Can there be any going back now we are in a hi-viz world?

There is freezing fog outside in Nottingham as I write this last blog post of 2008.

Earlier Bent Society blogs on hi viz culture have revealed that offenders as well as police officers are wearing hi viz jackets as a matter of routine. Now that police officers are all wearing hi-viz jackets that make them pretty hard to tell apart from binmen, traffic wardens and scaffolders - to name just a few of those who wear hi-viz clothing on a daily basis - can there ever be any going back?

What if the police were once again required to dress in navy blue rather than bright yellow and then one of them was run over on a foggy day? The lawyers would sue and no doubt win on the grounds that it was reckless or negligent to make these officers less visible.

But what do we know about the safety effects of hi viz clothing?

Well we know for sure that there were a huge number of pedestrian fatalities during the blackout period during the Second World War in the UK. More than 600 per a month were killed by vehicles during the blackout - a doubling of the death toll from before the war. This makes a compelling case for the promotion of hi-viz clothing as a way to reduce pedestrian and motor car collisions.

In the 1960's I was forced by my mother to have to wear bright orange plastic armbands over my gabardine coat on my short walk to school in the dark. This Nottingham resident remembers the same childhood humiliation:

"I was at primary school in the 60s. We were issued with bright orange armbands, which we hated and had to wear during the double daylight saving experiment."

In criminal courts it is important to explain the dangers of relying upon eyewitness testimony. Hunters, for example, have been known to shoot one another. The reason for that is because they are looking for deer and even when the thing in their sights is a man - they see a deer. Now they tend to wear hi-viz jackets - after all whoever saw a deer wearing fluorescent clothing? If someone is racially prejudice then they may see that the person amongst a group of strangers who had a knife was black - even when in fact it was the white man beside him who actually had it.This is because we interpret what we see with the brain - in reality we understand what we "see" with our brains rather than our eyes.

Possible Sensory Overload and Scofflaw Effects of Kidology Need to be Evaluated

I took the picture above and the one below at Nottingham's Caribbean festival in 2007.

How do we know whether or not putting too much hi-viz clothing into the environment will lead people to begin to ignore it all? How do we know whether or not putting dummy children besides zebra crossings outside schools will lead motorists to assume that real children are not real and so drive with less care than before this measure was introduced? We don't - and so we need to evaluate these measures.

Today, I took the two pictures below in Nottingham's Mapperley Top district just as the fog was clearing at around 1pm.

Where the marketing and distribution of medicine is concerned we are required by law to ensure that medicinal products are not only efficacious but also that they do not do more harm than good. Why on Earth is the same standard not required in other areas of social policy where lives and limbs are at risk?


End the quackery in crime reduction and other areas of social policy in 2009!

Robin

Preachers of Giant Lies Condemn Government For Immoral Economy

Immoral Government Promotes Immoral Economy

Bishops have criticised the government for not focusing on tackling poverty with some accusing it of moral failure in a Sunday Telegraph feature.

"Five bishops have publicly criticised Labour's economic policy with some questioning its morality.In separate interviews with the Sunday Telegraph, the bishops of Winchester, Carlisle, Durham, Hulme and Manchester also expressed concern over the level of poverty and the state of the family in the country.Bishop of Hulme Rt Rev Stephen Lowe said he was concerned by the level of debt accumulated by families and said the government's urging of consumers to spend and boost the economy would be counterproductive.He told the paper:

"The government isn't telling people who are already deep in debt to stop overextending themselves, but instead is urging us to spend more."That is morally suspect and morally feeble. It is unfair and irresponsible of the government to put pressure on the public to spend in order to revive the economy."

Meanwhile here on the Bent Society Blog we've been writing EXACTLY this regularly for the past 18 months in our debtmonger series of posts

It's all very well the church calling it like it is - but given that faith based religion is nothing but a giant insane and bent con trick perhaps these bishops need to first consider whether part of the reason that New Labour politicians encourage church going is so that people - who can be conditioned and groomed to believe in an all powerful all seeing and omnipotent man in the sky who nevertheless always needs more of their money - will believe their own ridiculous and transparent lies. Let those Bishops who are without sin throw the first stone!

The above caption is from Lobbydog and is the winner of our second 2008 Xmas card caption contest. Most fitting I think. And in case you still have doubts about the Turtuffian bentness of the Church of England check out this story from GrumpyOldSod.

Bent Society!

Robin

Is Nottingham Crap? If so who is to blame? The Citizens? Nottingham City Council?

Yachtingham Revisited

In 2009 Nottingham City Council - keen they say to turn Nottingham into a European city of culture - are once again spending well over £75,000 of tax payer money to party on a yacht in the South of France under the pretence that they wish to woo property developers to invest in the city.

A Miracle: Nottingham City Council Turn Tax Revenue into Personal Party Money

And yet they cannot even be bothered to spend any of what is now treated as their personal petty cash party Riviera yacht holiday money to repair the new cobble stoned square that they vandalised with drills and then slapped tarmac over more than 9 months ago. So much then for wanting Nottingham to be a European city of culture as apposed to a patchy tarmac hovel that smells of so much urine and where even the city police cannot be bothered to clean up vomit on their own steps.

Perhaps the mendacious liar Mandelson holds the answer. Because when The Observer Newspaper's Tim Adams (2008) asked Mandelson about those lies he told about being on that Russian Billionaires yacht some truth may have inadvertently been revealed:

Adams asks: "What about his [Mandelson's] own association [in scandal] though? Many of the current problems, I suggest, look like a direct result of Labour's goggle-eyed attachment to big business, and yacht owners. Does Mandelson regret now saying that ' we are intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich?'

Mandelson replies: " I was making the point... that New Labour was not about envy and spite towards those who were well off. It was important to say it and to demonstrate it, but I always added 'as long as people pay their taxes.'"

So there you have it, Nottingham City Council have followed New labour's lead as far as being seduced by yachts is concerned (which supports the Bent Society hypothesis - that shit at the top of the waterfall pollutes everything downstream) but they misunderstood the "as long as they pay taxes" bit. Because Mandelson meant so long as the millionaires pay their taxes. Nottingham city council wrongly think they are entitled to party on a 100 foot, £5 million yacht so long as Nottingham's citizens pay their community charge taxes to fund corrupt city council officials enjoying party shenanigans on this floating gin palace. How bent is that?

