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Crisis-hit ‘Met’ lines up Scots chief for top job

THE chief constable of Scotland’s biggest police force has emerged as strong favourite to become the next commissioner of the crisis-hit Metropolitan Police.

Stephen House, of Strathclyde Police, has been invited by senior Met officials to apply for the post that has been vacant since Sir Paul Stephenson resigned from his £250,000 position two weeks ago amid the furore surrounding the News of the World phone-hacking scandal.The job is regarded as one of the toughest in UK policing, and Home Secretary Theresa May and London mayor Boris Johnson have approved his candidacy.

Mr House, who left London to join Strathclyde Police, is also believed to have the support of senior Met officials. The closing date for applications to the Home Office is 12 August, and insiders said fewer than “a handful” of candidates would be considered.

The job will involve tasks such as ensuring the force cleans up its act following the hacking scandal, overseeing security measures against terror threats and safeguarding public safety at next year’s Olympics.

Mr House already has experience of major policing operations, such as the miners’ strike and the Brighton bombing. The 54-year-old Glaswegian held senior posts, including assistant commissioner and commander of the specialist crime directorate, during his time at the Met.

Rivals for the position could include officers from large metropolitan forces such as Greater Manchester Police or someone who has served at the highest level in organisations including the Association of Chief Police Officers or the Police Service of Northern Ireland

Last night, former police chiefs and police board councillors said they were not surprised at Mr House’s interest in furthering his career, and they painted a picture of an ambitious operator who appeared to have the attributes needed to succeed in leading the Met at a time of upheaval.

Christopher Mason, a member of Strathclyde Police Authority (SPA), said: “He’s amply qualified, he’s the right age, has the right experience of the Met and has the right ambition.

“He will want to distance the force from the phone-hacking scandal in every way he can, which will be a challenge, but he has the ambition to give it a go.”

Mr Mason added: “He served at a very high level when he was at the Met.

“He was Cressida Dick’s boss, the officer in command of the operation on the day Jean Charles de Menezes was shot in July 2005 at Stockwell Tube station in London, but he was on leave that day. He well understands the command response.”

Mr House, who moved to Strathclyde’s top job in 2007, is credited with taking a tough approach to violent crime in Glasgow city centre, initiating campaigns against domestic violence, sectarianism and football hooliganism and keeping a close watch on financial resources.

He has also become a leading light in the drive for a single police force for Scotland, after a hesitant start.Graeme Pearson, South of Scotland Labour MSP and former director of the Scottish Crime and Drug Enforcement Agency, said his experience of policing Strathclyde would stand Mr House in good stead compared with other possible candidates within the Met.

“Being chief constable of Strathclyde Police is a demanding job. I think that, all too often, it is thought that policing the capital city of London itself is real kudos and enough to make a fist of the top job.

“Some rise up through the system without encouraging challenges. This in not the case in Strathclyde.”

Last night, both Strathclyde Police and the Home Office said they could not confirm Mr House had been invited to apply for the job of Met commissioner.

A Strathclyde Police spokesman said: “Any decision to apply for another job is a personal decision for the chief constable.”

A spokesman for the Home Office said: “The process is still ongoing. No decisions have been taken. The advert for the commissioner appointment closes on 12 August.”

A Scottish Government spokesman said: “Stephen House is an excellent chief constable of Strathclyde Police, and this is not a matter for government to comment on.”

The former Army intelligence officer at the centre of the latest hacking inquiry has told Sky News police tried to sweep his case under the carpet and accuses the Metropolitan force of endemic corruption.

Video here - http://news.sky.com/home/uk-news/article/16040640

Ian Hurst’s computer was allegedly hacked by the News Of The World (NOTW) searching for details of an IRA informer.
Scotland Yard is launching an investigation into information allegedly gathered illegally from him by a private investigator who, it is alleged, was working for the tabloid.

Mr Hurst, who spent 12 years gathering information for the Government, said: “The private investigator has admitted that he placed a computer trojan on my hard drive and obtained, over a three-month period, all the email traffic coming in and out.

“He could access social media and ostensibly surveiled [sic] me for a given period.”

Mr Hurst believes the hackers were looking for information on an informer for the IRA, called Steak-knife.

He has reams of documents relating to his case, which goes back to 2006, but he believes the police were reluctant to investigate properly at the time.

If you don’t address the source you can put 10, 50 private detectives away but you won’t remove the demand for the information.

