Artificial intelligence is already reshaping policing, and the recent row over the Metropolitan Police’s blocked deal with Palantir shows how far politics is lagging behind operational reality. If we are serious about protecting frontline officers and visible neighbourhood policing, we should embrace carefully regulated AI as a force multiplier that releases cops from analogue bureaucracy […]
Just before Christmas, His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Prisons (HMIP) walked out of HMP Swaleside on the Kent coast to issue a rare red flag warning to Ministers. The ‘Urgent Notification’ painted a dystopian picture of an institution no longer in the control of the state, wracked by staff shortages, violence and drugs. The prison was […]
This week, the think tank Policy Exchange delivered a mid-term report on the performance of Metropolitan Police Commissioner Mark Rowley, who was enticed out of an apparently lucrative retirement to take command of the capital’s beleaguered police service. He will not find it agreeable reading, but then little that crosses his desk these days is. […]
David Lammy didn’t cover himself in glory this week in Parliament. Our Lord Chancellor chortled and guffawed while his shadow Robert Jenrick tried to hold him to account for the release in error of a registered child sex offender from HMP Chelmsford whose crime sparked national protests. The shelf life of ‘but the Tories’ as […]
Robert Jenrick is continuing to annoy all the right people. This weekend he turned his focus to the appalling attacks on front line prison staff, including by terrorists, that have left dozens of wounded, maimed and traumatised officers struggling to contain the threat in our High Security prisons. Jenrick asked me to produce a rapid […]
What can recent developments in the scandal over child sexual exploitation tell us about our dangerous descent into a low trust society? Two Labour MPs have now broken ranks to contradict the leadership and say a national inquiry into child rape grooming gangs is now needed. Many people will not have heard of Dan Carden, […]
What should we do about our national crisis of confidence? In every sense, confidence and trust in our institutions and national infrastructure is tanking. Let me count the ways. Tomorrow, I plan to go to London from Exeter. I have low confidence that when I get to the station my train will appear at all, […]
It was an atrocity that shook the nation. In June last year, Valdo Calocane stabbed to death 19-year-old students Barnaby Webber and Grace O’Malley-Kumar in Nottingham, going on to kill 65-year-old Ian Coates. Calocane then stole Mr Coates’ van and used it to seriously injure three more people by mowing them down in the street […]
The Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby was on Radio 4 this morning to pour oil on our troubled waters. With a national insurrection flaring into life in parts of England and police struggling to contain intercommunal violence, his words were unsurprising. Hate cannot win, the criminals assaulting police defile the flag they wrap themselves in, […]
One of the survivors of the 1987 IRA Remembrance Sunday massacre in Enniskillen described his injuries when he regained consciousness in the rubble: My mouth was blown out. My jaw was missing on the right-hand side. I was split open nine inches from my chin to my ear. My face and tongue were paralysed. I […]
The Prime Minister knows, rain or shine, the only place to make the case for things that matter to him and to the nation is outside his front door. His previous foray, then in fairer weather, took place on March 1 in the aftermath of George Galloway’s election victory when he warned democracy was being […]
Is there such a thing as an acceptable level of terrorism? You would be forgiven for thinking so. Last week, the results of yet another inquest into a terrorist attack here, all but flattened by the news cycle juggernaut, revealed yet more failures by the state’s agencies to protect citizens. The families of James Furlong, […]
I’d been thinking about writing a book about our current crisis in prisons since 2016. Back then, it was the height of the austerity programme that played an integral role in destroying an organisation I had once proudly served in. I was once temporarily in charge of Erlestoke prison. It’s a small category C jail […]
What’s the point of a ‘czar’? By this I mean independent experts appointed for a fixed term, usually part time, to provide independent advice to ministers on matters of national importance. The process, at its best, can circumvent Whitehall bureaucracy and risk aversion to make good things happen at speed. Louise Casey is a prime […]
Last week, I sat in Portcullis House, the modern addition to the Palace of Westminster opposite Big Ben housing the offices of many of our legislators. After formidable security I waited in a holding pen, keeping company with several police ballistic shields propped against a wall, not far from where a couple of heavily armed […]
A video showing a Jewish man being advised by police to hide his Star of David ‘for his own safety’ while watching a pro-Palestine parade in Edinburgh went viral on social media yesterday. While many people criticised the officer concerned, I think he was acting in good faith. That is to say he perceived a […]
Is James Cleverly’s processor stripping its gears? He appeared on the deck of Radio 4s Today programme on Tuesday to declare ‘mission accomplished’ in delivering the Prime Ministers pledge to deal with the asylum claim backlog which stood at 92,000 in June this year. These claims had now been ‘processed’ he declared. But what does […]
A couple of weeks ago, while travelling for work, I endured a seamless 5,500 mile journey from the middle of the Indian Ocean to Paddington station, where I immediately hit the the buffers. On that occasion it was a rail strike that prompted a tense cross-country Odyssey in teeming, unheated Great Western Railways trains that […]
Why was Suella Braverman sacked as Home Secretary? Opinions vary wildly between verbal incontinence and political incompetence. Wherever the truth lies – and we will hear her version in due course – her career was wrecked on the rocks of police ‘operational independence’. What does this mean and what are the implications for her successor? […]
The government’s proposals for criminal justice reform in this week’s King’s Speech fell under the title ‘Keeping People Safe’. However, it could just have easily read ‘keeping our election prospects alive’, as the party’s long held mantle of law and order is crumbling to dust. Nothing exemplifies this more than the recent emergency measures to […]