Bent Society

References

Adams, T. (2008) They made the News in 2008. Observer. 21.12.08. pp. 4-5.

Help - I need a correct diagnosis!

a Wench's Monday Blog 22/12/08

Are Medical Fearmongers Cashing in on People Online? Should there be Another New Law Against this too? Is Regulation Required?

I don’t want to insert a downer here, Christmas in a few days time and all that, but I’m suffering the depressive aftermath of flu (or a bad cold, depending on how callous and unsympathetic you are). I’m in the mood to believe, with congestive, phlegmatic sullenness rather than feverish excitement, yesterday’s Daily Telegraph story ‘Britain gripped by worst flu outbreak since 2000’. Hang on a minute – wasn’t 2000 only 7 years ago? Never mind, I genuinely have a headache and can’t be bothered.

Or is it just a headache? Couldn’t it be an aneurysmal subarachnoid hemorrhage? Combined with a painful neck, it might signal the onset of temporal arteritis. Without the rash and the temperature, it is unlikely to be meningitis but Erve virus is always a possibility.

You can tell, can’t you! I’ve been looking up symptoms on the Internet again. This widespread practice has been dubbed Cyberchondria and people like Koehler speculate that it is: ‘...frequently a symptom of an anxiety disorder or depression... [that] develops in the twenties or thirties and often follows the illness of a close family member or friend’.

Time for another reality check – isn’t everyone with access to broadband a budding cyberchondriac? Isn’t this one of the most normal of all normal things to be in 21st century Britain. Oh well - in the absence of medical validation, a self-diagnosed psychiatric label will have to do.
Most people I know, when they suffer a new or unfamiliar medical symptom will head straight to the web to check it out. Their concern extends also to the symptoms of family members and friends and need not be about trivial stuff. For instance, an Internet checklist gave me the confirmation that I needed to march my husband off to the doctors for an early diagnosis of Type II Diabetes.

But there is, I have to reluctantly admit, a darker side to freely available medical information on the Web. When I woke up at 3am this morning with a sudden and severe throbbing headache, it was most likely caused by ‘sleeping funny’ on a twisted neck and lingering flu damage. All I wanted was to sit up for a short while and find some simple advice on how to get back to sleep quickly: hot towel to the spine; couple of paracetamol? I swear, I didn’t even consider neurosurgery for the first 15 minutes. The observant amongst you will be asking just how bad a headache it could have been, if I was able to cope with screen glare for a whole 15 minutes. What can I say, you get sucked in and, alright, obsession might not be too strong a word for it.

There are several things that I noticed. The first is that the NHS-Direct site is deliberately low-key – but it doesn’t satisfy. You get the feeling that they really, really don’t want to spend money on CAT-scanning people if they can get away with it. In contrast, the likes of BUPA, Merck, and MayoClinic don’t shy away from the worst case scenario. They start with the scariest diseases first and work, very slowly, down to sniffles as the least likely explanation. You want magnetic resonance imaging, they’ve got it with knobs on. The third thing is the sizeable cyberchondriac community that is, ironically, alive and well and thriving on the Internet – there’s a market out there and someone’s got to corner it.

There is an interesting discussion thread, entitled ‘Is it dangerous to look up medical symptoms on the Internet?’ Here are some of the comments:

• Really got myself in a pickle once thinking I had bowel cancer when I think I actually had bleeding piles
• Regardless of my symptoms i always ended up on a page about some form of Cancer
• I always seemed to get HIV when I looked up my symptoms
• I currently have meningitis and MRSA (oh, okay ... i do have a headache, a rash and a blister).

And my favourite, demonstrating heroic self- awareness:

• Like many others I have often done it and every time I always say to myself "you stupid bloody idiot, don’t do it again."

It’s a case of Robin’s punterization at work again, I feel. A few weeks ago, members of the Bent Society crew were self-medicating in a Nottingham hostelry and discussing the need for regulation of healthcare information posted on the Internet. This would not affect individuals in private support groups, but there is a definite case for organizations (especially those that make profits out of healthcare provision) to be held responsible for the content they provide and the format that it takes.

a Wench

The Absolute Shame of Our Government's Involvement

This is a Disgrace in Our Time.

End it in 2009!

"True peace is not merely

the absence of tension,

it is the presence of justice"

Martin Luther King

What's in a Word? Can One Word Help to Make a World of Difference? Spread the Word. Punterisation or Punterization in Bent Society

In 2008 on Bent Society we invented a word that helps define a concept of modern life


Punterisation is a word that has its origins here on Bent Society.

Engaging with the public in criminology, our discussions and comments and posts all generated this word this year and helped us to work out what we mean when we use it.

To be punterised is to be treated by others as "a dipstick" as a problem and inferior person who is to be fobbed off with lies, half baked excuses and treated as a second rate person.

• One might be punterised by pubs that serve you a very expensive round of drinks and then 15 minute later send in a team of Hi-Viz jacketed and jacked-up bouncers to harass you every 3 minutes until you leave (thanks for that one to Langtree's pub in Nottingham city centre - now you will be famous for your customer service) .


• We might be punterised in the way we are treated by call centre staff - and indeed the way the staff at call centres are treated by their employers - (thanks to Soapsoane for the blog post on that one).


• We are punterised by our government's disingenuous behavior - their excuses for war, their short-term political vote seeking that causes long term social harms, their blatant lies (thanks to Tony "Formula 1 Cancermonger" Blair for that one).


• We are punterised by the UK Government that encouraged rampant borrowing and lending and gambling and then encourages more of the same to get the nation out of the economic meltdown, which was caused by exactly that (thanks to Gordon "Borrower" Brown and his Darling Chancellor for that one).


• Those who are less well off, less articulate and not versed in the subtle ways of the middle-classes may be punterised in terms of the information, explanations, treatments, choices and services they are offered by civil servants, health and social care professionals.

I have no doubt that our dictionaries will one day include the words "Punterisation" and "Punterised" and no doubt our American cousins will want to spell them with a Z rather than an "S" - and that is fine by me.

How have you been punterised in 2008? Who did you punterize yourself?

Today - taking text from Soapsoane's comment to last night's post, here is a poem that seeks to tell how punterisation of the poor continues to haunt their waking lives with Dickensian and Kafkaesque nightmares:


'To understand the issues
Bent offers us the floor
and adults (most) from Nottingham
tap out our keyboard groan

We file our pleas and insights(thinking passion is our own)
When really all we're looking for
is time and space to moan.

