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Crime

Bit fierce

Boris Becker, the three-time Wimbledon champion, was on Friday jailed for two-and-a-half years over bankruptcy offences as a judge told him he had been humiliated, but shown no humility.

But then this is one of the crimes the court system really doesn’t like – lying to the court system.

On the fairly sensible basis that if people think they can get away with lying to the courts then the courts don’t really work.

This one will go on and on

Police rape investigators dismiss women as liars and time-wasters, leaked findings from a Home Office study reveal.

An academic-led inquiry commissioned by the Home Office has found that some police officers investigating allegations of rape and sexual assault believe that a significant number of reports are false and feel frustrated that some victims are “wasting” their time, political sources have told The Telegraph.

The study, known as Operation Soteria, has examined case files and interviewed police officers in three forces in England. They discovered that some detectives described minor discrepancies or inconsistencies as “false”, which failed to understand how trauma can affect evidence given by victims.

One survey of almost 200 officers in the Metropolitan police found that only one in four agreed that “very few” reports of rape and sexual assault are untrue, according to well-placed Whitehall sources.

Define “significant” and “very few”. The best evidence we’ve got is that 6% of complaints are wholly false. Some other number will be, given the nature of the offences, differences of opinion. Well, that significant or very few?

Define sexual abuse

One in 10 children sexually abused by the age of 16
Fifteen per cent of girls and five per cent of boys are victims of child sexual abuse by that age, Home Office-funded research finds

Does rather depend upon what definition is being used, doesn’t it?

Ian Dean, the director of the CSA Centre, which is funded by the Home Office and hosted by Banardo’s, said: “Areas with low numbers of recorded cases may assume they have low levels of sexual abuse, but we know from prevalence data that this is simply not the case.

“With 500,000 children under 16 estimated to experience some form of child sexual abuse each year, the significantly lower levels identified in official data indicate that services are failing to identify and address what we know is a challenging but very worrying and hidden problem.”

AKA, give us more money to deal with this thing that we’ve identified.

Page 15 here. Telling a 17 year old that of course you’ll respect her in the morning would seem to be included. No, not being trite, they have gone for a very, very, wide definition. As we’d expect.

Suppose so

The firing squad dredges up some of the core contradictions at the heart of American capital punishment.

“It’s an almost instantaneous death, it’s the cheapest, it’s the simplest, it has the lowest ‘botch’ rate,” said Corinna Lain, a law professor at the University of Richmond. (Federal judges have made similar points.) At the same time, it’s “more honest”, she said.

They’re also honest enough not to do it with the prisoner facing the wall and the bullet in the back of the head. Unlike some….

So, err, what is being said here?

A former justice minister has been branded “disgraceful” after he claimed that the conviction of Tory MP Imran Ahmad Khan for sexually assaulting a teenage boy was “nothing short of an international scandal”.

Crispin Blunt told The Telegraph that he thought the decision by the jury was unjust and that the case relied on “lazy tropes about LGBT+ people that we might have thought we had put behind us decades ago”.

Teh Gayers expressions of sexuality are not as those of other men, up to and including rape? Statutory rape? Fiddling with a cute young ‘un?

Or there’s dreadful bias by assuming that a Teh Gayer would fiddle with a twink?

It’s obviously possible that the contention is that this was a railroading. But why would that involve stereotypes?

What is it that Blunt is actually alleging here?

So my surmise was right

Police have raided the Unite headquarters as part of an investigation into bribery, fraud and money laundering, which is believed to be connected to the construction of a £98 million hotel complex.

It is about that hotel. My assumption has long been that there had to be something more than just incompetence to explain that.

Labour’s biggest union backer Unite is facing questions over how it spent £98m of members’ money on a hotel and conference centre.

Some Labour MPs are calling for an inquiry into the Birmingham scheme, which was originally estimated to be £57m.

And, well, you know, this is going to be fun:

Unite came under scrutiny last year over its decision to award the contracts to the Flanagan Group, run by Mr McCluskey’s long-time friend Paul Flanagan, as well as a health and safety contract awarded to SSC, a company owned by David Anderson, the son of Joe Anderson, the former mayor of Liverpool.

If there’s enough looking around we might even be able to get Derek Hatton into this as well………

No, not really, no

Robert Maxwell may have employed the services of the paedophile Jeffrey Epstein to help him hide hundreds of millions he stole from his company’s pension funds, a new documentary series claims.

To a very reasonable degree of accuracy Maxwell didn’t in fact steal the money, he lost it. OK, sure, he stole it from where it was meant to be and put it to other uses but he didn’t ship vast quantities of it into gold bars in the undersea volcano base. He did stupid things like buy his own stock which then went down in value. He lost the money, not stole and hid it.