Ian Hurst

He said if they had acted then on the information they had, it would have stopped others from becoming victims.

“It’s incredibly important that we understand the rationale for the decisions to effectively sweep this under the carpet,” he said.

Mr Hurst claims it is more than just bad policing that allowed the gathering of information to go on for so long.

He said: “Fundamentally, what lays behind this whole cesspit – not since 2006, it predates it by many years before that – we’re dealing with institutionalised corruption.

“It’s endemic within the Metropolitan Police and that has to be dealt with.”

Mr Hurst says his investigations point not only to the NOTW but other newspapers and beyond the media.

Senior Government figures are under pressure over dealings with the Murdochs

“Some of the clients that the private detectives were working for are large financial institutions, celebrities, major PR organisations.

“It’s diverse. The client is the source. They’re the people willing to pay large sums of money to obtain this unlawful information and if you don’t address the source you can put 10, 50 private detectives away but you won’t remove the demand for the information.”

Scotland Yard is now running three separate investigations: one into phone interceptions, one into computer crime and the third into police corruption.

Meanwhile, Labour has called on Prime Minister David Cameron and his most senior colleagues to “come clean” about their dealings with the Murdochs.

Senior party figures have sent out a series of letters to Cabinet ministers with more than 50 questions they say have not been addressed by the coalition in the wake of the phone-hacking scandal.

….because without these figures ‘detections’ would be through the floor…

Strange police priorities in a time of austerity

With numbers being cut, officers should be focusing on crimes that seriously harm

More than 130,000 cannabis warnings are issued each year across England and Wales.

Burglary, sexual assault, heroin dealing, mugging, smoking cannabis, vehicle theft, assault. Which should be the highest priority for police? Too difficult to pick just one? OK, pick three. When researchers asked this question to over 1,600 people a few years ago, less than half of 1% said cannabis use should be in the top three.

This week the government released the latest figures on drug use and misuse in England and Wales. What’s striking is how little has changed in the last year, but there is an important story lurking beyond press reports focusing on the rise of mephedrone use among young people.

The latest figures confirm that levels of drug use have fallen substantially in England and Wales over the last 15 years and are currently at their lowest since recording began in the mid-1990s. This downward trend has been driven primarily by falling rates of cannabis use, especially by young people. Surprising, then, that the number of stop searches for drugs has doubled in the last 10-years and that cannabis possession still accounts for 70% of all drug offences recorded by the police. Drugs are by far and away the most common target for police-initiated encounters, accounting for as much as half of all stop searches.

Before stop and search is hailed as the solution to the drug problem, it is worth noting that drug use started to fall before the increase in drug-related stop and search activity. The concentration on low-level drug possession is even odder when we consider what is happening with burglary. Stop and search for stolen property has halved in the last 10 years, while the latest figures from the British Crime Survey indicate that burglary has increased by 14% in the last year.

The real question that this week’s figures raise is why are so many resources being spent combatting low-level drug use when other, more harmful, forms of crime are on the increase. Administering more than 130,000 cannabis warnings each year across England and Wales does little to combat serious harms to communities, while consuming vast amounts of police time and resources.

Officially, the national drug strategy calls for policing to focus on drugs that cause the most harm. When cannabis was moved to class C in 2004, enabling the police to issue a cannabis warning instead of having to issue an official caution or arrest offenders found in possession of small amounts of cannabis, this was hailed as an opportunity to “reduce the amount of time devoted to policing the possession of a drug which is undoubtedly harmful to individual health, but does not cause harm to the community on the scale of crack cocaine, cocaine or heroin”.

Instead what we’ve seen is the police spending more time on low-level cannabis possession offences. Even the government admits: “The number of drug offences recorded by the police is greatly dependent on police activities and priorities and doesn’t give a reliable indication of trends in level of drug offending.”  Research regularly shows that the police racking up scores of possession offences does little, if anything, to affect drug availability or price.

Government cuts mean up to 34,000 police personnel might lose their jobs, and while we don’t want to see the number of frontline officers being cut, we should use the harsh economic climate to ask what it is that we’re doing with the forces we still have available. What are our priorities as a society?

Policing minister Nick Herbert was right when he said: “What matters is how well money is spent and how effectively officers are deployed.” Should we really be sending officers out to find small amounts of cannabis, or should we ask them to focus on providing safe streets, responding to robberies, and supporting communities suffering from repeat victimisation? If government cuts mean fewer police being put on the streets, then careful thought should be given to what they’re being asked to do.