What is it that we talk about amid the legal haze?
Is it life outside the prisons
or time spent marking lives?

Do we really like to listen or are we really just afraid
of doing what we say we think without our drug or drink?

The chorus of the weary folk is that they're battered down
The versus of the vice is to join and beat them up

So really, here's my question

It's prisons that we make
The way we pin kids up and down remain our biggest crime.'

*******

What do you think?
We brutalise and turn our blind eyes to the sun we feel is ours

By Soapsoane (2008)

******

Can we have liberty for all in a bent society?

With this word punterised I hope that we may have gone one very small step further to empowering those who are treated as second-class citizens to make others stop and assess what they are doing by giving them the ability to say something quite socially profound: "Do you realise you are punterising me?" "Stop punterising me!".

SO PLEASE GO FORTH AND SPREAD THE WORD: Punterization.

Robin

Postscript 21.45pm 17 December

Entering punterization, punterisation gets just four hits on Google and they all come back to us and our ferret on the Daily Telegraph blog - Innit. My research reveals that in fact the word has been used a couple of times earlier in reference to such odd things as crags in New Zealand - although I never knew this when first using it . However, we are the first people to use it and explain what we actually mean by it. Great word "Punterization" and to be "punterised" - has its origins in the word "punter" as in mug-punter ..gambler and loser user of prostitutes etc.

Who Cares About Who Does What to Whom? Does Our Government Care?

Reflections Upon The Economy, Crime and the Criminal Justice System's Inadequately Slow Response to New Trends in Offending Behaviours.

Officially recorded police crime statistics and national crime survey data such as that coming from the British Crime Survey all generally assume that there is a degree of permanence about crime - so that we can for example compare crime figures from today with the same time last year - ten years ago - next year... or whatever.

But what such data do not record or tell us is the specific way that crime occurs and who does what to whom. For example, simply recording offences of violence will not distinguish between domestic violence and other assaults in the street. And official statistics on fraud will not distinguish between the white collar embezzler at work and the Internet facilitated offender who buys goods with your stolen credit card details. The British Crime Survey and other Government crime surveys may at odd times include a set of questions on more detailed offending such as fraud or drug use but these are most certainly not conducted on a regular basis at all.

I was forced to ponder this fact on reading The General Blog Of Crimes excellent post on this subject today.

The author of that excellent blog post points out that domestic violence appears to be rising in the USA in the economic recession. This is important because it is most likely that overall violence levels will go down and theft levels rise in a recession.

This is what I wrote as a comment on the General Blog of Crime site today:

1 comments:

Bent Society said...

Excellent blog post.And this just goes to show the importance of asking the "how" were you the victim of violence (or any other crime) rather than simply collecting crime statistics by legal (statutory) offence type.

Research by Simon Field (see here for full details and an expose exclusive:

http://bentsocietyblog.blogspot.com/2008/10/has-new-labour-spin-corrupted-home.html

Shows that violent crime (overall) goes down during an economic recession and up during a boom. This has an inverse relationship with acquisitive crime.

But what you just proved is the need to understand the dynamics as well as the offence category - the who does what to whom, where, when, why in what way, and with what effect. Armed with that information it is possible to fine tune crime reduction solutions to specific crime-trend problems in specific places at specific points in time.

Robin
December 16, 2008 1:21 PM

And so there you have it: what goes on behind closed doors is going to get more ugly and violent during this recession, while what goes on outside should become more peaceable with a move away from violence while theft levels rise. I hope the police are using foresight to gear up and target their resources accordingly. What about the Home Office and our community safety partnerships? Are they fine tuning how they spend our scarce crime reduction resources accordingly?

Nah! Because that would mean there was no more quackery in crime reduction. And for some strange reason our current Government thinks such quackery is acceptable.

Robin

The Shaming of Topspot Promotions

Gamblingmongers Email Bent Society

> Date: Sun, 14 Dec 2008 12:21:08 +0400>
To: bentsociety@hotmail.co.uk>
From: joan@topspot-promotions.com>
Subject: Advertising opportunity for bentsocietyblog.blogspot.com/>

> Dear Webmaster,>

> My name is Joan, and my company Topsot-Promotions represents online gaming sites in various domains. We are looking at reputable sites to offer them opportunities to help promote some of our clients sites. We primarily seek text advertising and blog posts.>

> For further details please don't hesitate to contact me.>
> Best,
> Joan Barkley

******

Reply to Joan Barkley by way of this Blog Post on Bent Society....

Dear Topspot Promotions

NO, WE DO NOT WISH TO PROMOTE GAMBLING AND PROFIT FROM THE MISERY OF OTHERS THANK YOU!

And I would like to see the law changed so that all nasty and parasitical problem gamblingmongers are forced to name what they do for what it actually is - gambling - and not as: "amusements", "lotto", "lottery" or "gaming"!

For further blog posts to shame you and your wormy organisation for what you do and for what you seek to do please do not hesitate to contact me again.


Robin

Thank You

Profound thanks with bells on.


We at Bent Society wish to thank everyone who has posted comments, debated issues here, emailed us and written guest blogs in the past year. .

This week we'll be raising a glass and toasting you all. Toasting a big thank you to you our regular and less regular comment posters, the readers, the critics, those who find some resonance or annoyance with what we write. We want to let you know that without you this blog would not be what it is. And on the whole, we'd like to think that is a good thing.

One of our main aims here is to facilitate the engagement of the public with criminology and this is what drives us to carry on.

So please, if you can, do keep up the comments, ideas, stories, feedback, emails and guest blogs.

You will always find some discussion along with bent revelations, insights, observations and a little bizarre humour here on Bent Society. We are the only home of Curmudgeonly Criminology.

Robin

On Your Side? What New Madness is This From Nottingham's Corrupt City Council?

A KAFKAESQUE NIGHTMARE IN NOTTINGHAM BEFORE CHRISTMAS

"We're on Your Side" And it just cost you a lot of money for us to tell all of you punters that!

When your own City Council uses poor council tax payer's money to buy themselves a luxury yacht that they keep moored in a prime spot in Cannes in the South of France then you should not be surprised when they spend even more of your money on platitudinous punterising propaganda (PPP).

