A senior police officer is attacking changes to the law by government ministers-
A CHIEF constable launched a stunning assault last night on the government's criminal justice policy, accusing ministers of making it up to please the News of the World [ed- tabloid newspaper].
Reeling from a string of crises, the Home Office disclosed at the weekend that ministers are now studying a law that could allow English parents to know when a convicted sex offender was living nearby.
Of course it doesn't even occur to the cop that the fact that the papers are crying out about this sort of thing is because parents don't want paedophiles living near to them. I guess he'd rather the government ignored public opinion? The News of the World has actually been campaigning for a change to the law for six years, proposing that parents should be allowed to know the location of child abusers. Given that many of these scum are likely to offend again and shouldn't be out on the streets anyway, I can't see any reason to oppose such a law. So it makes life tough for them to find housing? Maybe they should have thought about that before they began abusing children.
And it was the News of the World that revealed that sixty sex offenders were placed in government-approved hostels overlooking schools. And then there's this-
The latest controversy comes on the back of a new Ofsted report which accuses many schools of ignoring checks designed to protect children from paedophiles.
The cop is complaining that his job is tough because of constant changes to policy coming from the Home Office. My advice to him is to suck it up- hopefully many more changes will be coming soon.
The Home Office has insisted that Mr Reid was "rebalancing the criminal justice system in favour of the victim" and had already announced several reviews to improve public protection.
About time too.
2 comments:
I read it slightly differently. I thought that he was objecting to the laws been created due to pressure from the newspaper. If the laws were made after careful consideration and review then it was business as usual. Blair has often said, when it suits him, that we can't govern by media.
The government frequently makes an absolute shambles of new laws when they follow "careful consideration"; perhaps a bit of public pressure to make them introduce laws that the people of Britain actually want (as opposed to what the government thinks we need) is just the thing we require right now.
I'm not a huge fan of media-induced laws (Britain's gun laws are a prime example) but if it wasn't for media attention the government wouldn't be doing a thing about child abusers working in schools, or illegal immigrants being released from prison instead of kicked out of the country, etc, etc. Seems to me that the government will only take action in a lot of cases when there is a public outcry- instead of them ensuring that those laws are implemented on the first place. If they don't get caught by the press in many cases, they won't do a damn thing.
That cop can complain about the UK not having a strategy to deal with sex offenders all he wants- but if a bit of public outrage is going to make the government stop putting child abusers next door to, or even in, schools, he can shove his "strategy". I'd rather have children protected from that kind of threat NOW, even if it means he has to do a bit extra work.
Seems to me that the only strategy this country needs for dealing with child abusers is to lock them up and throw away the key. How many times do we have to hear about some awful crime being committed by a "convicted sex offender" before the message gets through that these people have forfeited their place in our society?
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