I am old enough to know that The Sweeney existed, but young enough (save for one episode stumbled upon on one of ITV’s cadet channels) to have never seen it. Even as Regan and Carter fade into history however, the memory of what they represented lingers – and not just among those of my advancing years. No sooner is there some outbreak of disorder than right-wing Twitter demands a return to a more “robust” style of policing and coppers willing to wade on in and put a bit of stick about. That these calls are often made by intellectual types who look like they could neither wade in (still less put any stick about) may or may not be distasteful, but it is probably psychologically revealing.
Seventies policing was not, however we might remember it, a halcyon time of screaming tires and shouts of “Get your trousers on. You’re nicked.” Just ask the Birmingham Six. Arrested in 1974 on suspicion of having blown up two pubs, four confessed after being deprived of food and sleep, being subjected to violence and, in at least one case, a mock execution. Fourteen prison officers were put on trial for abuse, but all were acquitted.
“The past,” Faulkner tells us, “Is not even past.” In the 1980’s, Peter Sullivan was arrested for the murder of Diane Sindall and, despite being described as “suggestible” and “of limited intellectual capacity”, not given access to a lawyer until he confessed. His recent release marks the longest miscarriage of justice in British history.
Andrew Malkinson was arrested in 2003 and charged with rape despite being 3 inches taller than the description of the attacker, and having a hairy chest and tattoos when the perpetrator had smooth, uninked skin. Neither did he have the scratch on his face the victim gave her attacker. Three years later, DNA from another man was found in the samples from the crime, but despite this being known to the Police and the CPS, the latter advised against further examination and the Criminal Cases Review Board decided against further investigation on cost-benefit grounds. Malkinson was eventually released in 2020 and his conviction quashed in 2023.
Three cases. There are more. Numerous innocent lives, if not ruined, then needlessly altered. Years of chances and choices lost to the misdeeds of others. The golden thread of English justice – better the guilty man go free than the innocent man be punished – perverted by those paid to protect it.
News stories do not, in the main, affect me. War? Only the dead have seen the end of that. Royal scandals? People are going to do what people always have. But these stories of miscarriages of justice anger me like no others.
They violate my most fundamental if rarely expressed right of human beings, the right to choose as far as possible the manner in which we come to know ourselves.
They betray the public trust, those paid with the public’s money telling it a story they know to be untrue.
They are a dereliction of duty, the duty to protect the public being cast aside when the guilty are allowed to walk among them.
We can understand those who perpetrate or collude. High profile crimes bring attention and a demand that something must be done. We can all get to the stage where we wish our problems would just go away, reaching for the convenient choice rather than the right choice. But if we can understand, we cannot condone, nor should we forgive. Public servants are paid to do the right thing, not the easy thing; to make problems go away by solving them, not by pretending to.
The great U.S. Marine Corps general James Mattis was renowned for giving officers under his command a reading list, his justification being that they were unlikely to meet a completely novel situation and he would prefer they learned from history to discover what worked (and didn’t) rather than conducting experiments with the lives of his soldiers. History too offers a guide to our current problem.
Hammurabi’s Code, the earliest surviving systematic body of law, dictated that those who bore false witness in a murder trial be executed. The death penalty is, to my mind, a step too far (and the examples above should give those in favour pause) but that was, at the time, the punishment for the most serious crime. The Babylonians equalised the cost for those who had committed it, and those who wrongly tried to get others convicted of it.
Let us do the same. Public servants who knowingly cause or collude in the conviction of an innocent person should be subject to the maximum penalty for the crime, as should those who look the other way when exculpatory evidence appears. No parole. No time off for good behaviour. Just the years behind bars they would have had others serve. If you can’t do the time, don’t falsely accuse others of the crime.
We like to name new laws after the victims they would have saved. We cannot do that in this case. There are too many. That is why we need it.
Stewart Slater works in Finance. He invites you to join him at his website.
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(Photograph: Ethan Doyle White, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons)
‘The Sweeney’ was always tosh (as eg ‘The Professionals’, ‘The Saint’ and everything else on TV, including the much more downbeat police procedural ‘Z Cars’). Real life has always been more sordid, tainted, compromised and disappointing
Those responsible for miscarriages of justice never personally suffer the consequences. The question is why?
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