The latest PPP to come out of our taxes in Nottingham is yet another ridiculous new logo. How much did this one cost us? And who got the contract to produce this latest nonsense I wonder? And what is their relationship to those in the City Council who commissioned it?

You can see the punterizing logo here on Santa's sack.

It's on every single page of their latest edition of the pathetically useless, expensive, and environmentally wasteful punterizing publication The Nottingham Arrow, the unwanted junk mail that arrives once a month through all our letterboxes in Nottingham, all paid for at the tax payer's expense.! And it actually says:

"We're on Your Side"

Will this Kafkaesque nightmare never end?

The telling question here is this: Why on Earth should Nottingham City Council need a logo to tell it's own citizens that it is on their side - unless it is because people think otherwise? And why would the good people of Nottingham do that without good cause?

You really could not make this up. This punterising lunacy cannot continue.

We are gathering information and placing it forever in the public domain.

And we are not alone in our endeavours: see http://ncclols.blogspot.com/

In fact there are now several Nottingham blogs springing up to protest against the ineptitude and corruption that is ruining our city. See "Nottingham Blogs" towards the end (bottom) of our home page.

The time for celebrating themselves is coming to a close, for the time of intelligent and telling protest in the streets of Nottingham is near.

Robin

Goose Today, But Then What?

What's it all about Gordon?

What a Pantomine

Which way to Cloud Cuckoo Land?

It is probably appropriate that we are now entering the Pantomime season. Did you know that Angela Merkel is currently building herself a holiday cottage in the Black Forest? I’m told it has gingerbread walls, marchpane windows and hops around on chicken legs. It’s official, she’s a witch.

Merkel is known to be critical of the US and British in their handling of the economic crisis (and plans for nuclear power and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the admission of Georgia and the Ukraine into NATO and her desire for a close relationship with Russia and....). Now her evil henchman, German Finance Minister Peter Steinbrueck, has spoken out against our plucky Gordon and his plans to rescue the golden goose with a handful of magic beans.

Steinbrueck is deeply irritated that: 'The same people who would never touch deficit spending are now tossing around billions. The switch of supply-side politics all the way to a crass Keynesianism is breathtaking'. He also believes that all cutting VAT ‘will do is raise Britain's debt to a level that will take a whole generation to work off.'

But we don’t believe him, do we boys and girls? Brave Gordon will slash taxes and lower interest rates to keep us consuming, because he’d much rather we continued snacking on slices of delicious golden goose right now than tighten our belts and wait until the poor bird is able to start laying again.

Children of the Corn(market)

In Part Two of our short season of financial horror stories, I Was that Banker has a depressingly familiar tale to tell – one that he fears will become all too commonplace as the credit squeeze tightens its gnarly fingers around the throats of small businesses throughout the land.

***

My friends run a store in a small village in North Nottinghamshire, which they open every morning at 6am. They borrowed money from their Bank to buy the business and, five years later, are still with the same branch. The loan is secured against their home, their repayments are always made on time and the full amount will be repaid on schedule.

Dan and June do their banking every day, making a ten mile round trip each time (because there aren't any Banks in the countryside anymore). Pay-ins are in cash so there are no fears about cheque clearance times. Regularly, on a Wednesday morning, outgoing amounts to cover National Lottery and Cash and Carry trading need to clear their account and this can, for a few hours only, take the account above its overdraft limit. As a large pay-in is made on the same day before 3pm, the shortfall is easily covered before close of business.

The Bank Manager at their branch understood my friends’ business and was content to let things ride. But a few weeks ago he moved on and, most likely 'in the interests of improving service', was not replaced. Instead, a pool of trainee Bankers answered telephones and made decisions on whose cheques bounced and whose didn't.

After many months of pleasant understanding with their Manager, one of these children decided to get macho, bouncing three Cash and Carry cheques and the Lottery Direct Debit. Don and June only found out at 5am the next morning when they checked their balance on the internet. Before 8am, Camelot called to say that, unless they paid the due amount by immediate transfer, their machine would be switched off. Shortly afterwards, they received an urgent summons from their Cash and Carry supplier.

It is difficult to convey just how traumatic this was for Dan and June. Without the support of their Bank, the world as they knew it had been turned on its head. The following weekend was a most painful one as they reconsidered their future and consulted with their families. They considered selling the shop and were even talking about selling their house in order to pay back the loan.

On Monday, Dan called me for advice. I warned him not to shut up shop as the goodwill value of a business could vanish within days. By the time we met on the Tuesday he had had numerous discussions with the young thugs at the Bank. He was warned that, if sufficient funds were not in the account on Tuesday evening then the Wednesday’s items would be bounced again. Dan told them that if the Camelot payment was bounced a second time he would lose the franchise for the village, with the net result that his turnover would be halved. 'So what, not our problem!' was the response. It seemed like some perverse game, where the objective was to make Dan sweat.

On Tuesday, Dan was contacted by one of the few remaining grown-ups at the Bank. Someone had finally thought to contact Head Office and ask for an increased overdraft limit. Hey presto, the Wednesday morning problem had instantly vanished. I spent that afternoon and evening with Dan and June, reviewing their accounts, visiting their shop and driving round the village to assess the competition. I concluded pretty quickly that the business was sound and just needed a little fine tuning. Dan and June have implemented my suggestions and are back on track and, after a little string-pulling, will hopefully be with another Bank soon.

I Was That Banker

***

So, kind friends, as you sit around your log fires toasting your toes and roasting your chestnuts, what do you think of this Winter’s tale?

IWTBanker asks ‘why did these misfits have to start playing with people’s lives like this anyway? Just what is it about going to work for a Bank that gives these would-be Gordon Gecko's such superiority complexes that they start to lecture people who have been in business for years?’

Was it crassness, carelessness or callousness or were our young Bankers actively having spiteful fun? If we made them trade their pin-stripes for hoodies, would there be any substantive difference between them and the Chavs we all love to hate? Wouldn’t they all be out there bullying fat kids and tying fire-crackers to mongrels’ tails?

***

In Part III, tomorrow, we will have a fairy-tale for you - something about Gordon Brown and magic beans, I think... Oh, and that nasty witch from Germany!