• Join the debate, as both authors will be available to answer questions in the thread

“Forces give up on burglars and car thieves”

Police admit one in three crimes not investigated

July 30 2011 12:01AM

Police fail to investigate one in three crimes reported to them, including drug trafficking, sexual assaults and violent attacks, an investigation by The Times has revealed.

The figures are even more stark in London where almost half of all investigations are dropped after an initial screening process because officers believe that they cannot be solved.

Figures obtained by The Times for 21 of the 43 police forces in England and Wales show that the overall rate of crimes being dropped from further investigation is remarkably constant nationally and runs at about 32 per cent.

Almost 650,000 out of just over two million crimes were screened out in the past year in the 21 forces, according to responses under the Freedom of Information Act.

Conservatively, that would suggest that well over a million crimes are being disregarded each year…

Read Also: One in three crimes reported to police is not investigated as officers deem them ‘unsolvable’

If you watched this morning’s Metropolitan Police Authority meeting you’ll have seen the silent figure of acting Deputy Commissioner Bernard Hogan-Howe sitting alongside acting Commissioner Tim Godwin.

According to several MPA members what you also saw was future Met Commissioner Bernard Hogan-Howe sitting alongside his Deputy Commissioner Tim Godwin.

If he really is a contender to succeed Sir Paul Stephenson, Hogan-Howe’s prospects are hardly likely to be harmed by MPA Chair Kit Malthouse’s revelation that his family consider his tenure as head of Merseyside police as the force’s “golden age”.

“Before joining Merseyside, Hogan-Howe worked as District Commander of the Doncaster west area, serving with South Yorkshire Police.

“In 1997, he joined Merseyside Police as Assistant Chief Constable of Community Affairs, moving onto area operations in 1999. Hogan-Howe then joined the Metropolitan Police as Assistant Commissioner of Human Resources, in July 2001.

“He was the Chief Constable of Merseyside Police from 2004 to 2009, when he was appointed to Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary..”

Perhaps even more important than the endorsement of the Malthouse family, my MPA whisperers say Hogan-Howe has the gravitas many have long wanted in the Met’s top cop.

For the avoidance of any doubt generated by City Hall briefings, the MPA’s website makes clear:

“The appointment will be made by Her Majesty the Queen following a recommendation by the Home Secretary under the Police Act 1996.

“Before making this recommendation the Home Secretary will have regard to any recommendation made to her by the MPA and any representations from the Mayor of London. The successful applicant will be appointed in September 2011 at the latest. The appointment will be for a period of five years*.”

(*Unless sacked by BoJo sooner… )

A police officer involved in the investigation into the murder of schoolgirl Sarah Payne has said he believes his phone may have been hacked by the News of the World.

Detective Chief Inspector Martyn Lewis, who was second-in-command of the Sussex Police investigation into the 2000 killing, said he had now reported his concerns to Scotland Yard’s Operation Weeting inquiry.

The claim follows the disclosure that Sarah’s mother, Sara Payne, may have had her phone hacked by the News of the World, despite having worked closely with the paper to campaign for tougher child protection laws.

Mr Lewis said he initially became suspicious some time in 2002 or 2003 when he was telephoned at home by a News of the World executive threatening to publish a story about him which concerned the Payne family.

He said he told the executive that the story was completely untrue and warned he would sue if the paper ran it. In the event, nothing appeared.

“The fact they didn’t run the story would suggest their source was illegal and if I had admitted what the executive asked me they would have run the story and because I didn’t they didn’t run the story,” he told BBC Radio 4′s The World at One.

“I was the main (police) contact with Sara. Sara over a period of time became my friend and we often left each other lengthy voicemails which were intimate, because we are friends, and which could be misinterpreted or this allegation about the Payne family could have been construed from it.”

He said that the calls had been made on a police mobile which also contained voicemail messages relating to other investigations.

“On that case and on other cases I was running covert inquiries, sensitive inquiries, that would have been the subject of answer phone messages,” he said.

The chairman of the Commons Culture, Media and Sport Committee, John Whittingdale, said that it was another “appalling” allegation.

“People were very shocked to discover Sarah Payne’s phone may have been hacked. Obviously to hack into a police officer’s phone raises whole other questions,” he said.

Payne detective’s phone ‘hacked’