Review: Perverting the Course of Justice

I live in Cop-land. Just about every third person in my street is a retired police officer. There's an ex-DCI living down the road as well. The woman in the pet shop has a brother who's in armed response*, and hangs around there sometimes when he's off-duty. I bring this up because every one, every single one, will talk at length about how their chosen profession is, for lack of a better word, fucked. The retired ones will similarly go on about how things used to be better in the old days, and so on. I don't think I ever realised quite how right they are.
Which is all a long-winded way of saying that I finished reading Perverting the Course of Justice, the book written by police blogger Inspector Gadget. If you want to skip the rest of this review: it's good. It's very good indeed. It's presented in a kind of anecdotal style, with short vignettes strung together by theme (including some of the best blog posts recycled), which works very well; it makes it flow nicely. They range from the ones with a distinct sense of black humour, to the shocking, to the tragic. Put together, they form a very good book and a damning expose of modern policing in Britain.
I should explain that a bit more. I read Wasting Police Time, the book written by PC David Copperfield, but at the time I didn't quite grasp exactly how broken the criminal justice system is in this country. Most of what I remember from Wasting Police Time I wasn't surprised to learn; mostly about police forces messing with Detections in order to keep their statistics good, which is easy to dismiss as typical bureaucratic stuff. Not that I didn't like Wasting Police Time, mind, but I think Perverting the Course of Justice gets the point across better. What stuck with me most was the part about assaulting police; these days it seems increasingly unlikely you'll face much in the way of serious consequences, unless someone gets seriously injured in the process. Which brings me to another anecdote.
I have limited experience of crime, here in my rarefied suburban area. Aside from being mugging targets on the way to the station because we were loaded down with expensive gadgets, my schoolmates weren't either, back in the day. What little perspective I have comes from my family; both my parents come from a working-class background, and in my extended family there's a fair portion of, well, scum. My uncle, now dead, was into drugs, burglaries, armed robberies and heavy stuff like that for pretty much his whole life, and it wasn't uncommon when my mum was growing up to have the CID turning the tenement building upside-down because he'd escaped from prison or a Young Offenders' Institute. What I'm getting at was that even he and his mates, proper villains if the family account is to be believed, would have thought twice about getting into a full-on fight with the police. Not that they never did, necessarily, but at least then there tended to be consequences.
Anyway, that's just one part and I'm sure there are other parts that different readers will find have more of an impact. Regardless. Being an unwashed lefty-liberal-type, I don't always agree with the politics in the book (though I suspect Gadget and I share a hatred for New Labour and its policies), but it's hard to argue with most of it, largely because Gadget seems possessed of a preternaturally large amount of common sense, especially when it comes to things like actually arresting criminals, as opposed to the various and sundry functions police seem to be having to do at the moment.

Not the blogger. Probably.

So being as how this is a review, I should probably try and come up with some actual criticism, as opposed to just fawning. 'Liberal elite' - this phrase is bollocks, but that's another, more detailed, blog post. And I don't like the cover, if I'm honest. Also, Gadget seems a little too quick to dismiss the excesses of the police in the past. And about the whole racism thing. I think there's a middle ground here. I don't believe that the police is one big 'institutionally-racist' organisation, staffed with BNP members, who get their kicks out of randomly oppressing ethnic minorities. But then I'm not sure I believe that every officer is sweetness-and-light and tolerance personified, either. Which is about the same as any organisation, really. Mostly good people, some not. Aside from that? Hmm. Really, that's about all I don't like. It's well-written, exceptionally so in fact, and I highly recommend it, because even if you are part of the Liberal Elite, it makes a damn good case**. It's £7.99, probably less from Amazon, and well worth it. Go! Read! Be outraged!
Next on my reading list is the Qur'an (I only got halfway through it before). I suspect it'll be quite a change in tone. Just don't ask me to do a review of that, there'll be mass protests. Although, I could use the publicity. Hmm...
*I know this because I was just on my way in to have this chair leg repaired, and... What, too soon?
**I'm sorry, fellow revolutionaries. I tried hard to hate it, I really did. I was ready to denounce the book and slander its author as tools of capitalist oppression and everything.

Irreverence: The Clash - I Fought The Law, Morrissey - The More You Ignore Me, The Closer I Get