Your Quarterly Bank Statement

a Wench’s belated blog 10/12/08

Do you think that bankers are too soft a target at the moment? Good, let’s kick them some more while they’re down. Over the next few days, we have a few fireside tales to tell you, of greed, stupidity, thuggishness and downright chavvy behaviour - all the sorts of things that we should try not to forget once Christmas is reinstated and we can afford to heat our homes again.

***

The saga of Mandy is over and I am happy to report that she will not be going to gaol. You might recall that my young friend Mandy went out one night in February to check her meagre jobseeker-level funds at her cashpoint machine. She nearly fell over backwards with shock when she saw that her balance, which should have registered a £750 overdraft, showed instead a handsome sum of over a quarter of a million quid.

She managed to convince herself that this must be the winnings alluded to in an email she had recently received, telling her that she had won a Euro lottery. She took the trouble to check her account at a few other cash machines, which all told the same story, before going on a wild spending spree. After the first flush of blood to her head had subsided, she began to consider her future and went along to her local branch of NatWest to invest some of the money and, in the end, settled on £20,000 worth of ISAs and other assorted funds, as recommended by her friendly NatWest financial advisor.

A few weeks later, she went to withdraw some more dosh, only to find all her beautiful money missing and a new overdraft of just over £79K. The bank had realised that there had been an error, grabbed the money and now set about terrorising Mandy into paying back the balance. It was at this point that she came to me for help.

A paper war commenced. The Bank’s solicitor’s sent a letter demanding a repayment plan. We responded with an exposition of the circumstances and a request for a full explanation of what had happened. They answered back with a deadline for a repayment plan. We hit back with a claim that they had been negligent, citing for good measure a fat wodge of legal jargon and some landmark legal cases. Still game as ever, they stepped back up to the mark with some of their own supporting cases and a new deadline for our settlement offer.

It wasn’t, actually, as much fun as it sounds. Mandy had such dark circles under her eyes that I considered offering her to the Panda breeding programme. Legally, we were hamstrung. We had tried to get some free legal aid but, because Mandy had £20K in investments, she wasn’t eligible. Until the bank started official proceedings and made the investments subject to dispute, no-one could help her.

I was out of my depth and the only choice we had was to get NatWest’s solicitors to make a move on her ISAs. To our complete astonishment, they just walked straight into our arms –still arguing legal precedent, they made the mistake of saying that the situation would have been different if Mandy had given the money to charity rather than spending it on herself.

Oh, thank-you, Money God.

‘We’ve got this £20K, you know. Do you want it or not because, otherwise, we’re quite happy to follow your suggestion and donate it to charity? By the way, Mandy doesn’t own any property and has no other assets. She doesn’t even earn enough in a month to pay off the overdraft interest. If you do not accept the return of these investments as full settlement, then we suggest that you continue to court. We will, of course, seek full publicity.’

It was an outside chance that they would take the offer and sensibly cut their losses. At the very worst, we would break the deadlock and make them go for the money, at which point we could call in the cavalry.

They caved, completely ... but oh so slowly. Last week we finally learned that the investments had been paid back into Mandy’s current account, which has now been closed down. Since their acceptance letter, we have received no further communication from either the bank or the solicitors (which I think is downright rude). But, unless something bizarre should crop up, Mandy is now safe.

She’s actually better than safe – she’s also debt-free. I only realised, towards the end of the saga, that not only was her spending spree written off, but so was the £750 overdraft that she started out with. Not bad in these dark days of credit crisis.

I wonder whether NatWest’s eventual decision to soft-pedal had anything to do with their own looming ‘bank error’ problems. In a sad post-script, on Friday Mandy received a tardy statement on her now non-existent investments, which had tumbled in value and were now only worth about £18k and falling.

***

Tomorrow, please stay tuned for another tale of banking woe from our favourite ex-moneylender - I Was that Banker.

a Wench

Hi Viz Criminals, Hi Vis Police: Oooer how confusing!

Hi Viz Culture

It seems that H-Viz Culture is really taking off with an offender reparation scheme "Community Payback" which is forcing offenders to wear hi-viz clothing to let everyone know they are criminals. See here for more details.

Given the penchant for hoodies in the USA and, peculiarly, in some parts of the UK to roll up one trouser leg to symbolise that they have been on a chain gang combined with the popularity of low cut-butt-revealing jeans modelled on belt-less falling-down prison garb - it will not be long now before anti-social types (besides violent Wigan Police Officers) will be wearing police-style hi viz jackets as a form of post-modern sardonic irony.

This will prove interesting.

In the past, bobbies uniforms were unique and anyone wearing one - or something very similar - who was not "police" seriously risked being charged with impersonating a police officer. But what will happen now?

Actually, it might not be all bad news. Because when it happens perhaps the criminals won't know anymore whether the person they can see approaching them from half a mile away is a police officer or a fellow delinquent.

Remember you read it on Bent Society first.

Robin

Irish Pork Poisoned With Dioxin: Industrial Sabotage?

PIGS AND LUCKY MONKEYS

Irish Police are investigating the cause of the dioxin poisoning of Irish Pork.

Good job too because high levels of dioxins cause cancer and can make a right mess of your skin as the poisoning of President Victor Yushchenko in 2004 revealed.

So far, the source of contamination is thought to be one pig feed plant in Ireland. And there are suspicions that industrial grade oil has contaminated it. Presumably Irish police are considering terrorism, industrial sabotage or criminal negligence as possible motives and crimes.

The fact that you can poison an animal that will then poison humans is frightening. But you can poison vegetables with it as well. This is scary stuff - on a council estate where I once lived many people would service their own cars and they always poured the old engine oil down the rain drains in the road - which meant it made its way into our food - via watering of crops from reservoirs and our drinking water!

Many years ago I went trout fishing in a wonderful lake in Wales. I spent the week in a remote cottage, catching both wild brown trout and rainbow trout. I enjoyed wonderful fresh trout for breakfast and supper and thought myself a lucky monkey to be the only person fishing in idyllic surroundings. So good was the fishing that several times I had my 10 lb line broken by hard fighting monster trout of, I'd guess, above 14 pounds.

Before returning home I spent some time thanking the bailiff who managed the lake. "You're lucky" he informed me "we only opened last year after the Government closed us down because all the fish and the lake was contaminated by the fall out from Chernobyl. The locals still won't fish here!"

