Despite central London being in the midst of one of the biggest public security operations of modern times due to the preparations for the late Queen’s funeral, the streets are still not safe from random knife men. However on this occasion it’s not some ordinary member of the public who has been stabbed in Leicester Square by such a knife man, but police officers. Yes in Khan’s London not even police officers are safe from stabby scum.
LBC said:
Two police officers have been stabbed, with one understood to be seriously injured, while tackling a knife man near Leicester Square.
Police said a man had been arrested after the incident in central London at around 6am this morning. The arrested man has been taken to hospital for treatment.
One of the Met officers has suffered multiple serious injuries, the Evening Standard reports. The injuries, while serious, are not believed to be life-threatening.
Police said the families of the officers involved have been informed. The incident is not being treated as terror-related.
The police have been pretty quick off the mark with their denial that this incident was ‘terror related’ and many will wonder just why this was. It’s quite possible that the police made this statement because the alleged stabber is a Mohammedan. Later press reports that came out after the alleged attacker was charged named the suspect as Mohammed Rahman, 24 of Notting Hill. Rahman has been charged with attempted murder, robbery,assault and two counts of threatening a person in a public place with a bladed article. I suspect that the polices denial of terror links to this offence may well be due to this incident being witnessed by members of the public and therefore knowledge of Rahman’s identity as someone likely to be a Muslim being spread widely. The police may have had their own reasons for quashing gossip about a suspected terror attack during the early stage of the investigation.
This incident did not happen in some out of the way suburb or one of the more crappy areas of London but at the heart of the city and in an area that I as an ex-Londoner perceive as being much safer than areas such as Camberwell or Newham or Waltham Forest. Security in London has now degraded to such an extent that police officers can get stabbed up in one of the most heavily monitored and policed areas of London’s West End. The fact that this incident could occur at this place and at this time shows us that London’s Mayor Sadiq Khan in his role as Police and Crime Commissioner, has utterly failed Londoners when it comes to policing and security.
The more I see of Khan and the more I see how London has and is being destroyed under his watch the more I wonder whether it is time for the new Prime Minister to enact some radical change on the way London is governed. I can’t help but think that at least some of the answers to London’s current problems could be found in the Government taking the ‘Thatcher Option’ with regards London’s governance and removing those organs of local governance that are clearly failing Londoners such as the offices of Mayor and the London Assembly.
London is now in a worse situation than it was in when Ken Livingstone was in charge when Margaret Thatcher’s government shut down the Greater London Council because of fiscal waste and the council’s involvement in extreme left wing politics. With the rise in violent crime, the mismanagement of the Mayor and the impotence of the Greater London Assembly in holding the Mayor to account, there is a valid case for shutting down the Mayor’s Office and the Greater London Assembly and running London direct from Whitehall until such time that a democratic governance system that serves all Londoners and not just the Mayor’s supporters, is put in place.
May I make an observation without becoming the subject of flames and insults. Since UK abolished capital punishment the number of people who are charged with murder has not risen significantly. BUT the number of people who die as a result of a criminal act has gone up by 600%. Conincidence or could these matters be connected in some way? If we are not willing to restore capital punishment maybe we need to put in place a proper deterant to replace it.
Interesting but I’ve also read stuff tht says that there are more cases that pan out as attempted murder rather than murder because medical techniques have improved to such an extent that those who might have ended up as murder statistics survive instead.
What you might be seeing is a rise in manslaughter rather than murder cases. Following the 1957 Homicide Act there were less murder cases considered as capital ones but a lot more manslaughter and similar cases. People can be nicked and initially charged with murder but later alternatively charged or convicted of manslaughter. I recall somewhere reading that following the 57 Act there were a lot less murder cases where an insanity defence was used as the bar for capital crimes had been raised as there were other routes to a manslaughter conviction rather than a capital murder convictions. Britain tried very hard not to execute nutters so claiming to be mad was one of the few routes possible that would avoid the noose prior to 57
Your observations about manslaughter are correct. It is much cheaper and easier to prosecute a manslaughter charge, perpetrators are more likely to plead guilty and the maximum sentence is life the same as murder anyway. It has become a cheap opt out when someone is killed. Also helps to keep the perceived murder rate down.
I think it’s also the case that the courts have recognised that not every case of killing is necessarily murder as to have a murder conviction the jury must be convinced that there was deliberate intent to kill or recklessness about it. A lot of the instances where people are killed by others are not that, they are the result of fights or other altercations where the killer is clearly not calculatedly intending to kill.
Everything you say is correct which is why manslaughter is so much easier and cheaper to prosecute. It doesn’t matter if the charge really should be murder the CPS go for the cheap easy option.
