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[somedaybitch]

so, i've been waiting for the moral outrage, and the rants about the loss of freedom to an actual Secret Police, blah blah blah, and yet, nothing. here's me not surprised. wrong English-speaking country, i guess.

Comments

[raincitygirl.livejournal.com]

Wow. I hadn't heard about this. Thanks for the link.

Sigh. There is such a thing as oversight. Particularly given that the British police have had quite a few scandals over the years (corruption, police brutality, dodgy evidence), I'm not sure that ensuring a new set of law enforcement don't have oversight or accountability is the most brilliant idea ever.

[somedaybitch.livejournal.com]

i would have paid good money, and i mean, good money, to be a fly on the wall when 5, 6, and CID got the word. i'll bet that was ugly like no tomorrow.

questions of civil liberties aside, if they're really, really lucky, this won't turn into a friendly fire bloodbath. way to utterly hamstring your own, Home Office. good job.

tangentially, not sure if you're a Spooks fan or not, but this revelation really made me re-think the Season 3 eps with Oliver Mace and his attempt to take down MI-5. SOCA didn't come out of nowhere, and i remember reading about it previously. after all the backhanded insults thrown at my government and CIA, which don't bug me because they are totally plausible and solid within the realm of the show, i'm inordinately pleased that the Kudos writers also aren't afraid to focus the scathing criticism at the British Government, and i wonder if the Mace-Tom Quinn-Adam Carter storyline was their subtle way of telling the Home Office to sod off.

[raincitygirl.livejournal.com]

I've never seen Spooks, though I've heard good things about it from quite a few different sources. Hopefully I'll get to see it at some point. Are the early seasons available on DVD this side of the Atlantic?

One of my English relatives used to be neighbours with a guy who was a detectdive with the West Midlands Serious Crime Squad (I think that was its name. It was the one that got rather publicly disgraced). He said when the scandal hit all the papers and he saw the guy's name, he wasn't terribly surprised. Apparently he was not an ideal neighbour. Used to sit in his back garden and yell at his wife, kids, dog endlessly, with the whole neighbourhood hearing. until the wife left him and took the kids (can't remember if my cousin said she took the dog too). And one night when my cousin went over to ask them to turn down their music, the guy started screaming at him and saying he'd have him (my cousin) arrested if he didn't sod off.

Now, being an utter shit to live next door to does not necessarily mean that someone is corrupt in their professional life, and the plural of anecdote is not data, but he sounds like he had serious anger management issues. I mean, my cousin's over six feet tall and not exactly self-effacing, so anybody who intimidated him was probably fairly volatile. And generally speaking, giving people with anger management issues jobs where they might be tempted to beat up suspects in order to extort confessions is not the greatest idea ever. Hence, you know, the importance of internal affairs divisions and other such oversight, so as to keep the bad apples from totally buggering things up.

And even if the people who had this idea in the first place genuinely intend for such power never to be abused, and implicitly trust all the members of SOCA, that's not a guarantee that every future recruit is going to be quite so pure of heart. The various corruption scandals that have touched all the Canadian political parties at one time or another have convinced me that whenever there's a situation which can be manipulated, eventually *someone* will come along and take advantage of the opportunity.

questions of civil liberties aside, if they're really, really lucky, this won't turn into a friendly fire bloodbath. way to utterly hamstring your own, Home Office. good job.

Hmmm, how do you perceive it as creating a friendly fire situation and hamstringing law enforcement? At first glance, it seems like they're giving law enforcement WIDE latitude. You seem fairly familiar with the situation. Could you expand a little?

P.S. My understanding is that the Home Office is not exactly a brains trust. I mean, being Home Secretary is supposed to be something of a future political prospects killer (an extremely low number of former Home Secretaries go on to become Prime Ministers. Chancellors, however, are statistically speaking better placed, which seems odd to me. I mean, they're in charge of taxes, shouldn't that make them unpopular?). But the Home Office does have a very handsome headquarters, from an architectural point of view.

[adafrog.livejournal.com]

Hmmm, how do you perceive it as creating a friendly fire situation and hamstringing law enforcement?
Not that I know a lot about law enforcement, but what we have/are seeing a lot of around here are basically turf wars. Almost like two kids who really want a toy will pretty much destroy it rather than have the other kid get it. Not quite so bad, but that idea. It can also happen accidentally when there is no inter-agency sharing of info/operations/etc.