The Curse of the Lucky Monkey Principle

Earlier Bent Society posts on this subject area develop the arguments of Professor Richard Dworkin that: Given enough time something that is remotely possible will become a statistical certainty.


Rat fleas carrying the plague, monkeys carrying HIV, nuclear fallout contaminated trout, contaminated pigs. History tells us that what can go wrong eventually will go wrong.


What would you prefer: (1) the risks from global warming caused from coal burning power plants or (2) the risks of global disaster from a nuclear generator blowing up? Or perhaps we should all move towards carbon neutral wood burning? Or is it carbon neutral?


Turns out it is - so long as you replenish the trees at the same rate as you cut them down. In which case, I'm advocating we promote cast iron wood burning stoves, sustainable forests and local firewood co-operatives. Now all we need is enough land for all those trees. But then again I reckon we'd be victimised by petty martinets in our local authorities as is happening in San Fransisco USA. You just can't win can you. Perhaps then Romanian and Russian peasants are luckier than they think?


Robin

Plane Stupid. 'Elf and Safety Eco Nutters or People of Conscience?

Hi Visibility Offending in Plane Sight!

Bent Society Newsflash - Picture above is of the Police standing around the fifty protestors at Stanstead today.

Whatever your views on the fifty "Plane Stupid" eco protesters who today chained themselves into their own portable enclosure and locked themselves up with U-Lock bicycle locks around their necks in order to protest at CO2 that will be produced by extending airports in Britain you have to admire their brains. These folks all sensibly wore hi-viz jackets that matched those worn by the police officers called to deal with them. What better way to invoke solidarity with hi-viz police officers and so help to ensure you are not treated too roughly.

I wonder how long before criminals cotton-on to this?

Are hi-viz burglars coming to a street near you soon?

Robin

The Moustache Tony: Towards a Typology of Delinquents in Public Service

Delinquents in Public Service Continues With Part Five: The Moustache Tony

Several years ago an undergraduate student at Nottingham Trent University conducted some research for his final year dissertation, which demonstrated that almost all the major and well known organised crime groups in the World had their roots in organisations that initially were established to protect the weak from predatory "others." What began as peasant protection societies evolved to persecute the very people who established them for community protection. Daniel Lydon received a first class mark for his work and he went on to work for the British Government in a certain organised crime fighting capacity. You can read his dissertation here.

While Daniel's work focused primarily upon what were formally peasant protection societies such as the Triads, IRA and Sicilian Mafia, I wonder today whether we might include local authorities within this model of corruption?

And it is these thoughts that have influenced my creation of The Moustache Tony sub-type.

The Moustache Tony "type" is derived from the old school Moustache Pete's of the Sicilian Mafia. Moustache Tonies are the type of people who would have been old-school organised crime bosses in the past but in our more modern times have found a "legal" but parasitically socially harmful niche for themselves in public office. Like all illegal organised crime "types" the Moustache Tony is a hypocritical, self-centred and greedy nasty and narcissistic, parasitical sociopath.

Moustache Tonys in public office are identified by their superior attitudes, their transparent narcissism, love of celebrities and belief in their strangely brazen sense of entitlement to live the life of a billionaire without earning it and the huge amount of totally worthless and unjustified corporate entertaining and junkets that they enjoy at the tax-payers expense.

Moustache Tonys are consummate liars!

Famous Moustache Tonys include Tony Blair. They also include the group (identified by Nottgirl in her blog "Nottingham is Crap") in Nottingham city council who are using community charge tax-payers money to buy, run, and enjoy the 100 foot Falcon yacht - Powder Monkey - in Cannes, on the Riviera Southern France under the brazenly ridiculous and laughable excuse that they bought it, fly out to it and are partying on it because they are using it to attract foreign investment into the city. In doing this the Moustache Tonies in Nottingham City Council need to be called to account for exactly what revenue this escapade is generating compared to that which it is costing the poor tax-payers. It appears here that Nottingham City Council "bosses" and "under bosses" and their "captains", "lieutenants" and the business owners and operators that they are "in bed with" are behaving within Nottingham city in exactly the same manner as organised crime bosses. What other extravagant exclusive entertainment is Nottinghamshire tax payer's money being squandered upon as these Moustache Tonys and Tonies milk the city in order to live a personal bent-billionaire fantasy lifestyle without working or paying taxes for the privilege? What other amounts of tax-payer's money they are misappropriating and on what? Is our hard earned money going also upon private jets, fancy restaurant bills, five star hotels where they bed their lovers, Champagne, caviar, Caribbean islands, fast cars, and expensive wardrobes of designer outfits?

And all the while the city is awash with crime and criminals.

Gangsters just love boats.

Tony Soprano - of the fictional but genuine Mafia informed TV series has a boat for entertaining shady guests and mistresses. Big Tony can be seen pictured here with his Italian American fictional TV family on his boat.

If you are as shocked by this story as everyone that I have mentioned it to is - then perhaps you should find out what your own local authority is spending your local taxes on?

Organised criminals are most often parasites that feed upon the weak.

Are innocent citizens in your town or city being preyed upon by violent and cowardly police gangs? Are the taxes paid by your fellow impoverished and hard working citizens being spent by Moustache Tonys on the high life - including things like yachts on the French Riviera? Do you have open and long standing street level sex-markets operating in your neighbourhoods too?

History teaches us that at all times we must be wary that those paid to protect the public, by the public, do not begin to persecute the public - either physically or financially or by facilitating wanton corruption.


Robin

Postscript 16th December 2008

With thanks to the Daily Telegraph blogger PR (who lives in South of France) I can now update this post with further shocking information

Despite their bragging about it being "their" boat it looks like they may have been simply rented - though at a cost of more than £50,000 a week. See: here and here for their own shameless Power Point presentation to justify this nonsense

We must kick these greedy robber barons out of our city!

Nottingham Prostitutes

Are Senior Nottinghamshire Constabulary Police Officers on the Take from the Huge Vice Trade in Nottingham?

I picked this up today from the blogiste Nottingham is Crap. Click here to see Nottingham prostitutes talking about their lives.

The police in Nottingham drive past these women while they stand on the corners of otherwise middle-class and residential areas and bring further decay, crime and corruption to the whole city. The residents pay their community charges - of which the police services take a considerable slice - and the residents do not want these sad abused women and their sleazy customers and violent drug dealers in their neighbourhoods.

