Heroes and Villains

Liverpool needed to beat Italian champions Roma (who haven’t lost a game in five months) by two goals tonight if they were to go through to the quarter finals of the Champions League. And they did, winning 2—0, and dumping Roma out of the competition in the process! To make the evening even more memorable, it was manager Gerard Houlier’s first appearance on the touchline since his heart operation last year. Absolutely wonderful.

Moving on to less wonderful subjects, some little shit sped the wrong way up a one way street in a stolen Vauxhall Astra last Friday, and ended up smashing it into two parked cars, one of which was my mum’s Nissan. A heroic neighbour chased after the guy, but wasn’t able to catch him. Luckily no one was hurt, but the first car (a very big, very new Mercedes) took some serious damage. I think my mum’s car is probably going to be written off by the insurance company, as the front corner got well and truly crunched in the impact, which then sent it flying back into the Fiesta parked behind. My mum’s not too gutted though, as she gets to drive around in a nice new courtesy car provided by the insurance company until they sort out her claim.

Speaking of crime and policing, there are a lot of pissed-off people around this part of South London at the moment, after Commander Brian Paddick, head of the police in Lambeth, was removed from his post yesterday. Commander Paddick is the officer that has pioneered the ground-breaking (well, by UK standards), pragmatic approach to the drugs problem in Brixton, which has seen police concentrating on crack and heroin dealers, and confiscating cannabis rather than arresting anyone they see puffing on a spliff. He has approached the drug situation as a social problem, as well as a criminal one; as he has put it, “screw the dealers, help the users“.

Commander Paddick actually seemed interested in getting involved with the community (all sections of it, not just the white, middle-aged, middle-class section), seeking their opinions and discussing policing policies. For example, he was a regular poster in the discussion forums at Urban 75 (a site about green issues, anti-capatalist protesting, Brixton, nightlife, drugs, music, culture etc.). It was there that he made a “controversial” comment — that he found the concept of anarchy quite appealing — that was picked up and (mis)quoted out of context by the mainstream media. Read in context, his line seemed more that clearly we need some rules, but that a society without a ridgid heirarchy held some appeal. Of course, once the right-wing aspects of the media discovered his posts, they immediately turned it into a “looney, liberal, soft-on-drugs cop wants anarchy and rioting”-type story. For fuck’s sake, surely having police officers that are willing (and able) to discuss not only crime and policing, but society and philosophy in a public forum is something to be encouraged?!

I suspect the tabloid press and parts of the Metropolitan Police have really had it in for Commander Paddick since the start though. For starters, he’s previously stated that with the limited resources he has available, he wants to tackle the crack and heroin dealers, rather than weekend clubbers who do the odd E or line of coke, as it’s the former group that are behind the majority of serious drug-related crime. I mean, duh! This is pretty obvious to anyone with half a brain, but it no, apparently Commander Paddick got a complete bollocking from his superiors at New Scotland Yard for publicly taking this line.

Additionally, to some people, having an intelligent person (Commander Paddick is an Oxford graduate), who listens to locals’ views on tackling crime in charge of police is just not on. But the reason that the gutter press and certain senior police officers and politicians really hate Commander Paddick is because he is gay. In fact, he’s the most senior openly-gay cop in the country.

Realistically, knowing the British tabloid press, it was only a matter of time before they managed to concoct some scandal about Commander Paddick. So it wasn’t a great surprise when several of the tabloids had “Top Cop in Sex and Drugs Shame” stories splashed across their covers on Sunday.

Supposedly Brian Paddick, after some protest, had allowed his then partner to smoke a few spliffs in his flat at some point in the past. Goodness. And he also allegedly once had sex on a train, at least six years ago. Shocking, eh? Well, I guess it is shocking stuff if you’re a right-wing, scumbag, tabloid hack, trying to cook up some scandal for a reactionary piece full of thinly-veiled homophobia.

As Decca Aitkenhead put it in the Guardian:

If Paddick goes, it will officially be for breaking the law by letting someone smoke cannabis in his home. That, in theory, is the media’s only objection. But the weekend’s headlines all started with the word “gay”, and his “extravagant promiscuity” - not to mention his taste for Clinique - enjoyed just as much attention as any criminal allegations.

And who was the source of these allegations? Commander Paddicks jilted ex-boyfriend, who just happened to have been paid £100,000 for his story. Now there’s a reliable witness with no axe to grind! And how many of those twenty pound notes handed over as payment had previously been used by Mail on Sunday hacks to enjoy a little Colombian Marching Powder?

The result of this story? Commander Paddick was removed from his post as head of police in Brixton the following day. Some would argue that any police officer alleged to have broken the law should be immediately removed from duty. But given that a recent study concluded that half of all UK police officers have tried cannabis, that would leave our already over-stretched police service in a pretty dire state. Can there really be any police officers that have never broken any minor laws at some point in ther past?

How is it that the Metropolitan Police Authority can move so swiftly over allegations in the Mail, yet not move at all over allegations of racism, assault, perversion of justice and even murder by specific officers when asked to do so by the community police consultative group? A few months ago, several policemen were caught on CCTV camera, laughing as they kicked the absolute crap out of a man lying prone on the ground (the man turned out to have be the victim of a crime, and was chasing the offender when the police grabbed him). Yet the officers involved were still working their normal shifts several months later…

But someone claims that Brian Paddick let them smoke a joint in his flat (a ‘victimless crime’), and he’s immediately moved “away from the public eye”. It’s hard to see this as anything other than a very personal attack on a police officer who has earned the respect of his traditionally wary-of-the-police community.

And if you’re wondering about the success of Commander Paddick’s approach to policing the drug problem, most people there would agree that he really has made a difference, and that Brixton is starting to feel a little safer. The statistics on his “Go Softly” cannabis scheme back this up — from the Observer:

An internal review conducted by senior officers at Scotland Yard concluded that over the first six months of the scheme, 1,400 man hours were freed up. The number of seizures of cannabis rose by a third while seizures of class A drugs rose by 19 per cent.

Personally I’d worry about any cop that was prepared to turn in his partner for smoking the odd joint. And frankly I don’t care if Commander likes to have sex dressed as a pantomime horse. However, I do care that the press and some senior figures in the Met are able put an end to a respected officer policing his community with intelligence, maturity, openness and proven success. Now that’s a fucking scandal.

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