There’s a long preview of Brian Paddick’s autobiography Line of Fire in today’s Mail on Sunday. The book will, the article says, “offer an insight into police culture and practice – from the era of Life On Mars to the era of the suicide bomber.”

Paddick is, of course, the Liberal Democrats’ candidate for Mayor in May’s London elections. His thirty years in the police force make him the ideal person to lead the fight against crime in London, and those three decades of experience are charted in his book, from the Brixton riots to the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes. Here’s a morsel from the Mail:

Whenever I went out on night patrol with one particular pandacar driver, the first stop was the “tube station” – the off-licence.

We would buy a couple of “tubes” of Foster’s lager which we stowed under the front passenger seat. We would wait for a lull, go to Kentucky Fried Chicken and then sit in the car eating and drinking lager.

In those days the unofficial policy was to try to avoid arresting people for drink-driving – because police were drink-driving themselves.

Line of Fire is released on March 25th.

As today is National Poetry time
All my posts will be written in rhyme
Or at least semi-rhyming with a variable meter,
With one proper poem being posted up here later.

The Knock

Knock! Knock! Knock! on the front door of my flat
I woke up with a start thinking “Who the hell is that?”
Outside it was dark so I had something of a fright
I’d not before been knocked up in the middle of the night

The rapping was persistent so I got something to wear
And peered out through the spyhole to spy out who was there
I saw two burly polis from the Central Scotland belt
At least my dressing gown lacked a collar to be felt

I greeted them and listened, frown etched upon my face
As they told me they’d been called about a ruckus at my place
It was half an hour to midnight I gleaned from the one less burlier
I explained that I’d been sleeping for the sixty minutes earlier

They checked the address from the call that they’d received
And although it surely was mine, they rightly both believed
That there had been no disturbance and still, standing in the hall,
They checked the caller’s number; I hadn’t made the call

All of us were puzzled but prepared to leave it there
We said polite goodnights and they headed down the stair
My early night disrupted, I headed back to bed
With plots, pranks and conspiracies whirling through my head
Relieved that I hadn’t been served with some indictment
But struggling to get to sleep after the excitement

The lead story in today’s theguardian reports that the Government is planning to introduce relatively low limits defining what is considered “possession” of illegal drugs and what is “intent to supply”.

I’m not a lawyer so was a little confused when the article said

When the ACMD’s technical committee considered the issue in April, it was pointed out that even Sir Ian Blair, the Metropolitan police commissioner, had misunderstood the proposals: “Many people still think that the provisions are about setting levels that are reasonable for personal us,e and that if they are caught with amounts below the thresholds they will not be arrested for possession with intent to supply. The reality is contrary to this.”

but didn’t clarify the matter. I’m not sure whether the courts will be required to find someone guilty of dealing if the drugs they are caught with are more than the limit or whether it is simply a guideline to prosecutors, although it sounds like the latter.

Either way, it’s a recipe for wasting police time, CPS time and judicial time prosecuting for dealing people who have drugs for personal use – time that could be spent pursuing, you know, actual drug dealers. It sounds like a backdoor route to banging up more people for possession, by treating them as dealers even if they’re not. In an ideal world, sentencing guidelines shouldn’t depend on the prison population, but joined-up government means this has to be taken into account to: sending more people to prison for drug posession isn’t going to help the overcrowding crisis.

I don’t know about this sort of thing, of course, but a limit of “enough cannabis for 10-20 joints” sounds rather small; is anyone with a couple of packets of fags automatically selling on the black market? This doesn’t tally with the view of the Advisory Committee on the Misuse of Drugs who know a thing or two about this issue.

The proposed thresholds are so low that the advisory committee, which discussed the issue on May 25, is believed to have warned the Home Office that they would cause policing problems. The committee suggested the cannabis threshold should be set at 28g, or 1oz. The experts also told ministers that the five tablet limit for ecstasy was low – given that they can be bought for 50p each in some areas, and some users take up to 10 in one session.

In other drugs news, the police have smashed a cocaine ring in Kent – and, unlike the Forest Gate raid, it seems they actually found something. Good for them. What caught my eye was that the bust was called Operation Alpington and is a spin-off from Operation Anuric. I’ve often idly wondered where such operations get their names. Alpington appears to be a village in Norfolk; anuric means unable to urinate. Is that a side effect of cocaine then?