So why does Nottinghamshire police and the city council's community safety partnership continue to offer nothing but platitudinous punterising propaganda year in year out about what they are doing about the problem?

Why do community wardens roam around in hi-viz vests so that the soliciting drug-addicted women can flee as soon as they see them coming from half a mile away?


Is this ridiculously ineffective tactic used because senior police officers are receiving back-handers from the drugs and vice trade to maintain these long-established red light areas?

The Bent Society telling question here is: Why else would the police fail to do their job and want only to get away with hoping people will see them to be trying to do something - rather than actually change things?

I've said it before and I will continue to say it and I will go into print saying it: If the Chief Constable of Nottinghamshire Constabulary lived in Mapperley Park, Forrest Fields or any of the other numerous red light areas in Nottingham they would not be red light areas for long.


Further revelations of evidence that suggests there could be organised corruption at the highest levels in Nottingham to follow.



Robin


Postscript 9th Dec. 2008


Section 17 of The Crime and Disorder Act of 1998 - Under the heading of ‘Miscellaneous and supplemental - is possibly one of the most important sections of this legislation as it has the potential to generate particularly far reaching benefits. This section requires local authorities, and associated police authorities, to take account in all of their functions the likely consequence upon crime and disorder and to do all they reasonably can to reduce it.

With its long-term deliberately disingenuous crime facilitating policing policy of containing prostitution in long term red light areas and policing the problem with little more than platitudinous punterizing propaganda, fat-boobies in hi-viz vests and little under-funded ad-hoc initiatives that involve paying outsiders to spend just a few hours with the odd punter they grudgingly manage to find so that the punters can happily avoid prosecution- Nottingham City Council, Police and Nottingham's Community Safety Partnership is surely in breach of Section 17?

Problem Oriented Policing or Complete Buffoonery?

Might handing out sweets and bubbles curb police brutality?

In the USA Herman Goldstein invented the concept of Problem Oriented Policing (POP).

POP is a model of policing that involves "bottom-up" - rank and file officers devising solutions to particularly problematic demands for policing resources. So if, for example, an officer finds that he and his colleagues are being repeatedly called out to a certain venue, or area or house then they look into what the causes of the problem are and then are empowered to devise solutions and propose these to their bosses. The COPS website in the USA is an excellent source of materials for those looking for evidence-based good practice in policing and crime reduction.

Police in the the UK are unlikely to recommend the Wigan Solution of deploying 20 stone yellow-jacket cowards to attack innocent citizens that are a bit worse the wear for drink (see yesterday's post). One of our readers (Alan G) put me onto the recent newspaper lampooning of police deploying bubbles, flip flops and lollipops to revellers. Now these are in fact "problem oriented policing" crime reduction solutions to the difficult problem of what to do when drunken young people are all on the street late at night. But perhaps they work in a way that the tabloid newspaper editors in the UK have failed to see. Namely, perhaps they work best as crime reduction solutions by keeping potentially violent yellow jacket police gangs in check? After all, had the burly yellow-jacket officers, who cowardly ganged up on and then bashed up the innocent drunken soldier in Wigan, been offered flip flops, lollipops and bubbles then they might have offered these to the young man rather than offering him violence, attacking him and wasting tens of thousands of pounds of tax payers money clogging up the criminal justice system with trumped up charges and bent convictions that were thrown out on appeal.

Of course, to avoid quackery, we would need to conduct an evaluation of the precise impact of this POP solution of handing out sweets and bubbles to officers on levels of police violence against innocent citizens. That would involve analysing before, after, and during levels of complaints against the police and police self-reported use of violence against citizens combined with observational research by criminologists in several different policing areas.


Robin

Cowards in the Police: Are Vicious and Cowardly Yellow Jacket Gangs Set to Rival Hoodies?

We screen our police officers for racism and homophobia, but why not screen them for cowardice as well?

More than 30 years ago I was leaving a nightclub called Dixieland in Southport (Lancashire, UK) at 2am - I was 16 and underage but I'd been getting away with it since I was 15. Myself and three friends were confronted by a young chap bashing the hell out of another whom he had pinned to the ground. A group of about 6 or 7 burly lads were also taking pot shot kicks at the victim's head and body. Two police officers with an Alsatian dog were on the scene. The one without the dog tried to drag the attacker off his victim. At which point a couple of his friends got between the officers and their van and menacingly informed the officers: "You aint takin 'im fucking anywhere!"

All the while the bleeding victim, now groaning on the floor, was still receiving odd kicks to the body from the other lads.

What happened next you will not believe: the police officers walked away!

Myself and my three friends - aged 16, 17, 18 and 19 were all tough lads. Two of us were amateur boxers, one was a butcher and the other had grown up on the Scotland (Scottie) Road in Liverpool - between us we all had a fair bit of Saturday night outside the pub bare fist and boots experience - confident that 4 to eight was fair odds for us because the burly lads, though in their twenties, were rotten drunk. We convinced them to leave their victim alone with some degree of diplomacy and hands were actually shaken (something that I doubt would happen today).

We helped the victim up and waited while he eventually got a taxi. The police remained some distance away doing nothing but watching. I remember to this day that I wanted to go up to them and remonstrate with them for their cowardice, but experience had taught me that they would have arrested me and then trumped-up charges. I'd already experienced unprovoked cowardly police violence. It was important to me not to get a police record because I was ambitious and actually respected the concept of the police. And so we all went home without saying a word to them.

Have things changed? Are big lazy cowards and bullies attracted to the police services?

In the present risk-averse, 'elf an safety, hi-viz yellow-jacket world should such people be screened-out and kicked out - or are they in fact the ones most likely to be promoted?

Below you can read what one of our readers wrote yesterday as a heartfelt comment to my "We need Bobbies not Boobies" post. I cannot verify at this stage what he says about his son. But if the author would like to email me at (bentsociety@hotmail.co.uk) I would like to interview his son and and friends (anonymously if they wish) for our forthcoming book: The Bent Society.

****

"I thought they wore yellow jackets in Wigan so CCTV could catch them beating the shit out of a home from war zone soldier, banging his head against the concrete, scraping his face against the floor and then when there was still resistance delivering eight punches to head and arms.

And the good old fair play magistrates initially fined the victim and ordered him to pay compensation to the coppers who beat him up!! And the copper was 20 stone; probably thought he was in grave danger!!! Only in Britain maybe?