Sounds a little harsh

Two parents have been charged with manslaughter after allegedly allowing their daughter to become morbidly obese.

In what is believed to be the first case of its kind, the parents of Kaylea Titford, 16, appeared in court on Tuesday after being charged with gross negligence manslaughter and causing or allowing the death of a child or vulnerable person.

The disabled teenage girl was found dead at her home in Newtown, Powys, Wales, in October 2020.

It is alleged that between March 24 and Oct 11, 2020, Kaylea’s father Alun Titford, 44, and mother Sarah Lloyd-Jones, 39, of Colwyn, Newtown, failed to ensure that her dietary needs were met, leading to morbid obesity.

Failing to meet her dietary needs is now manslaughter?

Really now?

Jess Phillips, the Labour MP and women’s rights campaigner, said it would be “unfathomable that he be allowed to play” until the conclusion of legal proceedings.

An allegation of rape – an allegation, recall – means that you cannot earn your living until the end of the court process? What’s that for criminal trials these days? 2 years? 1?

Rather making the process the punishment, isn’t it?

Also in the news today:

The typical delay between an offence of rape and the completion of the resulting criminal case rose to 1,000 days in 2021 for the first time, figures have revealed.

So Jess thinks that someone accused – accused – of rape should not be allowed to work for three years. Which, for a footballer, is perhaps one third of their entire career.

Hmm, sounds most just, doesn’t it?

Well, no, not really

A “heroic driver” who intervened to try to prevent a mother of two being stabbed to death should not be charged with murder, the victim’s family said on Tuesday.

Yasmin “Wafah” Chkaifi, 43, was killed just a few minutes away from her home on a busy road outside the entrance to a park in Maida Vale, west London, on Monday morning.

A 26-year-old motorist is alleged to have run over and killed the suspected knifeman, Leon McCaskre, during the assault, before being arrested on suspicion of murder. He has since been released on bail.

The knifeman, who was Ms Chkaifi’s ex-partner, was said to have been crushed beneath the wheels of the Renault Clio while “begging for help”.

That’s not how it works. Or, sorry, not how I think it should work.

It’s pretty clear he killed the bloke. It’s pretty clear there was at least some forethought to it. He’s not claiming his hand just slipped on the wheel after all.

So, there’s a case for a murder charge there. Who gets to decide whether he’s guilty of it or not? The jury, that’s what they’re therefore. So, trial and see what they say.

Interesting

A woman was assaulted by a domestic abuser after he was confined to her home under a tagged curfew, an inspector has revealed – as he warned of a lack of checks.

Justin Russell, the chief inspector of probation, said it was “deeply concerning” and “unacceptable” that electronically tagged domestic abusers under restrictions were being allowed to live with potential victims.

On the one hand, if he’s a domestic abuser then this is possibly his domestic. So, after release (the tag is parole or summat) then why shouldn’t he return to his domestic? He’s been punished for his crime, no we don’t have sentences which say “You may not go home when time is served”.

On the other hand confining him with a tag to where the crime took place and another might doesn’t seem all that sensible either.

There doesn’t actually seem to be a fair answer either. What’s a penitent husband (no, imagine) supposed to do, rent another house while on parole? Or what’s the point of putting a scrote back into a target rich environment?

Any answers?

To identify someone is to identify them

The England rugby player arrested over the alleged rape of a teenager who claims she was drugged plays for Sale Sharks, the club has confirmed.

A 29 year-old, who is not currently a part of Eddie Jones’s plans, was quizzed on Sunday along with a prostitute after an incident in Manchester.

That’s getting pretty damn close to an identification, isn’t it?

No, thank you, we’ll not have speculation in the comments.

An upper limit to false rape claims

We do know that there are false claims of rape. Ranging from the malicious to the confused – no, that wasn’t rape M’am, however much you wish you hadn’t done what you did voluntarily.

We have varied estimates of this, from nearly never never, through to 6% from detailed academic research to perhaps this:

A third of rape victims feel police are ‘unhelpful’ during investigations

This is clearly an overestimate but it’s still useful as a boundary. It will include those who actually are let down by police activity as well as those who would like to ram something through. Interesting what can be observed by taking certain numbers seriously…..

Well, this is different

Man held after 100 iPads stolen from children’s hospital in Liverpool
Merseyside police took 54-year-old into custody after £70,000 theft from Alder Hey

Last time around that place was stealing brains, wasn’t it?

But there you go, Scousers