"Plebgate" is a peculiar UK controversy which has escalated out of all proportion... and for good reason! The initial cause was the allegation that a UK government minister, Andrew Mitchell MP, called officers in the Downing Street security cordon "plebs", the resulting publicity made it inevitable that the minister resigned his post. ("Pleb" is considered a patronising insult in the UK, while to call someone, its antonym, a "toff" for some reason passes without notice; but such is the reverse snobbery of public discourse in the UK).
As it turns out the Security TV footage does not accord with the police account and subsequent police inquiries have been fraught with mendacious self serving commentary. It turns out that Andrew Mitchell may be the victim of a police "fit up"!
Internet trolls have made the point that the ongoing inquiries and the cost incurred are merely the product of MPs seeking to protect their own but I believe these people miss the point entirely. If the police can "fit up" a government minister then how can any of us feel safe?
Regardless of the cost this incident needs to be investigated and if the police officers are found culpable they should be prosecuted. This particular incident comes on the back of the Hillsborough Inquiry, the mistaken shooting of Charles de Menezes in 2005, the police assault on, and subsequent death of, Ian Tomlinson etc etc etc. The fact is few police officers are ever called to account, the worst sanction often being that they resign on a full pension.
My opinions of the police were first formed a long time before any of these particular incidents. When I left school in 1976, aged 19, my first job was as a 'legal executive' in the criminal litigation department of a firm of solicitors in Bradford in the north of England. Over the course of the four years that I worked there preparing defence cases for hearing in the Crown Court (UK's superior criminal court) I moved from the naive opinion of 'if you can't trust the police who can you trust?' to one of deep scepticism. My role was to interview defence witnesses, brief the defending barrister and attend court as a note taker and adviser.
During my time at TI Clough & Co, solicitors, Market Street, Bradford, there were several cases where I was convinced the defendants had been "fitted up" by the police and in all of them, Thank God, they were acquitted. They were many less clear cut cases where the defendant was probably guilty and yet one suspected that the evidence produced by the police was concocted. Policing was then, and for all I know still is, about identifying a suspect and then finding the evidence to convict them. Let me explain why this procedure is flawed.
I had a case where a woman was being prosecuted for a serious assault on her infant. Her partner said she had done it and she herself had confessed to it. It seemed an open and shut case on the 'get the suspect and then collate the evidence'. But I sensed she was lying to protect her partner. The case came to trial at the Crown Court and fortunately the barrister felt as I did. Professionally speaking what we did next was totally unethical - even though we had been clearly instructed by our own client that she wanted to plead guilty, we cajoled her into making a 'Not Guilty' plea! As the trial unfolded we picked holes in the police case and we ignored her subsequent instructions that she wanted to plead guilty. We suspected her partner was continuing to pressurise her, but we fobbed off her instructions. The barrister spoke to me privately, "you do realise what we are doing is unethical?" I wish I had made some sort of noble comment at this point but I think I just laughed, "yeah, right!".
Our defendant, and the infant who was assaulted, were ill served by the police and the law; it is not cynical to say that the law is not the same as justice. It leaves me cold when I hear smug pundits in the media who seem to believe that the law provides Mankind with adequate notions of right and wrong, and put their trust in legal procedure. Humanists have misplaced faith in the fundamental goodness of Mankind. Human institutions are fallible and it is foolish to trust them so implicitly. I agree with King David who said, 'let us fall into the hands of the LORD, for his mercy is great; but do not let me fall into the hands of men!'
Realising that we could never get our client to give evidence in her own defence we set about destroying the police case before it ever got to that stage. And Thank God, by the end of the prosecution evidence we persuaded the judge to throw the case out! We got her off. Of course, having backed the wrong horse, the police could not now get a conviction on the real culprit. The leading police officer even asked our advice on the issue - I wasn't overly impressed by his intelligence I have to say.
The lesson of all this; there is much talk in the media about 'transparency' and 'ethics' in public life generally not just with regard to policing, but it seems to me that "transparency" is not a substitute for trust and "ethics" are no substitute for righteousness.
