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The Police Ping-Pong
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recently became aware that money had been stolen from me. It was confirmed to me some days ago. I decided to report this to the authorities; failing to do so may result in any remaining money vanishing from the thieves’ account. The video above does not go into the details of the case (like this series about Sirius ‘Open Source’); instead it explains how the police handles the report.

Sadly, even in 2023 the police is looking for ‘low-grade’ thugs and people it can apprehend in the streets, not business people that it can arrest at their office. The police believes and trusts money. Culture is very much the same. “I saw X on TV, X is not in prison, hence X is probably innocent” is false logic when it comes to high-profile people, who rarely get arrested because they simply “own” the system and have expensive lawyers.

Cops are good at arresting poor people, whom they deem rather defenseless and easier to convict. But this leads to a sense of helplessness for victims of crime where the perpetrator is rich and powerful. Sometimes the cops are almost making them feel “guilty” for reporting white-collar crime because this “wastes time”; it’s not a simple physical job like arresting a person after forcibly knocking that person to the ground, based on nothing at all; I saw that done by a cop from my window just months ago… attacking an innocent bystander and then arresting him for apparently nothing. I wish I had this recorded. I wanted to report this (yes, reporting cops’ misbehaviour to the police itself), but I could not find suitable contacts.

My deep cynicism about cops isn’t new and it was the result of experiences that I covered here before. It ranges from tactless to truly irresponsible. For instance, their failure to despatch people to deal with an actual crime likely resulted in the perpetrators proceeding to yet more crimes. Basically they don’t help when it’s truly needed and I’ve experienced this firsthand, it’s not based on hearsay. This scenario is unacceptable; it’s very frustrating and disappointing because we pay them! We pay their salaries and their performance (or returns to us) does not seem to matter much.

In the above video what I have is the police (on the line) passing me from one person to another person and then the police asking me to phone the police. There’s also a barrier which serves to keep out the poor (no access to police) due to financial constraints. Think along the lines of, “too poor to report the crime”…

They’re taking advantage of that; they’re making poverty a curse and wealth a prerequisite for “access to cops”.

The crime that I reported to them is a real crime and not very outlandish. But this sort of scenario is not in the ‘script’, so they pass me on and on; passing from one colleague to another colleague is a hallmark of incompetence — the thing I experienced in the past. And just like cyberattacks 15+ years ago, these people don’t know what I’m talking about. They’re trained to just deal with very basic things; yes, they listen, but they do not actually solve crimes and punish the perpetrators.

What kind of system is this? Towards the end it feels like they convery a message like, “get off the line, you’re too poor to matter to us, your taxpayer-funded police is there to guard the rich and powerful” (and you’re not important enough).

We’re going round and round and they look for excuses to dismiss or redirect the report. For instance, they cannot refer me to the suitably-trained division (like they’re different “companies”). Why should I phone people in the City of London to report a trivial case of theft?

What if I was poor, confused, insecure, shy, confused/traumatised and barely literate? Being eloquent isn’t enough either, as confidence isn’t the same as wealth or “importance”.

Anyway, this time (for the first time) I documented my experience with the police in the form of audio.

It’s a problem not unique to the UK. As a friend reminded me this morning: “Louis Rossmann has started a series on trying to get some state agency to clarify or fix its records. The process goes beyond byzantine and is really more Kafkaesque. It’s not that the New York state is so clueless that the left hand does not know what the right hand is doing, the individual hands don’t even know themselves what they are doing. The recordings he provides are really strange and if they are in anyway representative of the population then the US has collapsed already…“

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This entry was posted on Thursday, March 9th, 2023 at 3:13 pm and is filed under Personal, Rant. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.