This new group is utterly ridiculous. And very, very scary.

[raincitygirl.livejournal.com]

Ai yai yai yai yai.

And the turf wars thing makes tons of sense. I remember when I was living on campus at university, officially its law enforcement issues were taken care of by an RCMP detachment on campus, because even though the university is in the city of Vancouver, it's located on Endowment Lands and therefore the Vancouver Police's writ doesn't run there. However, the Vancouver Police didn't much care for the RCMP being in charge of a place that was within their city, and the RCMP didn't care for the Vancouver Police muscling in on their territory. So reporting so much as a purse-snatching involved massive amounts of paperwork, because you had to report something to the RCMP, the city police, and the private security team which was run by the university. And they all kept tabs on each other (which is probably where they generated most of their work from). Plus, things would get intensely sticky if somebody had committed a crime in Vancouver and then been arrested on the Endowment Lands or vice versa, with nobody wanting to give up jurisdiction.

And this usually involved fairly minor crimes. It would've been a nightmare if the RCMP detachment, the city police, and the security people had all had to cooperate to solve something major, like, say, terrorist attacks. When one of my roommates reported a theft, the report seemed to go to each of the three agencies in turn, and was at one point filed as two separate incidents because of the multiple copies of everything floating around. So your explanation makes tons of sense.

[adafrog.livejournal.com]

And the next question is, with all of these people fighting over jurisdiction, did anyone ever actually investigate it?

[raincitygirl.livejournal.com]

Of course not!

Well, I suppose they may have, but all the phone calls my roommate got re: the theft seemed to be be about the report, rather than asking her relevant questions which might have helped them catch the thief. And they didn't catch the thief, but I don't get the impression they were too concerned about that. The real issue was whose baby the report got to be.

[somedaybitch.livejournal.com]

see and that's a jurisdictional fight that i'm not familiar with, even though Hollywood has done its best to make that seem common. the ones that i see are in the opposite direction. the lengths that local jurisdictions go to in order to avoid taking paper would stun even the staunchest cynic.

[raincitygirl.livejournal.com]

Yeah, when you think about it, it does seem odd that they'd be looking for work. Mind you, there wasn't a whole lot of crime on campus. I was astonished when I first realized there was an actual RCMP detachment with several officers and a full-time secretary. So they probably had to latch onto anything that would up their numbers and justify their existence. Like when I worked for a government agency, and at the end of the financial year we would be frantically ordering office supplies by the gazillion if we hadn't spent all of our budget. Coming in under budget was just as bad as going over budget, because if you don't use all the money that's already allocated to you, they'll just take it away from you next year. Or that was the reasoning, anyway. Don't you just love bureaucracy?

I'd say they'd have a lot to do on Friday and Saturday nights during the academic year, but for the rest of the week, and the parts of the year where the campus is practically deserted, they were probably sitting around re-shelving files much of the time. I used to walk past the detachment on a regular basis to get to a class, and they never looked busy. I saw the officers standing outside taking smoke breaks very, very often. What the Vancouver Police's excuse was for grabbing onto extra work I have no idea. They're supposed to be busy with real crimes.

Mind you (puts on cynical hat), I'm sure that if the incidents being reported had been messy and required a lot of investigation, the RCMP and the Vancouver Police would've been trying to hand the case off to each other.

My roommate's case involved someone walking into the dorm in broad daylight and walking off with her laptop. That's the kind of thing that's probably very hard to solve (because in a dorm situation there are tons of people milling about, and if you blend into the crowd and have the chutzpah to look confident, nobody's going to assume you're doing anything nefarious unless you're actually caught in the act). Mind you, neither the police nor the RCMP bothered to actually ask our neighbours questions and at least *try* to figure out who took it.

[somedaybitch.livejournal.com]

Or that was the reasoning, anyway. Don't you just love bureaucracy?

we have that problem all the time. if you underspend, then you are telling the purse string holders that you didn't need that much money and they WILL cut it out of your next budget. it's a total mind frell and it's bloody irritating

[somedaybitch.livejournal.com]

the easy replies first...and then i'll chew on the rest.

Spooks is available through Series 3 in the US, but i'm not sure about Canada. you should be able to get it on amazon, though.

questions of civil liberties aside, if they're really, really lucky, this won't turn into a friendly fire bloodbath. way to utterly hamstring your own, Home Office. good job.

