Plebgate....shock Horror !...police Apologise

[mikey4444]

Well, nearly, but better than nothing I suppose :::

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-24615491

Still no explanation why they lied though. Curiouser and curiouser.

[Zeuhl]

Weren't they pushing a political agenda?

Part of which was calling for the Chief Whip's resignation or sacking

Guess they didn't realise it was being recorded because recorded interviews are not something they'd ever encountered before ... (DOH)

[ChillDoubt]

And these aren't even the Plebgate officers, these are Federation Rep's from within or near his own constituency who obviously have/had an axe to grind with their local MP over his plans as a minister to bring them more into line.
Did the Police as a whole have an agenda set aside for him?
You bet your bloody life they did!

[mikey4444]

All will come out in the wash, partly at least, tomorrow, in front of the Commons Select Committee !

[mikey4444]

It seems that some of Police are so stupid, that they can't even lie properly !

[ludwig]

// Ken MacKaill, Stuart Hinton, and Chris Jones said they had not planned to mislead the public. //

They said, misleadingly.

[jomifl]

Errm, have missed something, shouldn't policemen who lie be sacked? Isn't it a fundamental requirement that upholders of the law should be beyon reproach. Why the next thing we will hear is that the cops 'fit up' people to improve their solve rates, heaven forbid.

[Quizmonster]

I may well be wrong, but I thought it was illegal to record people without telling them you were doing so. Surely, if the police in this case were so informed, they would hardly have been so daft as to give an account of the meeting that could be so readily disproved.
So IS it illegal and WERE they informed?

[ChillDoubt]

I believe you are right in regards to the recording QM, but seeing as Police lied and have in essence been caught out by a savvy MP who has made them look like the Keystone Cops I have a feeling they won't be sending a file to the CPS over this one.

[Zeuhl]

quiz

there is no law against secretly recording a conversation, provided it is only for your own use and not shared with a third party

of course, as posted above, as soon as a recording reveals wrong doing those rules tend to be over written

that is the basis of lots of investigative journalism, security work or 'mystery shopping'

[ChillDoubt]

Poll results in the wake of Plebgate:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-24627319

I'm slightly taken aback it's that many who still trust them if I'm honest!
Thus far it appears to be a conspiracy from a cross section of the Police, not just rank and file.

[woofgang]

from reading the article, the question about trust seemed to have been something like has your level of trust changed...so many people who answered "no" may already not have trusted the police. Its very sad. One of my relis is in the Met and i have known other policemen and they have been decent honest people. Its sad to tar them with the same brush as this bunch.

[mikey4444]

I'm sure that not all Policemen are like this woofgang..in fact I am positive. But the difficulty is that everytime they step out of line, the media is there to bring it to our intention. As it should be of course. But my point is that they don't seem to learn. The old adage about stopping digging when you find yourself in a hole seems to have passed them by.

And the new Hillsboro inquests hasn't even begun yet...next March apparently although no idea why so far into the future ?

[Quizmonster]

"But it found that 40% agreed with the statement: "Generally, the police seem to try to cover up wrongdoing by those in its ranks."

The above is a quote from CD's link. I'd guess that the statement could as easily be applied to ANY profession! Ranks tend to close automatically whenever someone seen to be representative of such a body is accused of error.
Personally, whenever I hear of the police finding themselves in a situation like this and almost everyone coming out with phrases such as, "The Derby police are at it again!" my impulse is to ask them, "How many Derby policemen today did something honest, selfless and courageous on our behalf?"
I'm with the 82% who believe the police are honest on the whole.

[mikey4444]

But Quizmonster...we should expect all our Policemen to be honest, all of the time. There is no wriggle room here !

I'm not in the slightest bit interested in the 99 bakers that bake good bread...that is their job. But I am very interested in the 1 baker that doesn't.

The whole point about the Plebgate case is that the Police were in the spotlight...8 people have been arrested, four of them serving Policemen. The CCTV footage clearly shows that what the officers on the gate said had happened. couldn't have happened. But these Policemen still came out of the meeting with Andrew Mitchell, and gave a false account. The Police then compounded this error by saying that nobody needs to be disciplined !

In other words, they were still digging that hole ! If people today have less trust in the Police in general after all the recent cases of corruption and dishonesty, who are we to blame...the British public or the Police ?

The Police need to be like Caesar's wife...above suspicion.

[Quizmonster]

Mikey, I totally agree that we should expect our police to be 100% honest. In the same way, we should expect teachers to be 100% non-pædophilic, social workers to be 100% devoted to child-protection, for example, and doctors to be 100% devoted to curing illness rather than covering their own - and colleagues' - butts when things go wrong.
However, I'm sufficiently long in the tooth to know that these percentage-targets just aint gonna be met for ANY profession or trade! Consequently, I still maintain that complaining about the bad apples wherever they appear is justified but that we should never lose sight of the fact that the vast majority of people - including the police - DO perform their duties honestly.

[FredPuli43]

Yes, QM And here we have one very minor incident that didn't even result in a charge.But it happens to be one in which there were cameras and every detail of logs and notebooks could be checked, and resources were available, and, more importantly people involved were forced to use them.

If that happens over nothing much and involves some of the elite of the police force and yet officers are discredited, one is entitled to suppose that all. or nearly all; certainly more than a small percentage, of officers are capable of such behaviour and would adopt it.

[jomifl]

I saw the security camera coverage of plebgate and was intrigued at how what was supposed to have been said could have been said in the time available given that the man on the bicycle barely stopped.

[FredPuli43]

The problem the police had was that insulting a policeman is not an offence. To make an arrest or detain someone, the officer has to have a reasonable suspicion that a crime has been committed. Saying "plebs" or even "effing plebs" does not constitute such grounds for being stopped.

Now, the consequence is that officers are tempted, in such cases, to imagine the evidence that would make their actions valid. So, we discover bystanders who looked alarmed, for example, suddenly appearing in police notebooks when , mysteriously, there doesn't appear to have been any such person.

[mikey4444]

They have continued to lie, before a Commons Select Committee today. That hole is getting bigger ! At this rate the whole Police force will fall into it and disappear without trace.

[jno]

they're not giving up without a fight, are they?

Their thinking is probably coloured by the asusmption (widespread, it seems) that anything a policeman does is ethical, legal and right.