Keith Hellawell: The dangers we all face now Police cannot think for themselves

Daily Mail

This has been a difficult week for West Midlands police. It is rare for public servants to be sued for libel, and the High Court apology the force gave to Channel 4and the Dispatches programme was both humiliating and unprecedented.

For all its unique features, however, this case is symptomatic of a broader set of failings: a loss of nerve, a warped sense of priorities and, in particular, a culture of weak-minded politicisation that should concern us all.

Undercover Mosque, the edition of Dispatches at the heart of the legal case, made disturbing viewing.

Broadcast in January last year, it showed clerics at mainstream mosques making extreme and inflammatory statements, advocating the murder of homosexuals, for example, and praising the killer of a British soldier in Afghanistan.

Yet, instead of lauding the programme makers for their careful and enterprising work, West Midlands police said Channel 4 should be prosecuted for stirring up racial hatred.

They accused Dispatches of deliberately distorting the views of the clerics through misleading editing and, when their own investigations foundered, they complained to the broadcasting regulator Ofcom.

The whole sorry episode reached its conclusion on Friday with a joint apology from the police and the Crown Prosecution Service, and a promise to pay £100,000 - out of public funds, presumably. They had no evidence to support their case.

Such an astonishing lack of judgment is difficult to comprehend, perhaps, but it is by no means unusual. Police forces around the country grow ever more bizarre in their decisions on who and what to prosecute, leaving the public angry and confused.

How can it be, for example, that prominent figures from the worlds of art and fashion seem immune from prosecution despite clear evidence of drug-taking, while unassuming office workers are dragged through the courts for dropping an apple core or placing the wrong piece of rubbish in the wrong bin?

Why do complaints from ethnic minorities appear to be given so much more attention than those from the majority?

Why do police forces take action against parents who shout at their children while refusing to act in cases where property has been damaged by fully grown adults?

As a former police officer of 36 years experience, who worked my way up through the ranks to become Chief Constable of Cleveland and then West Yorkshire, later becoming "drugs tsar" for the Government, I am disturbed by what I see around me.

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