If you have something to say...
Say it on the Huffington Post
If you have something to say...
Say it on the Huffington Post
We found that in many cases people felt the police didn't understand mental health or its implications for how to handle an incident. We heard of a lack of empathy, respect or compassion, which has damaged relationships between individuals and the police.
What came out over the four week trial at Woolwich Crown Court gives rise to serious questions over whether kettling thousands of protesters in a confined space without warning or explanation does more harm than good - inflaming tensions, provoking conflict and increasing the number of injuries and damage that it's supposed to prevent.
Jimmy Savile was a "predatory, serial sex offender" but he did not "groom the nation". He was allowed to continue abusing because he was a 'celebrity'. Pretending that he "groomed the nation" allows those who knew to minimise and deflect their guilt. Those who knew and did nothing are guilty of helping Savile in sexually assaulting hundreds of children and adults. I say hundreds but we will never know how many. The term "grooming the nation" only serves to silence victims. It serves those predatory, serial sex offenders who are still harming people.
The mainstream media's representation of women and its normalising of pornography should be one of our first ports of call when searching for the causes of sexual violence. As we start the new year and look to what we can do to make a difference, let's not forget the young women bearing the impact of a society that does not take media objectification of women seriously. Sexual violence does not exist in a vacuum. One way we can show our collective disgust at its existence is by refusing to accept that women as sex objects is the norm.
Today is Ada Lovelace day. Ada Lovelace Day aims to raise the profile of women in science, technology, engineering and mathematics by encouraging peop...
Sir Ian Blair, the former Metropolitan Police commissioner, wrote a piece in The Times this weekend headlined "Ian Tomlinson is our Rodney King moment". A warning from such a figure of authority must be taken seriously.
A report launched at the beginning of June by the Victims' Services Advocates (VSA) has called for the police in London to be much more sensitive when listening to the victims of serious crimes, after highlighting findings that satisfaction with the police is extremely low.
Knocking on someone's door to tell them someone close to them has died - possibly a husband, wife or child - is one of the most difficult jobs the police do. In the Metropolitan Police it was called a 'death message'.
For those of you that don't read Polly Toynbee on a regular basis, Dr Eoin Clarke's blog, the Green Benches, is a poor man's version
Stop and search - stopping and or searching an individual in a public space on suspicion of a crime or potential crime - remains one of the most tangible signs that in Britain today, we are all far from equal.
Last week, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that six alleged terror suspects could face extradition to the United States. While extensive media coverage have been given to Abu Hamza, who has been convicted of soliciting to murder and stirring up racial hatred and jailed in the UK for seven years, the voices of Babar Ahmad and Talha Ahsan were almost silent.
Occupy is a young movement. I can understand that chaos is to some extent inevitable, that messages are mixed, that among your numbers you have people who like nothing better than to put on a mask or a scarf and have a ding-dong with the cops. But you need to be more coherent, more focused or you'll lose the 98%.
I made two Freedom of Information (FoI) requests to the UK's Ministry of Justice. I asked for the latest official data on offences involving indecent images of children for England and Wales. The final set of answers arrived last week.
London will endure, it always has, but why should it when on the 3 May 2012 we can Sack Boris?
There is a deliciously banal absurdity to the news that Rebekah Brooks, the disgraced tabloid editor at the epicentre of the phone-hacking scandal, was loaned a police horse by the Metropolitan Police.
In September last year, former New York Police chief Bill Bratton, who was in Britain to advise the Government about gang culture following the summer riots, described the morale of London's police as "awful"... If morale was awful back then it is now in a state which defies description.
