Monday 17 September 2018

No Equal Justice Under The Law

No one likes baddies. Everyone agrees that baddies should be locked up and we should throw away the key.

But what if you're not a baddie?

What if you have been, say, falsely accused by someone, or targeted by over-zealous police just trying to get their arrest numbers up?

Well, you'll be glad to hear that in this country we have a simple solution to this.

It's called a court of law.

In cases where you have been falsely accused or wrongly targeted by police you can choose to plead 'not guilty' and demand to go before a Scottish court of law to protest your innocence. In other words, you get to have your day in court.

The Procurator Fiscal will prepare a prosecution case against you. You in turn, will instruct a solicitor prepare a defence for you. At the end of it, the court will decide whether they believe you or not.

Sounds pretty fair, right?

Well, actually, no, it's not really fair. In fact it's far from fair at all.

You see the Crown Office & Procurator Fiscal Service have over 500 lawyers and more than £112 million available to them to prepare their prosecution case against you.

You, on the other hand, have just one lawyer and £500 of legal aid money to prepare your defence.

That's not just unfair, that's ludicrously unfair.

If you are an innocent member of the Scottish public who mistakenly finds himself in a Scottish court of law for any reason whatsoever, the deck is massively stacked against you.

The Scottish Government recently asked Martyn Evans, the chief executive of Carnegie UK Trust, to carry out an independent review of legal aid on behalf of the Government.

So what was his conclusions?

He told the Government that he could find no justification for an increase in legal aid fee levels.

Seriously, you couldn't make this stuff up.

What planet do these people live on???

https://www.heraldscotland.com/business_hq/16603914.does-extra-cash-for-prosecutors-highlight-imbalanced-justice-system/


Police Will Pay You To Spy On Your Neighbour

Anyone with experience of untrustworthy Police Scotland know that arrest figures are of the utmost importance to them.

High arrest figures allow police to falsely claim they are doing a great job. It works in an incredibly simple way. Arrest figures allow the police to say "Hey Mr & Mrs Joe Public, look at us, we've arrested lots of bad guys, so we're keeping you, the Scottish public, safe."

It's complete nonsense of course, but it has been the number one tactic in their playbook as long as I can remember and sadly most members of the public who don't understand how policing in Scotland really works are taken in by it all.

And now we discover that Police Scotland have descended to an even lower low.

Their latest tactic is to...wait for it...pay friends, family and neighbours to spy on each other.

It has been leaked out that police have recently been actively trying to turn young football fans into paid informants in an attempt to build a large "informant ring" of football fans who can provide intelligence on their fellow supporters.

And my sources tell me that this is actually just the tip of the iceberg. The number of fully paid secret police informants in many other walks of life is rising at an alarming rate. 

Make no bones about it. There are serious flaws in using paid informants and police are 'conveniently' ignoring these flaws.

It is an undisputable fact that when you PAY someone to give you information, the incentive for that informant to make money directly from the information they give you compromises the validity of the information.

Unsurprisingly, it suits the jack boots at Police Scotland to play down this fact.

A victims group who defend supporters rights called "Fans Against Criminalisation" contacted Police Scotland Chief Constable Iain Living-under-a-stone about the paid informant claims but all they received in response was "We don't comment on operational matters".

Let's be clear here. Police secretly paying football fans to be informants has nothing at all to do with trying to root out bigotry or round up those ned supporters who drink buckfast and sing stupid songs at matches. It's a guise, a smokescreen if you will, to hide a much, much darker ulterior motive from Police Scotland.

And it's a big deal.

Here's why.

You see, I lived in Spain for a while back in the early eighties. The Spanish dictator general Franco hadn't long died when I went to live there and ordinary members of the Spanish public were still trying to come to terms with the lifetime of abuse they had endured under the Franco regime and his gestapo style policing of innocent Spanish citizens.