Hmmm, how do you perceive it as creating a friendly fire situation and hamstringing law enforcement? At first glance, it seems like they're giving law enforcement WIDE latitude. You seem fairly familiar with the situation. Could you expand a little?

SOCA agents will be able to function, without any rules, commandeer operations, commandeer facilities, answerable to no one. they don't have to tell anyone who they are, what they're doing, or who they're working...or what they do with information once they obtain it. they have no boundaries whatsoever.

lemme give you a story to more succinctly illustrate my point...about 16 years ago, 2 dope cops were running a buy/bust op in a small city in SoCal. they were using a confidential informant (CI), which is standard. they set up the meet in the parking lot of a rather large strip mall, at night. they had plenty of backup, feds on rooftops and such. it was raining like hell. one minute they're waiting for the deal to go down, next minute everybody's got guns pointed at everybody else. many, many, many guns. it turned out that those two cops, and their fed backups, were buying dope from other cops. the only bad guy involved was the CI.

a whole lot of people could have died if anyone had twiched.

to prevent that, there's a mechanism in place now, a neutral holding tank of info as it were.

currently, the Security Services work with each other, with Special Branch [a division of the Met Police], with CID...they give and share information because 6 can't function on home soil, 5 can't function on foreign soil and neither has the powers of arrest.

SOCA, otoh, doesn't have to tell anybody anything. so they could be walking into ops they know nothing about, compromising ops that they don't care about because they are pursuing their own agendas...diming people off to whomever because it gets them something they need. all of that can put security officers and cops in serious danger, not to mention compromising CI's, useful bad guys, and innocent citizens.

and that's just the stuff that has nothing to do with civil liberties.

[raincitygirl.livejournal.com]

Fascinating. That makes a lot of sense now that you explain it (one of those lightbulb moment situations).

[somedaybitch.livejournal.com]

don't stare into the bulb, yo.;)

[somedaybitch.livejournal.com]

And even if the people who had this idea in the first place genuinely intend for such power never to be abused, and implicitly trust all the members of SOCA, that's not a guarantee that every future recruit is going to be quite so pure of heart. The various corruption scandals that have touched all the Canadian political parties at one time or another have convinced me that whenever there's a situation which can be manipulated, eventually *someone* will come along and take advantage of the opportunity.

every organization employs people with those kinds of "skill sets" because they have their uses. the balance against that has been accountability. SOCA now throws that balance out the window, drops it in a dumpster, pours gasoline on it and lights it on fire.

P.S. My understanding is that the Home Office is not exactly a brains trust. I mean, being Home Secretary is supposed to be something of a future political prospects killer (an extremely low number of former Home Secretaries go on to become Prime Ministers. Chancellors, however, are statistically speaking better placed, which seems odd to me. I mean, they're in charge of taxes, shouldn't that make them unpopular?). But the Home Office does have a very handsome headquarters, from an architectural point of view.

i can't speak to that. that ratio may be indicative of nothing more related than those that seek the office of Home Secretary don't have aspirations to be PM. no idea though.

[raincitygirl.livejournal.com]

i can't speak to that. that ratio may be indicative of nothing more related than those that seek the office of Home Secretary don't have aspirations to be PM. no idea though.

Oh, I've no idea what the real reason for the Home Office apparently being the graveyard of buried hopes is. Could be any of a number of things. But, well, they *have* come up with some fairly boneheaded ideas from time to time, so I figure it's as good an explanation as any other.

[arthurfrdent.livejournal.com]

one 'o them moments where seems like the entire mindset is different in the UK. It's always scary to me when the logical-nightmare-extreme scenerio comes true, and people :yawn: and say well, as long as we'll be kept safe... from my POV the worst part of this is that this is an IDEAL situation for the very crimeloards they are hunting to infiltrate the SOCA ranks... and as you pointed out, and prolly know way more of, this invites even more Wheels-within-Wheels ops, and is certainly the innocent bystander, and the cop on the beat who are going to get the bad...

[arthurfrdent.livejournal.com]

and... what was I thinkin through reading through all this? The Operative. The possibility of that is chilling...

[somedaybitch.livejournal.com]

yes. that total lack of rules is always pernicious in it's, perhaps, unintended consequences.