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Ian Blair is resigning
BillieTheBot
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If that is true, and hereby withdraw all the bad things I've said about Boris and will buy him a pint if I ever bump into him.
He was not popular with the media or the public very much but he did his job which is to reduce crime and he did it well.
If he resigned every time someone thought he should resign he would have been gone years ago and someone else would have had to resign over De Menezes and someone else would be resigning now.
Resignations of policemen do not fix situations they simply put someone else in the firing line next time there is an almighty fuckup.
He was not perfect, but he did a good job.
I myself prefer the more traditional approach to such situations: namely that the person ultimately in charge of something that goes disastrously wrong, and who, to add insult to injury, made things worse by feeding false information and refusing to acknowledge the mistake instead of apologising, should do the honourable thing and resign- or be made to.
Blair should count himself lucky he's not in any one of a number of countries in the Continent and elsewhere, where he would have likely faced charges of manslaughter for the De Menezes atrocity.
Then is the issue of ethnic minority officer after officer reporting racist bullying while he presided over all of it.
The tradtitional approach is anyone who makes a mistake should resign gets us nowhere, how would anyone get anywhere without making mistakes?
I am glad someone who actually had an opinion and the balls to come out with it was in charge of the police and not some sock puppet assbrain.
On the continent they are held accountable for mistakes like manslaughter etc - but police corruption runs so deep in some parts of europe its barely a police force anymore - take the Berlin police force with an anti corruption office bigger than the police force itself!
He may have given his friend some contracts which is a small part abusing his position, but its a petty crime compared to what MP's steal from us every day - 80k for 'research' done by a 20 year old student for example - which is out and out theft.
He also got senior coppers being suspended. Again, if you decide to brief the media against your boss you need to go. But the fact it went that far shows that Blair couldn't manage a toothpick.
He was handpicked by Labour as he made all the right sounds. It was an attempt to politicalise the peelers to make them lapdogs of the Labour Government. It failed.
So he expects us to believe that he's being forced out by a bunch of Tories in city hall. Very appropriate coming from Jacqui Smith's puppet, but it doesn't fool anyone. As much as I like Boris Johnson and am impressed by his performance as London mayor, I suspect that this story in the Daily Mail had something to do with it. A waste of money if ever there was! And a certain race discrimination lawsuit by the disgraceful Tarique Ghaffur doesn't exactly help his case either. Like his namesake Tony, Ian is a loser who failed to realise that his time was up years ago. He won't be missed.
Plus there was the other raid where a shot was fired by mistake, and on the day of the report into the shooting the Police just happened to arrest the completely innocent men of having child porn.
The way the Police in London have repeatedly briefed the press against people they have wronged has been despicable.
Personally I want the head of North Wales Police to get the job, but he's too much of an outsider.
Exactly, there have been a long list of situations like this which doesnt show that Blair had good (any?) management control over his own force.
That seems to be different from using peelers to be cheerleaders for a particular piece of legislation...