The British bobby whose courtesy and helpfulness foreign visitors never tire of admiring is in some kind of disgrace. Revelations of brutality, dishonesty and perjury have eroded popular faith in the integrity of the police force. It is no longer something that is taken for granted. Consequently pressure is building up for the establishment of an independent machinery to inquire into all complaints against the police.
As crime has grown and become increasingly well organised and professionalised in the past decade the police have been coming in for criticism from time to time for their failure to deal with the menace. On an average in 75 per cent of the cases no arrest is made though it must be said that murderers are caught in eight out of ten cases. The explanation has been that the force is understaffed, which is true and is admitted to be so. Also the police cannot often make arrests even though they are pretty sure about the identity of the criminal because for one thing under the law he can refuse to answer all questions and thus frustrate investigation. It is remarkable that in this country a police officer is required to tell a suspect that he is free not to answer any question which might incriminate him.
This extraordinary kid glove procedure of investigation and the rising tide of public criticism could hardly prove compatible bed companions. Inevitably while some officials stuck to the letter of the law others tried to meet the criticism even if the attempt to control the crime wave meant the use of brutal methods. In Sheffield, as in several other towns, a special crime squad was formed and the top officials not only connived at but encouraged the use of the whip. When the story came out, the officials tried to get out of the corner by dismissing two detectives who appealed against the dismissal. The Home Office set up a special tribunal to hear the appeal. The tribunal upheld the dismissal but the officials themselves did not escape blame. They have now been suspended. These disclosures have stirred the conscience of the whole nation. The bobby will take a long time to be rehabilitated.
Decisive Role
Just as Fleet Street played a decisive role in forcing the Profumo affair into the open, the credit for uncovering the police atrocities in Sheffield goes to a newspaper, the Sheffield Telegraph. Such campaigns which are commonplace in America are still rare in this country. British newspapers are often unwilling to undertake prolonged investigations on behalf of ordinary people, as was eloquently established by the manner in which the death of Herman Woolf, a painter, in mysterious circumstances, took nine months to be reported (for details see The Times of India, September 1, 1963).
The Sheffield Telegraph got interested in the case soon after one of the three victims of police atrocities stripped off his shirt in the magistrate’s court and showed the bruises on his upper arms. The paper’s feature writer, chief crime reporter and other reporters were put on the job of preparing features on the relationship between the police and the public. These reporters managed to win the confidence of the two detectives who had inflicted the injuries and had been dismissed. Other police officers, solicitors and city councillors were interviewed. The city’s chief constable himself admitted that the facts collected by the reporters were correct.
All this evidence was collected in confidence and could not be published with provable evidence to back the indictment. But the investigations themselves had set in train other developments. The detective inspector, head of the Crime squad, announced his resignation. The editor knew that the inspector and two other officials had been involved in the case. Their solicitors confirmed all three were facing disciplinary proceedings. The time for exposure had come. This was in May last. The campaign did not produce the inquiry by the Home Office. Six MPs from the area could not be interested. Towards the end of July the paper revived the campaign, this time in its editorial columns and a reporter pressed the Home Office daily.
Apparently spurred by the continuing rise in the crime figures, The Times recently conducted an inquiry into how honest or dishonest the ordinary people are. The findings published in a series of four articles are staggering. The instinctive choice of the word “staggering” speaks for my own reaction. I am staggered because the kind of dishonesty revealed in this series does not make any sense in an affluent society.
Appropriately the investigation started with Oxford where the elite of the country are educated. The booksellers there complained of students, not just the beatniks and the angry young men but highly respectable ones too, stealing books. If they were caught they were by no means ashamed, one shopkeeper said. They gave their friends a description of the store detective so that they knew whom to watch out for. On the whole the correspondent concluded that cases of shoplifting had risen by 40 per cent in the last five years. The shoplifters “come from all ages and all classes. Shortage of money is rarely the obvious motive.”
Dishonest shop assistants are as equally common. One shop in Oxford Street, centre of fashionable shopping in London, dismisses and prosecutes 40 to 50 assistants every year. They work in collusion with outsiders. Hundreds of cheques issued in favour of shopkeepers rebound because they came from stolen cheque books. At an unattended car park one spot check disclosed only eight out of twenty motorists had put the sixpence bit into the meter.
London Transport estimates that it loses one and a half million pounds every year because people travelling by the Underground do not pay the full fare. Thousands do not buy a ticket when they get into the Underground station and when they come out they get away by paying three or six pence by pretending that they got in only a stop or two away. It is the same story at the Customs. In 1961 £20 million were recovered from 37,000 taxpayers who had tried to cheat Inland Revenue. The number of those who got away must be much higher.
The Times of India, 17 November 1963