But the fact remains that there are some killings that don’t meet the murder standard of deliberate intent. Do you leave such killings unprosecuted because there’s not enough evidence to prove murder and only prosecute on GBH or similar or does the prosecutor go for a manslaughter charge which doesn’t need to meet the murder standard? Having sat in quite a few murder / unlawful killing cases during my time as a court reporter I saw incidents where it was not the prosecutor or anyone else who decided on whether it was murder or manslaughter but the jury. I saw juries convict on the alternate charge to murder that of manslaughter if the Crown had not presented enough evidence to satisfy the jury that there was sufficient intent by the defendant to be classed as murder.
A lot of arrests for killing start off as murder charges but as more evidence emerges it might become clear that proving intent to kill might be more difficult than at first assumed by the investigators when the arrest initially occurred.
Yes manslaughter can attract lower sentences rather than the automatic life sentence imposed for murder but these killings are prosecuted. It might be cheaper to keep a prisoner who gets a lower sentence for manslaughter for less time than the 12 to 20+ years that murder attracts but the court costs are less variable, you still need the prosecution and defence counsel and all the other costly things in our court system and there is still a need to investigate killings whether they are murder or manslaughter. There have been long standing issues with funding for cases and funding those who present cases for the Crown at court and indeed corners might be being cut, at least according to this Guardian article from 2011 https://www.theguardian.com/law/2011/apr/13/murder-cases-one-prosecutor-cps however I cannot see anything that suggests that actual real and provable cases of murder are being prosecuted as manslaughter due to cost constraints. Take a look at this list of London murder/manslaughter cases from 2019. The majority were prosecuted and convicted of murder where murder could obviously be proven whereas those minority who were convicted of or who admitted manslaughter were mostly obvious cases where there was no intent to kill. https://www.mylondon.news/news/west-london-news/london-murderers-killers-locked-up-16731941
I hear what you say and respect your opinion but having spent almost all my working life in the so called justice system I remain unconvinced. It has been my experience that the CPS almost always go after the easiest and cheapest option be that justice or otherwise.
The problem is the CPS is damned if they do and damned if they don’t. If they spent public money in a profligate manner and did so on every case then there would be an outcry as the CPS is a public body funded by the public. However according to the guidelines the CPS prosecutes ALL killings because the public interest in homicide is high and killings must not slip through the net because of their seriousness. I also noticed that the CPS does not accept pleas of guilt to manslaughter in a case where it could go either way re murder / manslaughter without involving counsel and consulting victims families. For the record I’m not one to normally defend the CPS,in fact I’ve often criticised it for its drift into being influenced by identity politics and giving houseroom to communal grifting groups but from my reading of the CPS guidance it would appear difficult for them to hide murder cases as manslaughter for cost reasons. I admit that the CPS might not always attract the best counsel, especially on the more junior side, because the wages are much lower than can be got in the private or corporate law areas and this has produced incidents of incompetence in putting together cases but the CPS does seem to take killing seriously and does prosecute those who commit acts that cause the deaths of others. See https://www.cps.gov.uk/legal-guidance/homicide-murder-and-manslaughter
We must I think agree to disagree on this one, you make a good argument but my experience has been different. Anyway I am right I tell you and if you keep on disagreeing with me I will stamp my foot 🙂
We all see things differently and that’s the beauty of life. We both appear to have been ‘inside’ the judicial system to some extent, in my case as a somewhat neutral observer and have formed our views based on our experiences. No worries. Where I will agree with you is that the CPS has by becoming a de facto part of the civil service suffered from many of the troubles associated with the civil service. It may be better and more fair and honest than the old system where senior plod did the prosecution but it still has its problems.
Yes, Roy, but even with having left the EU there is no way we could bring in again a death sentence for crimes defined as cold blooded murder. It’s also arguable if our murder rate could be reduced by people knowing they would be hanged for it?
Fair comment but with ever rising levels of violence in our society accompanied by an ever rising number of deaths resulting from criminal act it’s reasonable to say our system is failing and needs amending.
I don’t know, I have studied social history quite a bit in recent years, both from a family genealogy perspective and also about the areas they were living in. Theft, violent assaults, fraud, rape, and the occasional murder etc have always been with us for decades, and yet we have a perception now the UK was once a peaceful law abiding society and criminality was introduced by immigrants? So far from the truth?
You do understand that a lot of crimes are in fact committed by immigrants don’t you? They are not really pilgrims visiting the country as many seem to think. UK has never been a paradise but we used to be allowed to defend ourselves and reported crime is far from the real truth. Our police will do almost anything to avoid recording a crime because that keeps recorded crime numbers down. In the real world it’s very very difficult to get anything recorded and many don’t bother to report crime anymore.