‘Anyone with a rag on his head is fair game.’

You’ve heard of the Rotten Apple Fairy Tale?
You know how it goes, it’s the standard establishment explanation for corruption or incompetence:
He/she’s a rotten apple in an otherwise clean barrel.
According to this, rotten apples are either weak assholes in the guise of human beings, who have slipped through organisational screening processes and succumbed to the temptations [...]

Slippery Slope

(First published in May 2006)
Imagine there’s a small town somewhere out in the boondocks. Call it Raggedy End or Shimmering Stone, Dodge City or Nottingham, London, Barnsley, New York…
I’ve got it – let’s call it Slippery Slope.
Now let’s take it out of the boonies and place it in the secret centre of Your Town Anywhere, [...]

A comment on gun crime in the UK

Below is a comment by Ms Vaughan, which I received in response to my Gun crime in the UK post (11/09/06). I decided to publish it here because of its current relevance.
22 February 2007, 12:31:43 | Ms Vaughan
I am a Connexions Personal Adviser working in South London and I come into contact with young people [...]

UCLA tazer attack by campus cops video

Albert Einstein said: 
“The world is a dangerous place, not because of those who do evil, but because of those who look on and do nothing…”

Gun crime in the UK

While gun ownership in the UK is perhaps more tightly controlled than in any other European country, with gun crime constituting less than 1% of total crime, it is a fact that guns and incidents involving firearms are a quotidian feature of modern city life. So much so that out of the almost 11,000 firearms [...]

Mirza Tahir Hussain: further stay of execution

Leeds man Mirza Tahir Hussain, sentenced to death under Sharia law 18 years ago, has been granted a further stay of execution until 1 October.
The article below, which I wrote and first published in May of this year, provides a background to the case.
It was nearly dusk when Mirza Hussain reached Rawalpindi.
He had arrived in [...]

Summary justice

For some time now Tony Blair has been behind a drive towards what he has described as a “re-balancing” of the criminal justice system.
This week we hear that Mark Rowley, Surrey’s Assistant Chief Constable and ACPO’s spokesman on modernising police methods, is pressing for new powers that would effectively make front-line police officers unaccountable to [...]