So the first thing the good people of Spain did after Franco died was to revoke the unbridled power of Franco's ultra-loyal Guardia Civil police force. Franco's Guardia Civil police ruled supreme in every city, town, and village in Spain. If you've ever spent a holiday in Spain you may have seen them around - they wear khaki-green army style uniforms with guns openly exposed by their side (designed to intimidate) and they tuck the bottom of their trousers in to high fronted military style black boots.

Anyway, the Guardia Civil police were unhappy about their sudden loss of power, so they attempted to regain power by trying to stage a coup in the Spanish parliament in 1981. With pistols and machine guns in hand, they sprayed bullets inside the parliament chamber as MP's dived for cover - and all this happened just a year before I went to live there!

Thankfully the coup failed, due in no small part to the King of Spain Juan Carlos promptly going on television that evening and denouncing the conspirators, denouncing their attempts to reinstate a dictatorship in Spain and calling on the Spanish people to reject the police's coup and instead support freedom and democracy.

So why do I tell you all this?

Simple.

During the Franco era of dictatorship, the Guardia Civil police regularly paid people to spy on their neighbours and fellow citizens - just like Police Scotland are now doing.

You couldn't walk in to a shop or a bar or even chat to a friend or work colleague about Spanish politics and law, police behaviour, corruption or anything that criticised the police in any way because you never knew who you were talking to and if they were a paid police informant.

Stories abound of innocent Spaniards arrested, imprisoned, and taken away from their families just because an informant needed to make a few pesetas to feed his own family so he made up stories and gave them to the police in return for payment.

It was truly horrible.

I even knew one English woman who owned a little shop in a well-known Spanish tourist resort who was a paid informant for the Spanish police. Her particular job was to listen to conversations in the English speaking bars and cafes of ex-pats living in Spain and report them to the police.

Disgusting.

Here's the bottom line.

When police ask citizens to spy on each other and inform on each other and pay them money for it, it very rarely results in that information having any substantial validity.

Instead they get bombarded with a ton of false tittle tattle from vindictive money-hungry hustlers and disgruntled friends and neighbours trying to cause trouble and make a quick buck.

The temptation to invent crimes and misdemeanours for financial gain and to curry favour with local police officers breeds corruption on a scale that is unimaginable and totally tears at the fabric of a civilised society.

I know it because I have seen it. I lived through it in my early years in Spain.

Don't let this happen here in Scotland.

https://www.heraldscotland.com/news/16735745.police-scotland-accused-of-trying-to-turn-young-football-fans-into-paid-informants/


Police Scotland let the public down daily

Police Scotland are letting the public down daily.

And it isn't me who's saying it...it's the police themselves.

A police whistleblower has become so worried about it all that he/she has bravely spoken out to warn the public. The whistleblower has revealed that calls you make to police are being purposely "downgrad­ed" so that police officers can justify NOT responding to them.

Police Federation boss Calum Steele agrees too, and he has also been directly quoted as saying "The public are being let down."

The types of crimes police are "downgrading" (so they don't need to send officers out) include domestic abuse and break-ins.

This is truly shocking.

Police work the scam by getting their fellow officers in the control room - who initially take your calls for help - to purposely change the gradings of Grade 2 and Grade 3 calls. This means that your calls for help about such things as domestic abuse and break-ins gets passed on to a "public assistance desk" and therefore they don't have to send officers out to help and protect you.

The "public assistance desk" will book you an appointment to talk with an officer (usually days later).

I have long since argued that untrustworthy Police Scotland operate a back-to-front policy whereby the first thing they do in ANY situation is cover their own backsides. It is then, and only then, that they will attempt to respond, help, support, and protect you, the public.

Police Scotland's starting point for any call for help to them from the public is always to assume that it just may go pear-shaped for police and a complaint may end up being made against them.

So they always comprehensively cover their own a**es before they begin to lift a finger to help or protect you.

This is just plain wrong.

And these latest revelations prove to us yet again that untrustworthy Police Scotland's playbook of dirty tricks is still alive and well, even after the appointment of a new chief constable.

https://www.thescottishsun.co.uk/news/3168413/police-scotland-let-down-public/