Don't expect much in the Guardian or Observer though; doesn't suit the feminist agenda, covering miscarriages of justice.

www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5223567...-police-blunder.html

Naive or dishonest?

When she showed the Facebook exchange to the officer in charge of the investigation, he said: How did you know how to find the messages and we didn't?

His barrister's comment; all very well and true but there is more to it than that; urged on by targets and budgets and most of all by media coverage, junior officers are being ordered by senior officers to adapt and bend their behaviour so, I suspect, it crosses the line of conspiracy to pervert the course of justice.

Mr Kay’s barrister Philip Rule, said: ‘This is an important victory for justice. This is the tip of an iceberg of failings brought about by chronic and long-term under-resourcing of the criminal justice system.’

Great to hear the police will see Karma (have you ever considered starting your own news corp? You seem to be a very good investigate journalist )

But, I can't believe his barrister said that this is due to long-term under resourcing of the criminal justice system. What an idiot!

I suspect if/as the far left (feminists, guardian, bbc, labour etc) start to lose out this year their counter will be to claim that the cause of all this is the "long-term under-resourcing of the criminal justice system" and they'll be calling for more funding! And you know what that means don't you? That means more innocent men sent to prison not less! You couldn't make it up!

It doesn't need more funding, it needs less funding, the criminal justice system as it currently stands is causing more harm than good. We would be better off without it. Some 18% of the CPS workload is prosecuting men for sexual offences almost all of which will be false allegations, victimless crimes or crimes so minor that they should only be punished with a cheap slap on the wrist. If you were burgled would the police do anything? No of course they wouldn't! And more funding won't change that - any extra funding would just go into prosecuting more sex crimes. They would never use the additional funding to help men get found innocent.

The whole system needs a change of management, and the best way to do that is to sack the highly paid officials (e.g. Alison Saunders) and slash the funding. Force the police/CPS to clean up their act. Only when they can prove that they have become less corrupt can they get their funding back and even then they should only get it back if they can actually demonstrate they need it which does not include just uttering phrases like 'terrorism' or 'child abuse'. Have you ever noticed that whenever the police want more money they always start some propaganda campaign where the chief of police will ramble on about 'terrorists' and 'child abuse' and they 'need more money to combat it'? I really think that behaviour should be illegal, it seems to me to be in some violation of the principle of separation of powers needed in a democracy.

Anyway, end of rant!

As usual I don't entirely agree; yes the police and CPS must be forced to change and adapt to the new times, new technology but I think better funding is needed along with far better training. Many good cops left the force in disgust (I know several including terrific PI's) at both the "you will be believed" fiasco and lack of decent funding and training. You may not know it but most sex cases (especially historical) are dealt with by retired traffic wardens, transport police and family liaison officers - hired back at huge salaries - many without any training in the law or how to investigate legally. Which explains much of the collapse in cases.

I agree the police should be highly trained professionals. But rather than just increasing funding they could instead go for a smaller more elite force surely? That force would have a more narrow remit of the laws it enforces, rather than the huge number of victimless crimes that the police currently prosecutes.

My view would be (in no particular order):

1. Abolish pretty much all sexual offence legislation as it's pretty much all man-hating drivel
2. Legalise drugs
3. Legalise free speech (bye bye malicious communications act!)
4. Introduce a strict statute of limitations for most crimes
5. Legalise other stuff I haven't thought about right now

Once you do all that then plenty of money will be freed up for investigating the rest of the cases properly and professionally (such as murder, GBH and burglary - crimes that people actually want police officers to investigate!)

Some of what you say makes sense but adapt rather than abolish in many cases.

I think the Guardian etc will come onboard but the 'right wing' tabloids will do the hard work first.

It's not the true feminists, rather the FemiNazis who are wrecking a reasonably good social movement.

the idiotic @metoo campaign was a prime example and the hatred I experienced online questioning some motives of women or proposing that some women, was extraordinary

We saw amazing bullying of even women who dared to question the @metoo campaign or the atrocious and vicious Rose McGowan that resulted in the careers of actors like Kevin Spacey along with dozens of men being destroyed...while not one single one has been formally tried or found guilty of a single offense.

And the @metoo campaign totally ignored the millions of women working in ordinary jobs and who have no power or access to the media.

bit puzzled by this though:

3. Legalise free speech (bye bye malicious communications act!)

the internet has given millions of trolls "free speech" to amplify and destroy individuals on nothing but a claim.

I think there needs to be a new law of Criminal Defamation with severe penalties.

As it is, defamation actions are only for the rich which means some laws are not accessible by most citizens

Yes social media has sanctioned malicious gossip. What used to be bored housewives over a garden wall has become official BBC News.

hedda,

how are you going to define, exactly, this new 'Criminal Defamation' law? How are you going to police it when the internet is international and across borders and 'Criminal Defamation', being some form of speech, is thus also rather hard to define and so takes resources to investigate and prosecute?

And how are you going to ensure this law isn't used to prosecute people involved in daft twitter spats?
How are you going to ensure this law isn't used to prosecute people criticising those in power?

The hypocrisy in all of this is that lies and defamation is something used by our politicians frequently: They claim all Muslims are terrorists, they claim all men are rapists/wife beaters, they claim China restricts free speech when so do we, they call for violence against those who break their silly laws. And yet amongst all of this, our politicians have laws that criminalise the very same speech they use! Of course the laws are never enforced on them, but instead they are enforced on those they don't agree with.

So there's the problem, and it doesn't help your case that what you are proposing is already illegal (under harassment laws and the malicious communications act) but it isn't enforced because the ideology of the police is to only prosecute men who say that a woman should be raped. However, if a woman says that a man should be locked up on a false rape charge then all of a sudden that's OK, that's not harassment, that's not a malicious communication, WTF.

Personally I think there's some argument for graded harassment laws, i.e. on the first offence against a specific individual the police give a warning, then they escalate with fines, and finally they escalate with a prison sentence if the person simply doesn't stop. That way you remove the chilling 'fear factor' that just writing the wrong 'politically incorrect' line of text on the internet will get you raped in prison until the day you die. I think it was Stephen Pinker who said on witch hunts that it is entirely possible one ends up with the situation where everyone believes that everyone else believes in witches without ever truly knowing! The taboo effect, I suppose.