Late last Saturday, or should I say early Sunday my son and his friends came out of a pub in Nottingham; there had been no trouble and if they were a little worse for wear it was 2 am and they were on their way to the taxi rank.

'Round the corner comes a bobby van; two of its erstwhile occupants leap out and seize one of my sons friends, and begin roughing him up - a precursor to throwing him in the van; probably that well known game called 'getting the statistics up. My son asked why on earth they were picking on his friend and was grabbed and told 'you can have the same.' A cursory roughing up, thrown in the van, round to Central to be booked for D&D and an £80 fine and released at 5.30am.

Sometime in the small hours of last Sunday morning I understand that a woman was raped by two men after being induced into a bogus taxi. This was in the City Centre although she was taken to a house on the outskirts where the rape took place.So on the one hand we have a van load of yellow jacketed yobs leaping out of vans and seizing young men who are guilty only of having a good night out; probably too quiet in town and Plod needed some figures; a Home Office Initiative maybe?. On the other a young woman not too far away desperately in need of one of these yellow jacketed public servants and cant find one for love nor money.

Well I suppose that's the sort of tough luck you get in this country where all the good lose out.The Lance Corporal home on leave from Afghanistan, the lads enjoying a night out and the young woman merely seeking a taxi ride home.

Who are the guilty?

When the enquiry into the 20stone yellow jackets actions in Wigan is complete, do you think it would be possible for him to be seconded to the forces in Helmand? And any other yellow jacket whose idea of a Saturday night at work is to spoil that of fun loving young men, giving them a beating into the bargain, when they would have been better served looking for real crime, and perhaps foiling those most heinous, kidnap and rape. "

****


Robin

POSTSCRIPT - 05 DECEMBER 2008

The father of the young man arrested by Nottingham's finest has contacted me. I will keep readers up-to-date with developments.

The story about the soldier attacked by cowardly yellow jackets can be found here. More detail here. And the actual CCTV footage of the attack - here

The Mallard: Towards a Typology of Delinquents in Public Service

Delinquents in Public Service Continues With Part Four: The Mallard

The Mallard, being a total quack, is easily identified by its habit of implementing policies based on intuition rather than evidence based practice of what works. Mallards are anti-intellectuals, with reading abilities of the average state school educated 15 year old, which their staff know is the same as that of the Sun newspaper readership - and so brief them accordingly

Selfish and highly competitive, mallards often get to the top by flapping about and quacking noisily. Mallards are known, on occasion, to viciously pursue and peck their rivals. Once having dipped their beak in the public trough, mallards are ferocious feeders who care not for, and contribute nought to, the public good.

Bent Society has declared the next decade as open season on these parasitical quacks so please fire away at them with point-blank criticisms whenever possible.

The most dangerous mallard in the UK at the time of writing is Jacqui Smith (Home Secretary) pictured at her desk today. Others include The Prime Minister Gordon Brown, The Chancellor Mr Darling and Minster for the Department of Communities and Local Government Hazel Blears.

Robin

Crime and Social Harm

Some things that cause huge social harms are legal and vice versa. Why is this so and should something be done about it?

One of the main themes on Bent Society is to explore and criticise practices that are socially harmful but not necessarily criminal - yet.

The Second Edition of Criminal Obsessions is out now. This argues for just such an examination of what should be deemed illegal - by weighing up social harms.

It is available free online here. And hard copies may be purchased here.

"Criminal obsessions is an innovative, groundbreaking critique of conventional criminological approaches to social issues. The contributors show how social harm relates to social and economic inequalities that are at the heart of the liberal state. This second edition of Criminal obsessions includes an additional essay by Simon Pemberton in which he develops theoretically the concept of social harm and discusses the future of the social harm perspective. "

****

Robin

SkyNet is Alive and Well and Living in Ipswich

A Wench's Monday Blog 1/12/08

It seems that Christopher Galley, the civil servant who allegedly passed confidential information to the shadow immigration spokesman Damian Green, would have been wise to consider the advice of Wikileaks:

1. Send your disclosure to Wikileaks and only to Wikileaks.
2. Don't pass it around to other people or places.
3. Don't tell anyone else about disclosing the material. At least wait until the dust has settled so you have a clear understanding of the situation....
4. Don’t talk about FightClub

Wikileaks benefits from military-grade encryption and the ‘bullet-proof hosting’ provided by PRQ, the Swedish company originally behind PirateBay (see what I was saying about the creative side of deviance?)

After Robin’s post about the good work they did with the BNP list, I have been entertaining myself this week by trawling around the Wikileaks site to see what other goodies they have.

Given our recent interest in the marketing of ever so plausible sounding crime fighting solutions, Bent Society should certainly pay attention to the ThorpeGlen presentation on the ‘Identification of Nomadic Targets’. (I’m afraid that this was first published back in May and, as usual, I’ve arrived a bit late to the party; so much to know, so few hours in the surfing day.)

ThorpeGlen is the bastard child of a former British Telecoms R&D department. It lives in Ipswich and ‘creates advanced systems that can acquire, enhance, monitor and analyze massive amounts of data’, which ‘can be used to predict activity which may indicate preparation for major criminal events, including terrorism acts and high-tech financial frauds’.

(Did you know that British Telecoms used to run a ‘Corporate Technology Incubator’ – and do I hear faint bars of the ‘Terminator’ theme music echoing through my paranoid little brain? Yep, SkyNet is being developed in Ipswich – remember, you heard it here first.)

Anyway, ThorpeGlen claim to have a built a system that can, by crunching massive amounts of telecoms data, profile targets (that’s human beings, folks) by their ‘abnormal’ usage and then track those users through all subsequent mediums of communication.

LJ knows of an organised crime syndicate whose members use multiple phones for a maximum of four weeks each before exchanging them. Members of the group are highly mobile, travelling between at least 4 countries on a regular basis. They use prepaid SIM cards only and do not use the Internet at all. Conversations are kept short and cryptic. The group feel quite safe in their telephone protocols. Coincidently, they are located in the same region where ThorpeGlen appear to have carried out their system trials.

What do our readers think? Is it possible to identify people who exhibit this type of profile and then follow them wherever they go throughout the ether? Or is this another case of Smartwater hype?

a Wench